The Pedagogical Tipiṭaka: OER & the Three Baskets of Ancient Language Instruction

Ancient languages present a unique teaching challenge: for spoken languages, common pedagogy recommends engaging students via dialogue; for ancient languages, no speakers survive with whom to practise. This paper highlights how the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin has approached this challenge by creating the Early Indo-European OnLine (EIEOL) collection, an online educational resource whose lesson series present early languages directly through original, unsimplified ancient texts. Currently accessed by over 20,000 users per month, EIEOL spans 18 languages, from Greek and Latin to Old Church Slavonic, Sanskrit, and other important languages of ancient Asia such as Hittite, Classical Armenian, Avestan, and Tocharian. Each series presents extensively annotated excerpts of original texts in the target language, with accompanying modules explaining grammar and context. The text-centred approach affords learners a direct path to understanding that suits a variety of experience levels and minimises the conceptual grammatical apparatus necessary to begin interpreting original texts. This format fosters theoretical flexibility, adaptable to different approaches and grammatical descriptions of ancient languages. It is also useful for languages whose grammatical structures have shifted dramatically over their history, like Tocharian, or remain hotly debated or under-described by experts. Finally, it facilitates applications to typologically diverse languages and language families, with early Mesoamerican, Semitic, and Sino-Tibetan language series already under development. The EIEOL infrastructure therefore provides a robust platform for free, text-centred, self-paced introductions to ancient languages from a variety of language families.