21 ms·

Latin as she is spoke: How classicists tricked themselves (2019)

• ggm 5y ago
  Because she is routinely subjected to horrific misogynistic abuse online, I think this near-end paragraph bears repeating: Mary Beard is a great scholar, and I don't want to be misunderstood as saying otherwise. There is more than just language proficiency to successful academic life, after all, and it is by no means the most important thing. For many reasons, knowing a language well is less valuable in academia than than knowing something else about the people who used the language, or having something worthwhile to say about texts written in it. The Czech writer Jan Kresadlo was at home enough in Homeric Greek that he was able to write a brilliantly hilarious Science Fiction Epic in it. But his facility with the language did not mean that he knew the first thing about Ancient Ionian land tenure practices. But, that said, I think I agree with a couple of the authors points: She is brave to admit her lack of fluency and may have overstated how hard it is to learn. Also worth reading is this, linked from the original blog: there's a conversation amongst latinists/classicists and they don't all agree with this polemic: https://www.metafilter.com/181221/Lingua-pulcherrima https://www.metafilter.com/181221/Lingua-pulcherrima
  • prvc 5y ago
    I am unsure what the purpose of this comment is, which apart from making the assertion that Beard is "routinely subjected to horrific misogynistic abuse online" merely consists of copy-pasted snippets of the article. Perhaps we can assume that the purpose is simply to include is this former component. One must wonder, however, how much of this "abuse" is merely criticism brought about by perceptions of shortcomings in her work (such as those outlined in TFA), rather than by any inborn prejudice.
    • ggm 5y ago
      You might read https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/jan/21/mary-beard-suffers-twitter-abuse https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/jan/21/mary-beard-suf... or https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/01/troll-slayer https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/01/troll-slayer which is about the "abuse" problem. I don't think the problem is just criticism brought about by perceptions of shortcomings in her work. As to the relative ratios, and nature of the problem, I don't know how that could be assessed. I posted one snippet and a link. I stated why I posted the snippet. It is to set context: the blog author is aware of this abuse problem and wants to draw a contradistinction between their view and the abuse. I agree with them, and I too wish to draw a contradistinction between my view and the abuse. Also, the link is relevant here. Not every latinist agrees with the statement of the problem, there is an debate amongst latinists about the complexity of the language and nuance in the meaning of unfamiliar texts. It bears thinking about. I found it interesting, which is why I posted. I'm sorry you think my comment is pointless. Although in hypothesis, it is tenable to argue the complaints about Prof. Beard are simply misunderstood, and in fact its legitimate debate about her thesis and lines of reasoning, I think its not solely down to this, and I don't think the problem is mischaracterised. That's informed by having read popular history works by Prof. Beard, and also read about her problems being a public TV figure.
  • boppo1 5y ago
    Why is she the subject of abuse? I am a total layperson here.
    • Veen 5y ago
      She's not just a Cambridge don. In the UK, she's well-known as a TV and radio broadcaster about classics, history, and art. She is of the left and approaches those subjects with a progressive slant, which attracts negative attention from conservatives (in my view, much of it justified), but also some vile sexist attacks from morons, which are definitely not justified.
      • Brakenshire 5y ago
        I think people dislike her because she’s informal and popular in talking about a subject which is traditionally elite. She talks a lot about ordinary lives rather than great events, and she presents herself as an ordinary person, wearing trainers, with normal hair and teeth. A lot of it frankly is that she is not young and doesn’t attempt to make herself up to look young. You can see in many places there are very few women over the age of 50 on TV who have not been heavily made up. All of this could be thought of as progressive or left wing but not in a way which anyone should object to! The only reasonable criticism of her I’ve seen is the discussion around the “ordinary British family in Roman times”, which was obviously wrong but made an underlying point which was valid, i.e. the lack of a modern idea of race in Roman civilization. I think she has also objected to some aspects of gender self-id which would apparently make her right wing in a US context.
        • Veen 5y ago
          > I think she has also objected to some aspects of gender self-id which would apparently make her right wing in a US context. Or a gender-critical feminist. I agree with you about the rest, to some degree. I enjoy her shows, and she knows her stuff. But she does have a tendency to make foolish and out-of-touch comments: like the Roman family thing and the Oxfam thing.
      • fenderbluesjr 5y ago
• boffinism 5y ago
  Counterpoint: Classicists are not linguists and they're not supposed to be. There's no shame in a Classicist admitting they find Latin fluency hard, because it's a very secondary skill. There are some people who have that skill in abundance... so what?
  • chana_masala 5y ago
    What I got from it is that Mary Bears assumes or implies that everyone has this struggle.
    • boffinism 5y ago
      She made her comments in an article specifically about what it's like to be a Classics 'Don'.
