About Reading Morphologically
Reading Morphologically is an Open Educational Resource written and produced by James F. Patterson and David Welch. The goal is to make a linguistics approach to Ancient Greek and Latin accessible to students and teachers, no matter their level.
The goal of the linguistics approach we use is (1) helping us learn forms more easily by seeing the underlying patterns that explain away irregularities, among other things, but also (2) giving us tools for reading Ancient Greek and Latin in a way that is more natural, namely by understanding the language as it unfolds in real time rather than thinking about it as some artificial jigsaw puzzle. See below, eventually, for more on “morphophonology” and “morphological awareness.”
For the most part the material in Reading Morphologically is developed from J. F. Patterson, Gareth Morgan’s Lexis (Greenbelt Press, 2019).
Our project timeline is loosely as follows. Or rather, these are the stages we see in the project’s development:
- upload expository written material on Ancient Greek morphophonology (in progress);
- produce animated A/V lessons to accompany the written expository material (samples of these are available here);
- develop exercises for individual morphophonological topics which can be self-corrected, creating true lessons from what will otherwise simply be a resource;
- produce lesson plans for integrating this content into courses that use more standard textbooks (we expect to have everything ready to go for use with Hansen & Quinn by January 2025);
- develop reading exercises on the model of “the Lexis method” (see Patterson 27-28) which, coordinated with morphophonological lessons, will effectively create a self-standing textbook;
- write fuller essays on what “reading morphologically” and “morphological awareness” mean and how they work when learning Ancient Greek;
- and do the all of the above for Latin, acknowledging that a morphophonological approach can’t be the primary methodology as it can be with Ancient Greek.
This is not to mention test running everything in actual classrooms…
Bibliography
Allen, W. S. 1987. Vox Graeca: The Pronunciation of Classical Greek. 3rd Edition. Cambridge University Press.
Denniston, J. D. 1996. Greek Particles. Second Edition. Hackett.
van Emde Boas, E., A. Rijksbaron, L. Huitink, and M. de Bakker. 2019. The Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek. Cambridge University Press.
Patterson, J. F. 2019. Gareth Morgan’s Lexis. Greenbelt Press.
Sihler, A. L. 2008. New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. Oxford University Press.
Smyth, H. W. 1956. Greek Grammar. Harvard University Press.
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