Learn Greek By Radio, Book One 4th Ed: A Fun and Easy Way to Learn a New Language

Learn Greek Online is currently composed of 105 real audio files (around 15 minutes each), online student notes, a collection of collaborative learning tools and an online greek dictionary and a greek spell checker.

Galenism's final defeat came from a combination of the negativism of Paracelsus and the constructivism of the Italian Renaissance anatomists, such as Vesalius in the 16th century.[8] In the 1530s, the Flemish anatomist and physician Andreas Vesalius took on a project to translate many of Galen's Greek texts into Latin. Vesalius' most famous work, De humani corporis fabrica, was greatly influenced by Galenic writing and form. Seeking to examine critically Galen's methods and outlook, Vesalius turned to human cadaver dissection as a means of verification. Galen's writings were shown by Vesalius to describe details present in monkeys but not in humans, and he demonstrated Galen's limitations through books and hands-on demonstrations despite fierce opposition from orthodox pro-Galenists such as Jacobus Sylvius. Since Galen states that he is using observations of monkeys (human dissection was prohibited) to give an account of what the body looks like, Vesalius could portray himself as using Galen's approach of description of direct observation to create a record of the exact details of the human body, since he worked in a time when human dissection was allowed. Galen argued that monkey anatomy was close enough to humans for physicians to learn anatomy with monkey dissections and then make observations of similar structures in the wounds of their patients, rather than trying to learn anatomy only from wounds in human patients, as would be done by students trained in the Empiricist model.[96] The examinations of Vesalius also disproved medical theories of Aristotle and Mondino de Liuzzi. One of the best known examples of Vesalius' overturning of Galenism was his demonstration that the interventricular septum of the heart was not permeable, as Galen had taught (Nat Fac III xv). However, this had been revealed two years before by Michael Servetus in his fateful "Christianismi restitutio" (1553) with only three copies of the book surviving, but these remaining hidden for decades; the rest were burned shortly after its publication because of persecution of Servetus by religious authorities.

Learn Greek By Radio, Book One 4th Ed

Download

First, the codex was successful not for literary but for utilitarian reasons. First, the book, with its flat pages laid on top of one another, takes up less space than a scroll: codices take up less "shelf-space." Second, because codices readily support writing on both sides, they could store roughly twice as much information per square inch. Despite the wastage that comes from having bottom and top margins and empty space near the binding, codices are essentially a double-density storage medium -- a savings especially significant before the development of inexpensive paper. Third, even in manuscript form and before the settled conventions of running headers, standard page numbers, tables of contents, indices and other aids solidified in the age of print, books are far better suited to random access than scrolls. It is hard to imagine that you could ever unroll a lengthy scroll as quickly as you can flip the pages of the codex. It was the codex that encouraged a culture of rapid, silent reading. Readers of a scroll expected to read slowly. Words were run together and paragraphs were not marked -- storage media was expensive but processing time was less of a concern because readers expected to spend a more time working their way through the document: silent (and thus rapid) reading was a relatively late development. Readers who sounded out the words before them experienced the text both visually and aurally -- thus drawing upon more than one sense at a time and anticipating a learning practice that cognitive scientists encourage. Full-blown book culture -- which married the codex to mechanical reproduction -- produced a world of vast documents, quickly written and even more quickly consumed. Concentrated, self-consciously literary novelists such as Proust, James and, of course, Joyce, wrote against this tendency, saturating the ultimate codex genre, the novel, with that density of meaning and of reference which we can find already in Vergil (and, indeed, in the haunting prose of Thucydides). The great novelists were thus renewing, in a different medium and genre, that literary intensity which writing allows us to trace thousands of years further back. They were trying to charge the non-linear and rapidly-read codex with the literary texture that emerged with the texture of the linear and slowly-read scroll.

Digital technologies such as CD ROM (which let us disseminate hundreds of interlinked books) and, of course, the Internet (through which we can reach millions of documents) are still in their infancy, but they are already beginning to redefine both what questions we academics can ask and, more importantly, who can ask what. We can, for example, see signs of a revolutionary change in one core area of classics. However well our students may learn classical languages in their student days, they have traditionally had little prospect of retaining these skills later in life, when their careers and family obligations allow them to broaden their interests and when they are often hungry to read works such as the Iliad or the Republic again. When our former students wish to return to Plato or Vergil, their linguistic knowledge has receded and they lack the support system to work their way through the language. Now, however, we provide not only raw access to many Greek and Latin texts on the World Wide Web but, more importantly, links between source texts and reading aids of various kinds, including lexica, grammars, commentaries, and morphological analyses of individual words. In some cases, we make faster and more widely available functions that could be done in a library or if the reader had assembled a bookshelf full of reference works. 2ff7e9595c