      • boomboomsubban 5y ago
        And judging from the quotes, she caveated that some people do actively overcome this struggle.
  • Ericson2314 5y ago
    Yes except linguists don't need to learn languages fluently either! This is a lot like the modern jousters teasing medievalists. It's simply not the relevant skill. A difference is, this person seemed pretty knowledgable (for an amateur? Not that I could properly judge) so it was much more enjoyable read than most of these sorts of things.
  • otabdeveloper4 5y ago
    > because it's a very secondary skill Really? Just wow.
• xhevahir 5y ago
  Seems like just an inevitable outcome of ever-increasing academic specialization. (Well, that and from the fact that classical languages aren't taught to many schoolkids anymore.) Maybe in the nineteenth century reading Thucydides would have posed no difficulty to the average classicist, but nowadays the scholar who specializes in Thracian numismatics or whatever probably doesn't have this facility and doesn't have much opportunity to develop or use it. I can't read Greek but I've always heard that it's quite a bit harder than Latin, a language that I found to be preposterously convoluted. (I hated it and didn't get any farther than Caesar.) These languages are hard. I remember reading somewhere that a distinguished English-speaking Hellenist who'd been a professor for decades reported that after all that time he was able to read ancient Greek about as fluently as he read French. That's crazy.
  • Ericson2314 5y ago
    I wouldn't blame this on specialization, per se. This is more like asking why aren't critics good at sports/music/whatever. "Empathy" with the subject of study to the point of total mimicry is or isn't part of the job description on a different axis. The trend in modern social studies to emphasize "historical specificity", or an impossibility of fully embodying living some other context, might provide some cover to those that don't learn the language fluency, but this point didn't come up in the original reply or your comment. If we want people to learn ancient languages fluidly, I think the right model is not even Academia, but, say the Europeans subsidizing rural quasi-traditional farmers for cultural reasons. Or "historically informed practice" in old music. It's not scientific study of the past, but an art or cultural practice in its own right. A good question to ask is how well the Romans could speak 500 years prior Greek. (Older forms of their own language was already covered.) That was also an cultural practice of reverence.
  • tgv 5y ago
    Idk. Mary Beard is not a present day schoolkid. The chair of the section in which I worked was about her age, and he could recite the opening of the Odyssee in Greek, and he was a psychologist. And he wasn't the only one. But IMO it isn't "academic specialization". That just hides the nasty fact that it's publications and successful grant applications that determine a career, the latter being so politicized, that you can get away with bold, unproven statements if you know the right people.
• sdoering 5y ago
  When I was at University studying history (among other subjects) our medieval history professor was fluent in reading, writing and speaking Latin. Having studied the language in school (with more than mediocre outcome) I was in awe. My command of the language was that bad that I had to do certification at university studying the language again for three semesters. He, having read and written Latin professionally for many years was from another realm. He once explained that the foreword of editions of primary medieval sources were done in Latin by everyone doing the editions as then these forewords would not have to be translated as everybody studying medieval sources would by trade be fluent in Latin.
  • aspenmayer 5y ago
    > He once explained that the foreword of editions of primary medieval sources were done in Latin by everyone doing the editions as then these forewords would not have to be translated as everybody studying medieval sources would by trade be fluent in Latin. Now we just drop a PGP public key block in there and call it a day.
  • madaxe_again 5y ago
    I had Latin beaten into me for just over a decade of my childhood, and dropped it at 15, as soon as it was permitted. I hated it with a passion - endless declensions, recitations of stodgy poetry, copying and translation of texts so dull that it was normal for half the boys to fall asleep in class - usually swiftly adjusted with a board eraser or a meter rule kept for the purpose. There were no textbooks per se - just leatherbound copies of various literature, filled with the bored scrawlings of generations of schoolboys, which were usually far more interesting than the text itself. As an adult, I find what I learned extremely useful, again and again. I moved to Portugal a bit over two years ago without a jot of Portuguese or Spanish to my name - just some rusty French, similarly imprinted by my Victorian schooling - however I rapidly realised that I could get away with speaking Latin with a Portuguese sound and be understood, as I pieced in the actual modern language, palimpsest-like, over the Latin. It allowed me to go from non-speaker to amply conversational in under a year, and knowing the underlying grammar and much of the vocabulary has similarly unlocked Spanish and Italian for me. I’ve even found that Mirandese, a dialect that native Portuguese speakers find quite impenetrable, has been no more of a challenge than Portuguese - less so, in fact, as it largely comprises vulgate Latin. The cognates in all of the Romance languages are profligate, and having Latin as a root from which to grow the various trunks has, I feel, given me insight into Latin as she was spoke, as it were, as hearing the incidences in common words between all provides a bridge to what the commonality in sound is, and how Latin may have actually sounded. It’s also a delight to be able to walk around Roman ruins and museums and rattle off translations of inscriptions and writings, but I digress. I hope that the teaching of Latin has improved since my day (80’s/90’s), as it’s an incredible tool to have in one’s arsenal, but to say I was unenthused by their pedagogical approach would be an understatement.
