Classics, Ancient History, Linguistics, Academia and more
I'm excited to say that my article "The sociolinguistics of gender, social status and masculinity in Aristophanes" has now been published online in the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics. The research in this article ultimately goes all the way back to my undergraduate thesis, though my conclusions have changed many times since then. But I kept coming... Continue Reading →
I'm really pleased that Venetic and the goddess Reitia have been included on the CREWS project blog. Many thanks to Pippa Steele for writing this post, making such good use of my photos (and Anna's delicious cake). As Pippa points out, Venetic gives us lots of important and unparalleled evidence for how people learned to... Continue Reading →
This week at the Faculty of Classics, we held the second Venetic seminar (summed up by one attendee as "Close Encounters of the Venetic Kind"). We tackled a few more of the shorter inscriptions as a warm up, including one of the dedicatory styluses from Este - you can see a selection of these in... Continue Reading →
Tomorrow I'll be speaking at the Cambridge Philological Society, 4pm in the Old Senior Combination room at Trinity College. Tea, coffee and cake is provided - all welcome! My title is Competition and Identity in Venetic Funerary Epigraphy: Becoming Roman at Este and Padua. I'm very excited about this talk, as I'll be dealing with a... Continue Reading →
Great post yesterday by Peter Kruschwitz, giving one Roman's account of the phonology of Latin - click through to the original post for the English translation. The explanations range from pretty much accurate, to fairly nonsensical (what's going on with G?). I rather enjoyed the reason for the "abhorrence" of Z as well, which seems... Continue Reading →
Over the past few months, I've been involved with the formation of the Women's Classical Committee UK. There's been an organisation for women in Classics in the US for a long time (the Women's Classical Caucus), and there's also an equivalent organisation in Australia and New Zealand. So when Liz Gloyn (among others) suggested a... Continue Reading →
I'm following the lead of the excellent Liz Gloyn and Ellie Mackin and looking back over the past year. It's all too easy to forget all the achievements and milestones of the past year - when I was a PhD student I was encouraged to write a list of everything I'd done at the end of... Continue Reading →
I'm pleased to announce that I'll be speaking at the upcoming Roman Archaeology Conference in March 2016, to be held at ‘Sapienza’ Università di Roma and the British School at Rome. The Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference will be held at the same time. For now, the RAC website is a little sparse, but you can... Continue Reading →
For the past few weeks I've been doing something which has been rewarding and frustrating in almost equal measure (in between some weekends visiting family in Sussex and Yorkshire, with some Roman sites and a grinning she-wolf thrown in): namely, building up a complete corpus of all the extant inscriptions in the ancient Venetic language.... Continue Reading →
There are two words for “elephant” in Latin, and both have to do with Greeks in Italy. The first one, elephantus (or sometimes elephas or elephans), is fairly straightforward. It’s used in Latin from about the second century BC, and it’s a borrowing of the Greek word ὁ ἐλέφας, –αντος. That’s the normal Greek word for both African and Indian elephants, and is... Continue Reading →
Katherine McDonald 