Caveat magister:  a computational approach to designing a Latin curriculum

1. Abstract

We introduce a code library for morphologically manipulating openly available corpora of Latin texts, and present a novel approach to designing a curriculum for learning Latin. We morphologically analyze a target corpus to sequence the presentation of grammatical features based on their frequency. We then identify sentence-level passages within the target corpus that include only a given set of features: in this way, for any stage in the curriculum, we automatically cull passages containing only forms and constructions that students have already learned. After four weeks in our fall, 2019, course, beginning Latin students were capable of reading unaltered continuous narratives that would have been impossible to approach with less than a semester and a half following a conventional textbook.