• bsder 5y ago
  I suspect that, with notable exceptions, academics gain the level of proficiency they need. However, practically everybody can at least read the characters of Latin. I find this interesting to contrast to academics studying Ancient Chinese. Evemn native Chinese speakers require lots of training before they can even begin decoding the scripts and characters, let alone things like the poetic forms. Now THAT'S a difficult language to do research in.
  • Ericson2314 5y ago
    Mmm the characters themselves are largely unchanged, precisely because they are so largely artificial! But yes, merely recognizing the character doesn't mean one has much of a leg up decoding it.
    • thaumasiotes 5y ago
      > Mmm the characters themselves are largely unchanged, precisely because they are so largely artificial! Your mileage may vary. https://hanziyuan.net/#%E8%99%8E https://hanziyuan.net/#%E8%99%8E Granted, that one starts out as non-artificial as it's possible to be. But compare https://hanziyuan.net/#%E7%94%B2 https://hanziyuan.net/#%E7%94%B2 , where the original character is 十 and it develops through 田 and various intermediate forms into the modern form 甲. You don't get more abstract than 甲.
      • Ericson2314 5y ago
        Oracle is quite a bit different, sure, but Seal is a lot more clear, and Clerical is completely clear.
• leonry 5y ago
  There are quite some examples of contemporary Latin speakers, wow! However, I am surprised that Luke Ranieri (https://lukeranieri.com/ https://lukeranieri.com/) is not mentioned.
• Sniffnoy 5y ago
  (2019)
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• e-dant 5y ago
  A Latin Perl module: https://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html https://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html Author’s reasons are fascinating.
  • marginalia_nu 5y ago
    Latin ~~Skyrim~~ Caelifinis conversion mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/27433 https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/27433 It wasn't finished last time I played it though. Amusing project none the less.
• lukebuehler 5y ago
  I wish learning Latin/Greek as a spoken language would become the default pedagogical method. I recently studied ancient Greek extensively in the Boston area. I was well aware of the living language community--people that speak and write Greek/Latin as they learn it and not just read it--and even joined some seminars, but these are all not for credit and are usually run by non-accredited institutions. Since I was in a masters program, I needed the credits for my language work. And I realized, it is nigh impossible to learn Greek as a living language in an academic settings. It's a real pity. Ancient languages are largely taught to pass the advanced language exams like the comps. If you want to learn it as a living language you have to step outside the academic mainstream. Edit: clarify the credit thing.
  • Ansil849 5y ago
    > If you want to learn it as a living language you have to step outside the academic mainstream. Your tone makes it sound like there is some conspiracy to keep ancient Greek out of curricula. In fact, the reason is that there is virtually zero demand. The "academic mainstream" are the student body that has no interest in it. I too took ancient Greek. There were 6 people in my program. It was closed two years after I completed it.
    • lukebuehler 5y ago
      No, I do not believe there is a conspiracy like this. What I said was specifically about living language style learning vs. the traditional sight reading and then translating type of learning. The latter is the primary style, and if you want the former it is very hard to find in the universities. I know about the dwindling demand for ancient language learning in general, but in Boston there is still quite a bit of demand in the bigger universities. However, I do think there could be more interest if learning Greek/Latin would not feel like such an immense grind, going at it more as a living language style would help a bit (it still hard, though).
    • ImprobableTruth 5y ago
      If other languages were taught like Greek or Latin, I'm certain there would be almost no interest as well.
• throwawayarnty 5y ago
  Another related academic field that has this quirk is musicology. You can have a successful career writing books and papers on musicology without needing to know how to play or write music. To me it feels analogous to an academic who writes on history of math without being able to prove or understand theorems.
  • Ansil849 5y ago
    > To me it feels analogous to an academic who writes on history of math without being able to prove or understand theorems. You're suggesting that in order to study the history of something, you also need to be a practitioner of it? So for example, a professor of military history needs to have combat experience? An art history teacher needs to be an artist?
    • throwawayarnty 5y ago
      Lecturing on “historical mathematics” without being able to follow a mathematicians papers seems dubious to me. Lecturing on music without being able to play music is also suspicious. I would feel very fake if I were one of those people. You would only be able to use second hand sources where someone with real ability has predigested the original works for you.
