3 ms·
Stuff like Herakles, Odysseus und Ödipus - we commonly refer to those as "griechische Sagen" - greeks Sagas(?) in German. What is that surprising number of peo
by turbinerneiter 6y ago
Stuff like Herakles, Odysseus und Ödipus - we commonly refer to those as "griechische Sagen" - greeks Sagas(?) in German.
What is that surprising number of people speaking latin? How much of that is outside of church? You do know that church used latin as gatekeeper?
I always hear all those magical properties that learning latin supposedly has. Why does learning italian or french not have those? Plus the added benefit of being actually useful in your life, even if you don't end up becoming a linguist.
The leg up in studying other languages that latin supposedly gives me is pretty useless if I never study other languages. Most people never go back to learning a new language after school.
I think having 12 year olds learn latin as a third language is a tremendous waste of time. The rudimentary spanish or french I could have picked up in those two years would be far more useful than me studying the declination of the 6 cases and parsing sentences with no word order.
- dredmorbius 6y agoScholarly use of Latin in a time before Gutenberg also reflected the fact that it was easier to bring readers to the books (by learning Latin) than books to readers (through translation). As well as the likely compounding of errors by the dual process of transcription and translation. Scholastic Latin had a stability vulgar vernacular toungues did not ... the task would have had to be ongoing. And of course, literacy was sharply limited ... 5--20% of the population, possibly less.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y agoI don't know. I live in the UK but I'm Greek and very often I realise that people around me have trouble with Greek words borrowed into English- like phenomenon, automaton, etc. The trouble is not in using these words properly but in understanding what these words mean. To me it's quite clear because, well, they're Greek. But they're, ah, Greek to others. I disagree in general that there's anything wrong with teaching kids new things of any kind. Knowledge is knowledge. We learn a new thing. We file it away. We may need it one day, or we may just feel the warm glow of intellectual richess that can sustain one through difficult times. Why deprive kids of this opportunity? One might as well argue that children don't need to know their native language and should learn English instead (when it's not their native language).
- turbinerneiter 6y agoWe deprive them of learning any other language than latin in the same time. I'm not arguing against a 3rd language, I'm arguing against that language being latin. Let them chose.