METHODE D'APPRENTISSAGE DU LATIN PAR ORDINATEUR

Abstract

Summary Linguistic experience in the study of dead languages does not involve production or understanding of new utterances; there are no more hearers nor speakers; the Latin language is only a finite set of sentences inserted in a finite set of written texts; hence acceptability is not a question of competence, but a question of performance. Grammatical knowledge becomes the ability to read a sentence: the grammar has to specify, for each element of a given word sequence, the total of all the environments in which it occurs and all its prosodic, rhythmic, syntactic, semantic, anaphoric or cataphoric relations to the context. Hence learning how to read is not learning how to pronounce, but learning how to match hierarchical structures and linear structures. VELA is a text reading system based on such principles: throughout the work session, the text appears in the same format and all the commentaries are linked to elements of speech strictly identified in the text; when providing grammatical interpretatio...