      • Ansil849 5y ago
        So to return to my question, would you apply this criteria to all historical courses? That the lecturer must have firsthand practitioner knowledge of the field? How would this work for, say, ancient history?
        • watwut 5y ago
          Can't write about historical crime, unless you killed someone. I don't make the rules.
          • MrYellowP 5y ago
• bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >It's not just that this assumption would be news to people like Galileo, Kepler or Descartes. some of the smartest people who ever lived learned Latin and Greek, so you can see how easy it must be. I mean not to say that it isn't just as possible as learning any other language, but the reason why we don't is that it is not that important all things considered to read Cicero in the original for most people. If it is important they will learn the language, and if they do that will probably become a source of income for them as it is a rare skill.
  • Beltalowda 5y ago
    > some of the smartest people who ever lived learned Latin and Greek, so you can see how easy it must be. Those are just the people we remember today; many more were fairly fluent, but we haven't heard of them.
    • bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      My problem is not with the idea that people can learn the languages, but that the example chosen as to why it should not be too difficult is among the set of people whom, judging from brain power, would probably find it easier than the normal learner. In other words it is a rhetorically poor argument. on edit: changed set up to set of.
    • dc-programmer 5y ago
      John Milton was famously fluent in both. Paradise Lost is written in the style, form, and diction of an ancient epic. It also biased towards words with classical roots
  • pfortuny 5y ago
    Indeed. And they did bot use it in their daily speech, which is what makes a language “alive”. As I said in another comment, I can talk the language of schemes. It does not make that langauge any more “alive” as a tongue than Latin.
  • marginalia_nu 5y ago
    Is it much to ask to have people who are academics, specialists in a field to have an aptitude for it? Like, is it unfair to demand that a professor is smart?
• Aidevah 5y ago
  It's amusing how intense Nietzsche's contempt was for his fellow classicists during the heyday of the profession in the 19th century. Here is an excerpt from his "We Philologists"[1]: Greeks and Classicists The Greeks: pay homage to beauty; develop the body; are articulate; are religious transfigurers of ordinary things; are listeners and observers; are prone to symbolism; possess freedom as men; have a pure outlook on the world; are intellectual pessimists The Classicists: are windbags and dilettantes; are repulsive-looking creatures; stutter; are filthy pedants; are hair-splitters and screech owls; are incapable of symbolism; are passionate slaves of the state; are Christians in disguise; are Philistines It's probably unreasonable to expect the average classicist to possess the linguistic skills of the people whose legacy have survived over two millennia. [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/20162817 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20162817
  • watwut 5y ago
    The Greeks were sexi, contemporary classists spend less time doing sports and caring how awesome they look, therefore ... I mean, this shows Nietzsche's being capable of contempt and emotional/aesthetician argument, but not much else.
  • dgellow 5y ago
    I cannot read your comment without visualizing the "virgin vs chad" meme template, it's a perfect fit :) Nietzsche would have been the best reddit shitposter.
    • marginalia_nu 5y ago
      To be fair, this is an old tradition in philosophy. Socrates was arguably the original forum troll, even if Diogenes took it to another level.
      • eru 5y ago
        If Socrates had lived in Rome, he could have trolled on the original Forum.
• pfortuny 5y ago
  The article presents latins as a “live” language. That is a fallacy. A live language is one passed from “mother” to child. It is always a “first” language. The fact that Newton, Leibnitz etc used it did not make it a true “live” language. This is something latinists have to learn to bear with. Latin is dead and is only academic. Nothing wrong with that or with using it. But trying to comvince people that it is “flourishing” is like trying to defend, say, Cathegory Theory because it is a “flourishing language”: no, it is not. It is a convenient means of ACADEMIC (scientific even) information transfer.
  • jhbadger 5y ago
    Living languages and native languages are different things. A living language is just one that is actively used in the present. The majority of people using English in the world today did not learn it natively. To them, it makes no difference that there are native speakers of it in the UK and USA, etc. They learn it not because they care about them or wish to visit these places (although they might) but because English is (currently) the standard language for a variety of purposes such as science, just as Latin was in Newton's time.
  • marginalia_nu 5y ago
    > Latin is dead and is only academic. Latin's mostly been kept alive thanks to the catholic church. The church operates on a different timescale than most organizations, and the audience of their documents and decrees aren't just people of the present. When your organization is thousands of years old, it's very useful to stick to one language, so that you can read what your predecessor wrote 500 or 1000 years ago.
