Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Armed retinues, both for self-protection and to assert equality with barbarian kings and their army, cost local Romans as much as mosaics and private bathhouses had once done"

"In effect, barbarian kings and their armed retinues offered the regional elites a Rome at home"

"Altogether, it was civil war - and no bloodthirsty drive of their own - that had moved barbarian militias from one end of the Roman West to the other in under a generation."

"Eventually the empire went down fighting beneath the unloving eyes of many Christians, who considered it an empire that had failed to give effect to their own aspirations for a Christian society" - so there never really was a conversion of Rome, Christian states superceded the Roman one.

"There was room in Augustine's image of the church for distinctly average sinners."

"This was the last great debate in the Latin West, between the fifth century and the reformation..." - debate about sexuality was later debated only by a celibate clergy????

"After 410 a lifeboat mentality had developed in Rome. Divisions of religious opinion were a luxury inherited from a more affluent age" - i.e. the sack of Rome hardened the dominance of Christianity.

"[because of original sin] religious giving also had to be permanent, regular and devoted to the advancement of a collective venture in salvation."

"If you wish to have a memorial forever in heaven and earth, give an estate and its income to each monastery".

" In [Augustine's] hierarchical view of society, the good rich were expected to be also the good governors. "

"An oligarchy...tended to take over the government of their region...by controlling the allocation of taxation"

"Listening is therefore fundamentally better input than reading for mastering the grammatical system of the language...L1" - most grammar is a feature of literacy.

"L1 and L2 learning...must be more similar than different." - Literacy?

"Context, situation and global real world knowledge mean that a very small amount of aural information is sufficient for us to identify what must have been said" - variation in this between languages?

"My position is not that language consists of prefabricated items, but that much more language than we have previously thought is stored and produced in this way."

"The difference between two words of similar meaning is in some cases defined precisely by their different collocational profiles"

"Learn how to identify multi-word items" - how?

Don't "worry about ship/sheep style pronunciation problems" - why not?

"Learners tend to want to understand every word...[this] tends against maximally efficient acquisition." - again quantitative claim where's the quantitative evidence.

"Learning a language involves a small element of factual knowledge, but consists largely of procedural knowledge..." - no, the opposite is true, if you consider that lexis is the factual content of a language.

They outlawed the Donatist church. It's building's were confiscated, and its Bishops were exiled from the cities. Upper-class lay supporters were penalised, and their legacies to the Donatist church were declared invalid." - The end of freedom of religion in the Roman Empire? 411 just after the Sack of Rome.

"Other partisans of Pelagius wrote treatises that showed the same obsessive focus on the relation between wealth and administrative violence".

"While sex might be satiated, avarice was not."

"Wealth was a bad habit. It was the result of innumerable free acts of avarice and violence." - Pelagian view of wealth

"We have already seen that learners acquire most efficiently by learning wholes which they later break into parts, for novel reassembly, rather than by learning parts and then facing a completely new task, building those parts into wholes." - well have?

"Neither possibility nor topicality are, however, quite what language teaching is looking for."

"By becoming a consecrated virgin, Demetrias stepped out of the marriage market and saved her family the expense of providing a dowry."

"Money spent in "good works"...would go instead to the support of [the celibate]"