Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"...astrology was the default religion of the upper classes of the later empire...This universe...lay close at hand, far below the somewhat faceless supra celestial realm of the new High God of the Christians."

"When applied to monasteries, [the ideal of a property-less community] would remain for all of a millennium the most prominent and most charged model of human institution building in the Latin West." - the middle ages explained?

"It is this rare mixture of republican virtue (represented by Cicero) and a mystic's vision of the infinite (represented by Plotinus) that formed the basis of .... "the spiritual communism" of Augustine."

"Like Cicero, Augustine believed in no uncertain manner that the State existed to protect the property rights of private persons." - not sure what suprises me more, that such different traditions could arrive at the same conclusion as John Locke, or that that they could arrive there so much earlier.

"Since I was a boy I've always felt more French than Italian, as everyone in Piedmont does. That's why I find the French unbearable."

"But Augustine was prepared to go further than Cicero ever went in order to assert the primacy of the public good over the private will...he deprived his monks and nuns of private property."

"In all this Augustine followed the typically late Roman tendency to use personal bonds to conduct public business." - I thought we were getting beyond patronage?

"Augustine and his friends deliberately unhooked themselves from the life support machine of patronage. By pooling their wealth..."

"Plotinus's writings had set Augustine on fire" - it might a good idea to review why Augustine was a Christian. The seems to be an assumption here that there is a straight line between classical philosophy and Christianity, that simply didn't exist between classical philosophy and pagan religion. Monotheism?

"Turning over the learned writings of the men of old in the well watered gardens of their villas, [senators in otium] renewed their allegiance to the culture that was supposed to make them truly noble."

"Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor...had lightened the tax load in a way in which no Christian emperor had done." - he's definitely trying to set up parallels with 20th century ideologies of political economy.

As in the Soviet Union, the emperors realised that "the real power of a totalitarian state results from it being at the disposal of every inhabitant"

"It is not anything of yours that you are bestowing on the poor; rather, you are giving back something of theirs. For you alone are usurping what was given for the use of all." - Well known Socialist thinker, Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, 340-397

"Paganus originally meant...those who did not serve the emperor...the true emperor, Christ."

The impact of these exercises is how difficult they are.

"...research suggests that, instead of doing a new exercise...you should repeat the old one; learners improve by repeating the task because they have more processing capacity available the second time."

"The examples clearly demonstrate the way in which lexical and phonological chunking are important to meaning" - is there anything new in 'chunking' or does it just obscure what we already know?

"The second slight variations [in stress pattern] are similar to the variations we find in good poetry"

"The real definition of a word is a combination of its referential meaning and its collocation field" - its referential meaning depends on its collocational field, but how can the teacher provide shortcuts to learning the collocationial field?

Exercise 7 - from a dictionary.

I appreciate the significance of collocation, but how is the learner to acquire this knowledge, especially if passive language acquisition is not happening anyway.

"it is a good general rule that the gap should not occur in the topic element" - evidence?

"In both L1 and L2 a mature lexicon is acquired in very similar ways" - completely goes against my experience.

"Studies show that the paradigm of brief spoken exchanges is not the 2-part question-answer, but the three-part initiator-response-acknowledgement" - not just teacher talk then

"...they maintained their generation by generation, through carefully planned marriages. Intermarriage was the secret of their vast fortunes." - affect on fertility?

Ambrose was an alms giver, but also a help to the citizens, "Once bishops began to take on both roles, the cities would soon be theirs."

"[Late Roman society] was a world that appeared to ruled by iron laws of reciprocity...[a dream in which one gave money to a beggar] foretold death: "For death is like a beggar, who takes and gives nothing in return.""

"Inclusion of every 'new word' should be discouraged"

"[From a pronunciation point of view] The chunking is not "I'm getting up / at six", but rather I'm / getting up at six" - if the syntax and the pronunciation chunking are coincidental this implies "getting up at six" is a complement of "I'm" :o

"I tend to tell about me and ask about you... Learners' classroom language rarely has the I-centric quality of every day language." - pretty damning for the communicative approach!