• denton-scratch 5y ago
  Beard has commented on the correct pronunciation of "omicron". https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/pronounce-om-i-cron-confusion-bbc-classicists-debate-variants/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas... She says it's pronounced "oh-MEE-cron". I took one term of ancient greek, and was taught to recite the greek alphabet; we were told it's pronounced "oh-MY-cron". I'm fairly sure that schoolboys have been taught to pronounce it that way since forever. It's beyond me why the BBC Pronunciation Unit decided it's pronounced "OMMY-cron". I also wonder how Beard came by her knowledge of how the ancient greeks pronounced the letters of their alphabet.
  • Grustaf 5y ago
    The accent is on the initial o, why would you stress the second syllable? (1) And why would Greek MI be pronounced MY? That’s a very English specific pronunciation of I. It definitely wasn’t a diphthong in Greek. What is even your point? Nobody really knows just how it was actually pronounced, so we rely on standardized reconstructions. But that’s not really related to being able to read it. Also, omicron and the Greek letters have become English words, and their pronunciation as English words doesn’t necessarily correspond to the (reconstructed) Greek pronunciation, these are different things. 1 Yes I’m aware that the accents originally denoted a melodic accent rather than a stress accent, I did take four full-time semesters of Greek, but something tells me that’s not the reason your teacher taught you that way.
    • denton-scratch 5y ago
      > What is even your point? Nobody really knows just how it was actually pronounced, so we rely on standardized reconstructions. I imagine that ancient pronunciation can sometimes be induced from things like poetry. > something tells me that’s not the reason your teacher taught you that way. I imagine he taught it to me that way because that's how he learned it. I don't know how far down the turtles go, but this was at a school that has traditionally emphasized classics; all the teachers pronounced it that way, including those teaching science and maths. The BBC variant jars, because I have never heard it pronounced their way until this damned virus cropped up.
• giomasce 5y ago
  Shameless plug: my wife produces Latin content for beginners on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/c/SaturaLanx https://www.youtube.com/c/SaturaLanx). Fun fact: during 2021 she earned quite more with her Latin teaching business than me as a full time software engineer. Not bad!
  • dgellow 5y ago
    > Fun fact: during 2021 she earned quite more with her Latin teaching business than me as a full time software engineer. Not bad! Not that I am doubting what you're saying, but I find that fact surprising. I see on her channel info that she has 363,157 views in total. Does youtube pays really that well that with 300k views you can make more than as a software engineer? Or do I misunderstand what you're saying?
    • jfk13 5y ago
      I'd guess the youtube videos are just a part of a "Latin teaching business" that also involves paid courses. The main income is from people who directly pay for tuition/resources, not from youtube monetisation.
      • dgellow 5y ago
        Ah yes, I misread the first comment, he’s talking about her Latin teaching business, not just the YouTube channel. Thanks for pointing that out
    • enkid 5y ago
      Not the above poster, but many language teachers YouTube channels are basically advertising for their paid individual lessons.
  • supperburg 5y ago
• netcan 5y ago
  Interesting read. I think there is some parallel to "secondary school languages." If you compare secondary school (or k-12) language programs, you will find a vast range of outcomes. Vast. In one context, kids acquire usable language skills. In others, basically nothing. I studied French for 4 years, as did all my classmates. Almost none achieved any level of proficiency. I've challenged several language teachers over the years with a "why bother?" If year after year kids matriculate without gaining enough proficiency to take a bus or order lunch... why not shut down the program and teach something else? Usually, the answer is (understandably) defensive. Highlighting of meta/peripheral benefits of learning a language. Noting that out-of-classroom context plays a big role. Ultimately though, IMO.... classroom language learning is hard, and we accept low levels of performance. Classicists, generally, learned latin in an undergraduate classroom setting. This is, very often, a very ineffective way of learning a language. Being normal and common, this standard is deemed acceptable. We don't really know how to fix the classroom. The Latin classroom also has less competition than other languages. High school French learners don't become French language scholars, at least not without actually learning French. With Latin, you can get away with it. So that's basically my take. We don't teach languages very well. Formal education settings often achieve pretty weak results. By and large, we just accept whatever results are achieved. Language programs don't "declare bankruptcy" if results achieved are weak. They accept it.
  • BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    The longest-term knowledge I gained from my high school Spanish classes was learning all the parts of speech that I should have learned in the fourth grade but didn’t pay attention in class.
  • TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
    The classroom is useful to help bootstrap the understanding of the language: here are some common words, here are the rules they follow. But there's no substitute for diving into real texts, and there's not enough time in the classroom to do that enough. I spent years learning various languages at school, but moving to another country and being forced to read text (etc) in this new language day in, day out, taught me far more in the space of just a year or two.
