Hello everyone,
My name Is Francesco, I am originally from Italy but am currently doing a PhD in Old Irish in Maynooth, Ireland. At 51… My topic is language teaching, and I am trying to devise an approach to teach Old Irish in a communicative way. My other passion are Latin and Greek, of course taught in a lively way. I am now working on them very hard to reach an acceptable level as soon as possible. As for Latin, I am teaching myself with LLPSI, I am now on lesson 30 of Familia Romana. For Greek I am attendig a class here at Maynooth University, where the standard textbook is Reading Greek.
A few months ago I read an article on the work of Rouse and his direct method applied to Latin and Greek. I think that both his own and his collegues’ method books could be a huge inspiration for my research about a lively approach to Old Irish teaching. Beyond Rouse’s books I see that there is a whole jungle of similar publications from that time, and I think I am getting a little bit lost… Maybe you could give me a hand in identifying the key works, both by Rouse and by others, with a special focus on a communicative and spoken approach to Latin and Greek. Any hint is welcome.
Thank you in advance for your contributions.
Francesco
Welcome to Textkit, Francesco!
Tá fáilte romhat, Francesco!
When you say in a communicative way, do you mean some king of spoken, direct method? If so, which pronunciation system to you propose to adopt?
Hi. For Old Irish the problem does not arise. There is only one “official” prononciation for the old version of the language, it is not like modern Irish. And that is the prononciation I am going to try to use.
Moreover, although the Old Irish spelling is very complicated, once you know the rules, I would say it is basically more regular and predictable tha the Modern Irish one.
I thought that Wagner’s system with over a hundred phonemes was considered to be unlikely to be correct, and that an alternative containing only about 66/67 phonemes was proposed.