j a m e s f o r s y t h ✡ n e t

I’m procrastinating - there’s a big pile of essays still to be marked.

One thing I feel more and more about China is that everywhere one goes there is something worth seeing or worth knowing that is essential to one’s knowledge of China as a whole. The more I see the more I realise there’s so much more to see that I’ll never have the opportunity to see. In my opinion I’ve seen the greatest highlight of all, the Great Wall. Walking and, at times, climbing on the Great Wall gives one the feeling of being on top of the world. It’s so high and the air tastes so fresh. On reaching the Wall, one can choose to go the easier route, where there are more tourists or the steeper, which is more difficult to climb. I chose the latter, simply so I could savour the moment and have a moment’s peace. Thoroughly worthwhile.

The wonder of the Great Wall doesn’t detract from all the other cities, as I’ve already alluded to. Every city has some kind of a story, special food, idiom connected with it, or some historical figure was born there (or lived or died there).

I don’t intend to return to China for quite some time. But there will be plenty of good memories of places, foods and eye candy. Basically anything that is a lexical entry (or addable as a lexical entry) has been worth seeing. Lately if the English definition of a vocabulary point is too easy or obvious, I’ve been substituting it with the Latin scientific name for things like spices, flora and fauna. The same can be done if there’s a saying or idiom with the same meaning in both Latin and Chinese. I don’t know why, but doing this just seems to give me a far greater appreciation of the thing being studied. For example, instead of just saying “snapper”, one can learn lutjanus stellatus - 笛鲷.

Recently I’ve been lightly dabbling in the Latin language, mainly because I’d like to be able to read Jerome’s Latin Vulgate.

There are quite a few resources online for studying Latin. Perhaps not under the category of study materials, but Latin nonetheless, are Google in Latin and also Wikipedia.

It seems like a strange cross-over between ancient and modern.

I’m also studying Latin because some of the grammatical concepts are similar to Biblical Greek, which I’d like to get back to eventually.

This book is logically set out and is complete with lexica and indices.

In case you have already studied Latin, and don’t want to switch the way you go through your declension paradigms, Collins uses the following order: NGDAA - Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Ablative. That’s the way I personally prefer it, as I did Greek that way, except that in Greek there was no Ablative, but a Vocative in its place.

For those of you, like myself, who hold to a reformed faith, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater and forget about Latin. Remember, all of the reformers knew Latin, and that doesn’t make them papists by any means. Furthermore, logically, isn’t knowledge better than the lack of knowledge?

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a somewhat tongue-in-cheek “Mass” in his book Fates Worse than Death. In an appendix at the back of that book is John F. Collins’ Latin translation!

It’s a shame this book didn’t come with its own answer key in the back. Honestly… it took another author to write one, which has recently been released.