• nathell 5y ago
  I've stumbled upon this article before thanks to a tweet by @azforeman (https://twitter.com/azforeman/status/1370779212697628672 https://twitter.com/azforeman/status/1370779212697628672), which I'll reproduce here: > I once was sitting in O’Hare airport reading a book of Latin poetry when a guy looking like a monk walks up to me looking utterly lost and asks “Loquerisne Latine”? (Do you speak Latin?) To which I answer “Ita, possumne te adiuvare?” (Yes, can I help you?.) > Turned out he was indeed a Polish monk and knew only Polish and Latin. Had never been outside Poland before, or even seen the inside of an airport, and needed help finding his way. > That is my personal story of Latin as an auxlang.
  • fennecfoxen 5y ago
    Yeah, it’s a little surprising to read the article and not see one mention of the word “church” when the Catholic one is one of the most-active modern day users of the language.
    • deleted 5y ago
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    • rst 5y ago
      The first example of a contemporary speaker is a Catholic priest and former staffer at the Vatican. That subsequent examples are drawn from elsewhere is probably the author deliberately trying to convey it isn't just the church.
  • 1-more 5y ago
    This is the dream for me. Sure I've helped the odd Spanish and French tourist, but to swing into action in Latin? This is all I could ever hope for. Gonna maybe hang around monasteries looking helpful.
  • bobthechef 5y ago
  • tasty_freeze 5y ago
    It shouldn't take much effort to find a fluent speaker of Polish in Chicago's main airport. I don't know if it was true, but growing up there I often heard that Chicago is the second largest Polish community outside of Warsaw.
• gumby 5y ago
  > I think it is partly that most of us, … still learn ancient languages largely passively. This fascinates me for two reasons. In my high school, which drew from every corner of the city of Boston, taught Latin (a required subject) as a living language and most students were as reasonably fluent as you would expect high schoolers could be. You’d encounter it in other subjects, not just Latin class. For many students Greek too. What’s the point otherwise? I am somewhat surprised to hear that actual classicists might not be fluent — again, what’s the point? Didn’t they choose their domain because they loved the language or material? Computer scientists who are poor programmers are not uncommon but then they know their mathematics, the language of their trade (academic computer engineers tend to be better programmers). But my son observed that many of the faculty and grad students of his university’s German department similarly were mostly not strong German speakers. While I noticed that in the 80s the political science profs who taught geopolitics all appeared to be fluent in Russian (though tbh how could I know?)
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • madaxe_again 5y ago
    At my secondary school, Latin, Greek and Classical Studies were all distinct subjects. It was uncommon for someone to do Classical Studies and either language - rather, Classical Studies was seen as the “can’t hack Latin/Greek” class, and most switched to it after the mandatory year of Latin. Of the people I schooled with who are now classicists, they almost universally studied Classical Studies. The linguists, only one, as far as I know, is now a classicist. I think the explanation is straightforward. The language teaching is, or was, practically designed to make you despise the topic. Classical Studies involved field trips, videos in the classroom, archaeological surveys - and was positively engaging. Therefore, people who studied the languages, usually at the behest of their parents, ran from the classical world as fast as they could. The ones who dropped the languages and did classical studies instead, found themselves engaged by the subject matter and went on to be classicists.
  • deleted 5y ago
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• GnarfGnarf 5y ago
  I was forced to learn Latin for six years during high school and college, and I detested it. Also two years of Greek. I argued it would be much more useful to learn a living language like German, Italian, whatever. And I am fluent in English, French and Spanish.
  • eru 5y ago
    What you are saying makes a lot of sense. Doesn't have all that much to do with the article, though. (Not sure why you are downvoted so much.)
    • watwut 5y ago
      Probably because it is completely offtopic.
      • GnarfGnarf 5y ago
        My point is that Latin is not all what it's cracked up to be in a modern context. If Latin is so great, why was it such a loathsome experience? I was 11 years old when I started rosa, rosa, rosam, rosae.... In six years, you'd think I could find one teacher that could inspire me? BTW I graduated Magna cum, first of my class, so I'm not impervious to learning.
        • eru 5y ago
          That's certainly evidence, but perhaps not damning evidence? Compare mathematics (or even programming): from first hand experience I can tell you that they are interesting topics, but also that most teachers that most people have are awful. In any case, Latin is just one language amongst many. It's fine, if you don't like it. There's plenty more you can learn, if you want to.
• soniman 5y ago
  Internet gurus are hacking language learning and the consensus is moving towards the importance of a steady diet of "comprehensible input" versus grammar instruction. That was always the expert opinion I think but the internet has accelerated it. One important factor is that the early content you consume be translated from your native language into the target language. For instance Latin learners should start with something like Harry Potter latinus. It's interesting to think about why translated-from-native material is the best for beginners; it probably reduces the mental overhead and focuses the learner on learning the language instead of learning the language & content at the same time.
