The (discreet) beauty of learners’ list
Recently I have started adapting the excellent DCC Core Vocabulary Lists of the most common words in Latin and Ancient Greek. We want to add a Croatian layer to the lists (translating into Croatian semantic and grammatical categories and short definitions); eventually, we hope to use the lists as a pedagogically sound source for automatically generated language learning exercises for complete beginners. At the moment, for generation of exercises we are experimenting with the H5P Software as the framework for content taken from a given corpus – which should have been, as James Tauber has lucidly described, lemmatized, parsed, and glossed (and, ideally, connected with other parts of their phrase). The material for this, at the moment still rudis indigestaque moles, is in a Bitbucket Git repository, under the name of Discipulus.
But, back to lists. I have found it necessary to add one field to the DCC Core lists (beside the Croatian translations, that is): a field for the lemma given as simple as possible – basically, the first word you would find or read in a dictionary entry for the word. We need this simplest form as an anchor for exercises. And, before you say “but you could have done it programatically”; the DCC lists are provided for a slightly different purpose – for individual study that is not computer-assisted – so their variant of lemmata was slightly strange (for example, “VBI1VBI2VBI3” in Latin, or “ἵστημι στήσω will set, ἔστησα set, caused to stand, 2 aor. ἔστην stood, ἕστηκα stand, plup. εἱστήκη stood, ἐστάθην stood” in Greek, definitely too long for a lemma). The definitions had to be adapted in a similar way, to be made as short as possible. Now I begin to see the wisdom of the Perseus Project, which has a long time ago produced a “Short Defs” word-list.
These changes would have been impossible if the DCC Core lists haven’t been published under an open license! Indeed, for this and for lot of other work sincere gratitude must go to Christopher Francese, the project director of Dickinson College Commentaries and the mastermind behind the DCC Core Lists. The lists are an extremely important contribution to learning and teaching Greek and Latin with digital support, a κτῆμα ἐς ἀεί (we hope).