Twenty five bizarrely wonderful pages of history, linguistics, brewing, friendship, and geography Download PDF. Listen. Continue reading Figs – a meditation

A detailed and quotidian history of St Peter’s Presbyterian Church in North Sydney. Download PDF. Listen. Continue reading Presbyterians in North Sydney

This is not an autobiography – it’s a set of memories about intellectual and emotional experiences that went to make the author the person he is today. There is not much here about his parents, or his brothers and sister, or about the many interesting people met along the way. Those things are not what this book is about. This is not necessarily the ways thing actually happened. Different incidents may have been conflated, relative chronologies reversed, black called white, and vice versa. That’s memory for you. Download PDF. Listen. Continue reading Living By My Wits

There is no lack of introductions to the grammar of Old English. Still one of the best, if you have the background in traditional Latin-based grammar to use it, is Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer, first published in 1882. The trouble is that few students now do have that background, and there has been little attempt among writers of Old English grammars to address the needs of people without it. Of Sweet’s would be replacements, undoubtedly the best is Quirk and Wrenn’s Old English Grammar, which does try to reassess the way the information is to be presented and introduces some more … Continue reading Reading Old English

Alex Jones prepared two Latin primers for several generations of Latin students. The grammar has everything you need to know in 55 tight pages, while the vocab guide lists the 1000 most common words and also has a pronunciation guide. 1000 words is the minimum necessary to achieve some degree of fluency in reading, and can be internalized over a couple of months of diligent practice, a fact that took me about five years to discover. In the era before LLMs or even online dictionaries that parsed word endings, a compact primer was the essential bridge between the text, the … Continue reading Bridget’s Guide to Latin

A first person Pilgrim’s Progress dating to the 14th century, relatively unknown but still makes powerful and challenging reading. In particular, the explicitly autobiographical passages can cut uncomfortably close to the bone. The Dreamer/narrator is an inadvertent pilgrim: beginning as an observer of the world and its failings (and by implications his own), he is drawn into the search for what ‘Do-well’ might mean, but gains little enlightenment from the intellectual faculties: Wit, Study, Learning orImagination. This is the first part of the poem. In the second part the Dreamer, having left these faculties behind, sets out on pilgrimage with … Continue reading Piers Plowman

You’ve memorized the Koalanet Australian slang dictionary and worked through Down Under Without Blunder, but still hungry for more! Alex Jones brings the goods with his definitive guide to Australian English Grammar, drawing extensively on an inexhaustible supply of examples from the Sydney Morning Herald. Download PDF. Listen. Continue reading Australian English Grammar

An authoritative and modern translation and detailed commentary on the Old English poem Beowulf. Download PDF. Listen (alternating pages in the original and contemporary English translation). Continue reading Cadfain’s Beowulf

A fun, approachable account of the origins of human language. Join Blind Freddy, Pussycat, Mother and Grandpa as they look for the beginnings of our language, finding more answers than questions, and a lot of people along the way that you wouldn’t necessarily want to know. And that’s not even counting the last thousand years. Download PDF. Listen. Continue reading When did our language begin?

When Alex first learned I intended to travel to Russia c. 2006 as a hormone-addled teen (photos, journal, and blogs), partly inspired by the fevered travel accounts of Vladimir Dinets, he quickly wrote up a ten page primer on the language. Together with a trusty dictionary, it got me out of many scrapes. Continue reading Russian In 15 Minutes – Русский язык за пятнадцать минут