  • bravura 5y ago
    Do you mind sharing some links or references where I can see language hacking discussion?
    • dymk 5y ago
      It's not a new idea being discussed in language learning circles, and 99% of the recent online discussion about this is based off of this youtube video [1] of Stephen Krashen (a linguist) talking about comprehensible input in the 80s. If I had to guess, most of the recent discussion has started again in the Japanese language learning community, as Japanese is a notoriously difficult language to acquire for anglophones. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnUc_W3xE1w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnUc_W3xE1w
      • soniman 5y ago
        You really think that grainy video from forty years ago is driving the discussion? It's unwatchable.
        • dymk 5y ago
          I realize how it sounds, but yes. It's the source of "comprehensible input" discussion that is cited again and again in online Japanese language learning circles if you dig through the rabbit hole of citations people make.
• cultofmetatron 5y ago
  latin not withstanding, most language learning classes are a waste of money. You know whats cheaper than taking a college course on spanish? traveling down to Colombia with a small book on Spanish grammer and a duolingo membership while living here for 3 months. I wouldn't say I'm fluent but I have picked up enough to navigate the city, ask for directions, flirt with the locals and make a few friends. And isn't connecting with people why we ultimatly want to learn a new language?
• Koshkin 5y ago
  As evidenced from [0], for example, Classical Latin is rather complex, and original Latin texts are often more difficult to read than texts in Ancient Greek, in my non-expert opinion. [0] https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/latol https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/latol
  • spijdar 5y ago
    I'm curious how you'd come to that last conclusion from that article, as the historical Greek languages/dialects have the noun and verb forms therein (except for the ablative case, which fell into disuse by the classical period, and prepositions taking ablatives took genetics case nouns instead) Greek has more forms as well, having a dual number (in addition to singular and plural, a middle voice in addition to active and passive, the aorist tense... Now, I never studied Latin, only Greek, so I have a very basic understanding of the terms as I learned them from Greek, but I've always felt like Latin was way more regular and consistent. It's a much "younger" language, too, at least compared to Attic and Homeric Greek. But, I really don't know Latin well, so I'm not in a good position to compare...
• sul_tasto 5y ago
  I think it worth posting this resource for those who might be actively studying the classics: https://geoffreysteadman.com/ https://geoffreysteadman.com/
• Maursault 5y ago
  Author has a point yet inexplicably dresses it up with bashing classicists. Author sure seems to know a lot about all classicists all from what a single one of them said, apparently carelessly and without rigor, in a setting that no one should have taken too seriously. This is employing the fallacy of hasty generalization, which the author uses as a point of departure but never strays too far before coming back again to bash classicists' command of Latin. I wish a classicist would respond. Most of them are mental giants that would make quick work of the author's meandering editorial, if only they were remotely interested in anything written in the last 1200 years. Author is clearly not an academic. Academics don't bicker... there is no hierarchy or pecking order there, with the economists on top, physicists in the middle, and theater professors at the bottom. In general, they all respect each other's work and PhDs (except interdepartmentally... head of dept. stuff is political), because they know how much work they invested in their own.
  • MagnumOpus 5y ago
    > Most of them [classicists] are mental giants Ha! > Academics don't bicker... there is no hierarchy or pecking order there Ha ha! > In general, they all respect each other's work Now I know that you're trolling. Poe's law almost got me...
• denton-scratch 5y ago
  I hesitated to mention this, because I assumed people would all be jumping in to say this. Roman Catholics have been using Latin continuously since it was a Lingua Franca. No doubt many of them are pretty fluent. Clerical Latin is a dialect; I don't know much about it, but I know it's different from (for example) legal Latin, or vulgate Latin. But I assume that at least some practitioners of clerical Latin are fluent, and I also assume that there is a pronunciation tradition in the Catholic Church that runs back to Lingua Franca days. It was pointed out to me in some other HN thread that Latin is not a "dead language" - it experiences the same kinds of drifts and changes in grammar, semantics and so on as modern languages. I accept that. The same can't be said of Sanskrit, I think.
