New England Classical Journal

CLASSICAL COMPUTING

MasterLatin

MASTERLATIN (ML and demo file). Edward Bailey, 18 Sturtevant St., Beverly, MA 01915; phone (508) 922-6076. Price still to be set.

MASTERLATIN is one of the most exciting Latin computer-assisted instructional programs to come along in a long time; it is still in the development stage and needs a good deal of work to correct some flaws and to fine tune its capabilities and CAI routines. As it is now, it is only available for IBM compatibles, but it comes ready to run on any DOS system with or without color monitor, and it runs exquisitely. It is cleanly and elegantly written in C, so that it runs quite fast and is fairly compact; moreover, I found it very intuitive to use and able to respond to the user's wishes quite easily. For instance, you can press the ESC key at any time and exit the immediate routine or the whole program.

MASTERLATIN comes with a twenty page printed and stapled guide to using the program. The guide is clearly written for the computer novice. The program has been carefully planned to do its most frequent tasks with the least fuss or user input; to run a practice session, all you have to do is type ML and then type the name of the data file (e.g. DEMO) at the prompt, and you are ready to go. One of the great thrills of this program is the second option on the master menu 'Create/Revise Sentence File'; you type in an English sentence, press return, and instantly the Latin translation flashes onto the screen. Now that is mirabile dictu! Another excellent feature is the record keeping facility for administering tests. The record file is partially encoded (and will in a future edition be more securely protected). The version that I received to review was set with the vocabulary from Wheelock; future versions are planned for other textbooks.

Since the program is still under development, I have the follawing wish list. First are some operational hopes: 1) a couple of safeguards such as passwords on the options to view or revise sentences and to see test results; 2) full encryption of the record-keeping files; 3) an initialization file to keep the program set up from one session to another automatically; 4) the option of doing a practice or test session blind (i.e. without the vocabulary displayed); and perhaps 5) a facility to allow the teacher to add vocabulary. Secondly come the hopes for further developments in the English and Latin parsing and construing, for herein lie the greatest challenge and currently my maior reservations. Foremost among my hopes is that the program will recognize certain basic rules governing 1) Latin wqrd order, and 2) alternate forms. For instance, I translated the sentence "The evil king led the foolish people out of the city" as urbe rex stultum duxit illa ex populum malus and the program saw nothing wrong; in fact, it congratulated me. But when I substituted e for ex, it told me that I had made an error. Moreover, I hope that in the future Latin demonstrative and quantitative adjectives will precede their nouns and that proper adjectives will follow. Further, the scoring should take into account errors in word order. I also have hopes for improvements in the English parsing: 1) that the program recognize the English present perfect as the model for the Latin perfect, since the English simple past can be used to translate either the Latin imperfect or perfect; 2) that the program either require that the student's Latin sentence start with a capital letter or not require a period at the end; 3) that the list of prepositions be increased to include 'under,' 'by means of,' 'because of with ablative, and 'at' with accusative; 4) that the vocabulary include more syntax-prone words like propinquus, occurro, careo, resisto; 5) that more tban one prepositional (or infinitive) phrase be allowed; 6) that various infinitives (complementary, objective, indirect discourse) be added; 7) that the passive voice be added; and finally 8) that subordinate clauses be added (and so also the subjunctive). There are also two, more dfficult problems, first what to do about ablatives without prepositions ("by," "in," "from" = means, respect, cause) and the so-called locative expressions like Romae and domi); and secondly what to do about alternative syntax (when I tried to translate "You (p) have a beautiful city" with Vobis est pulchra urbs, I got all hinds of error messages).

Finally, this program betokens the fuhue, if we are lucky. It is worth having now for the beginning students in the first throes of learning the wonders of inflectional signalling. Moreover, it allows the classroom teachers to tailor the program for whatever situation they face.