New England Classical Journal

CLASSICAL COMPUTING

LATIN TUTOR FOR TRADITIO

LATIN TUTOR FOR TRADITIO (2 disks: Nouns and Verbs). Programs available through CANE at the cost of postage and handling.

LATIN TUTOR FOR TRADITO was developed by Patricia A. Johnston and Marc Milgram at Brandeis University (which holds the copyright) for the Macmillan Publishing Co. to accompany Johnston's Traditio: An Introduction to the Latin Language and Its Influence (New York 1988), originally published by Macmillan, but now taken over by Prentice Hall. The software has been written for IBM and IBM compatible machines.

LATIN TUTOR comes with one page (printed on both sides) of installation and set-up instructions. The instructions are very basic and explain what to do step by step. They end with a toll number to call for technical help; unfortunately the number is that of Macmillan's Software Coordinator, so it is of no help now.

LATIN TUTOR is a suite of two main programs each with its support files, one for declensions and one for conjugations. The whole package is closely correlated with the textbook for which it was written, in that it follows the sequence of presentation of Traditio, and the user determines the level by the chapter of the textbook. The noun program (NMAIN) provides English to Latin and Latin to English vocabulary drills (for both nouns and adjectives as well as a noun-adjective phrase declension exercise. The verb program (MAINB) provides initially English to Latin and Latin to English vocabulary drills (for verbs) as well as a verb conjugation exercise; later on a verb synopsis exercise is added, once the tenses and moods have been fully covered. The vocabulary drills list all the answers at the bottom of the screen, so the exercise is basically a multiple-choice recognition quiz, but the questions are presented in a random order and do not repeat within the first ten items. In a future edition it might be well to consider adding the option of asking students to produce correct forms as well as recognize them.

In the declension and the conjugation exercises the student is expected to fill in all the forms in the same order, starting with nominative singular or first person singular and continuing to the ablative plural or third person plural. Luckily, the student may always opt to press ESCape and get back to the menu (though with more or less jeopardy to the score). In a future edition a randomized single shot for each tense and voice might be considered.

An interesting feature of all the exercises of both programs is the capitalizing of the long vowels; they are always so presented by the program, though the user does not need to present them so. (However, the program neglects to mark the -i- in the perfect subjunctive forms such as amAverls long.) Another helpful feature is that the program tells users how they did after each round, and then repeats the questions missed.

The program was not written in an imperative language as is normally the case, but in a declarative language (Arity Prolog), which may explain some of its features. On the menus it would be nice if the first letter of an option could activate the option (at present one must use the up or down arrow keys and then the ENTER key).

Overall, this is an excellent program that provides an excellent way to assimilate and review the basic lexical and morphological skills needed to learn Latin. Moreover, with some revision the program could be made much more generally useful, regardless of the text used: first, the user should be able to select the level of exercise directly without reference to the chapter of Traditio; secondly, it would be nice to have some general review exercises; and thirdly, it would be very helpful if a general facility (program) could be provided that allowed teachers to input their own vocabulary and paradigm words.