ISAW Hosts the Academy for Teachers

By mp4071@nyu.edu
07/27/2015

This past semester, ISAW hosted a "Master Class" organized by the Academy for Teachers in partnership with the Paideia Institute. According to its website, The Academy for Teachers "honors and supports great teaching, which means we’re all about passion for a subject, creativity in the classroom, and devotion to students. The Academy brings powerful teachers together with leading experts for Master Classes held in New York City’s great institutions." Joshua Katzprofessor of classics at Princeton, led a seminar for NYC Latin teachers at ISAW entitled, "Before Latin: Proto-Indo-European and its Daughters."

An abstract of the talk from the Academy for Teachers website:
"Everyone knows that Latin developed into the so-called Romance languages — French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. — but where did Latin itself come from? This class will bring together linguistics, history, and good old-fashioned grammar by introducing Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of not just Latin but also English, Greek, Farsi, Welsh, Czech, Albanian, and dozens of other languages, now thoroughly distinct, that are used across the globe, from India to Ireland and from Novosibirsk to New York City. How do we know anything about this “mother tongue,” which was spoken about 5,500 years ago, before the advent of writing, probably somewhere north on the Black Sea on the Pontic-Caspian steppe? And how does knowing about such things help us understand Latin?" 

The Master Class was recently featured in an article in the New Yorker by Ian Frazier.