• jll29 5y ago
  Thanks for an interesting read (and the lecture video link in the comments!). Never met a Latin teacher who could hold a conversation, although one said he had been to a convention where they dressed up in Roman gear and greeted each other in Latin "SALVETE". I was studying Latin for 4.5 years in secondary education, my summary is it isn't as useful and as logical a language as many claim: there are plenty of tables to memorize, many exceptions to remember, and then advanced texts leave important words implicit (e.g. main verbs). As someone passionate about language and languages, I was initially excited, but quickly disappointed and bored by Latin grammar books and textbooks that taught it. The typically historic texts are mostly war-related (Caesar, De bello gallico). In contrast, Spanish grammar is lean, beautiful and simple. The exceptions are fewer, and somehow one doesn't even need to study much to pick up the essentials for daily communication, one tends to pick it up intuitively (after four years of Latin, I still couldn't "Vamos a la playa" in Latin, but I could say "Vamono" in Spanish after two years - "let's go!", emulating the slang of the Canary Islands where the -s ending is often dropped, to sound more native-like). Ironically, of course, Spanish is a Romance language and therefore derived from Latin. In linguistics, there is an observation that over time, languages simplify and drop cases, conjugations and endings indicating other grammatical systems generally. For instance, English once had a "dual" in addition to singular and plural, which was only used for things with cardinality two (e.g. two apples, a pair of shoes), but this was eventually shed [1,2]. It is important to know more than one language well enough to have conversations and read books, as this totally broadens one's perspective. This is because categorial divisions are done differently in each language and the world is organized differently - along different grammatical dimensions - and the leads to an increased ability to take alternative viewpoints. Learning a second language opens your mind and makes accessible another vast body of books you can read and people you can communicate with. It's vital that this is taught you people in schools, and it's importal to do that well, as later people have insufficient time and focus, and older humans learn much more slowly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_number) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_number) [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327510106_The_Loss_of_Dual_Number_in_Old_English https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327510106_The_Loss_...
• kazinator 5y ago
  I think these scholars should try immersion: watch some Roman dramas in Latin, Roman music videos, Roman news, Roma documentaries, ..., for a few hours a day at least until they understand everything without subtitles. I don't think you will get the hang of seven case declension from just reading. Practicing speaking is important too. Find a Roman friend for language exchange, maybe.
• artemiszx 5y ago
  From my personal point of view: native speaker of Chinese & self-taught Japanese; not particularly good at Latin—your typical Vergil, Tacitus, Sallust level but did some phonological history research in university setting. I admit I can’t sight read well (beyond Osberg’s textbooks) I agree with the other commenter that woefully, Latin is a dead language. The author lists examples of modern usage of Latin in the article that, imo, are few and far between. They almost always resort to neologisms and English back ports on the spot, or reuse some Latin vocabulary that hopefully makes sense. In the manned mission to Mars video by Paideia the author linked, the speaker rather handwavily refers to the rovers Opportunity and Curiosity as instrumenta, while his slides uses carri (wagons). I don’t think there is any consensus on what rovers should be called. Articles on the Latin Wikipedia (that the author also links to) painstakingly avoids this issue by de-Anglicizing official NASA monikers (so Curiosity is Laboratorium Scientificum Martianum, or just vehiculum). I’m not saying the way modern Latin creates new vocabulary is bad--most non-English languages have gone through a similar process. I am lamenting the absolute lack of consistency or consensus, because the corpus is so small and because Latin speakers rarely actually communicate in Latin about such matters for practical ends. The Maritian mission lecture can uncharitably be said to be a mediocre high school presentation on the subject, with the novelty of it being in Latin (and again, I like Latin as a language a lot. I almost went on a Paideia trip before their scandal cropped up). And yes, novelty is the biggest factor here--why are all the numbers in Roman numerals? Cultures around the world have adopted to Arabic numerals despite all having indigenous systems. I am aware that the Latinitas Foundation publises a Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis, and you can see a small portion of it on the Vatican website: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/institutions_connected/latinitas/documents/rc_latinitas_20040601_lexicon_it.html https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/institutions_connected/la.... The problem is that it simply has lemma in Italian and Latin explanations to them, which is not exactly helpful (or sometimes correct). “Jet” is explained as aërināvis celérrima (the fastest airship) and “jumbo” as capacíssima aërināvis (the largest airship; wouldn’t it be prudent to think it might refer to things other than a plane?). Also I am under the impression that planes are more often referred to as aeroplanum, because loaning from English gets more traction (like computatrum vs ordinatrum). It’s ironic that in the information age, when dialects in living languages are increasingly homogenized, Latin is so fragmented—-again, probably because people don’t actually communicate in it. Remind me how Latin got replaced by the veraculars? This is becoming a huge rant, but as someone who has experience teaching myself language to fairly high levels, an excess of engaging learning materials is crucial for achiving proficiency. Imagine learning English and you get to choose from the huge and diverse corpus of Shakespeare, Milton, Samuel Richardson, Shelly and Dickens. Not that any of those is not a great work, but to achieve listening and speaking skills, you obviously need other materials: news, pop culture, entertainment, instruction manuals, random people’s posts online–the equivalents to which Latin cannot provide. If you are trained to read and analyze only the classics, you will be able to do that--maybe you can't listen or speak or sight read, but what did you really expect. That said, I do not regret not having been part of a “living” kind of Latin language course. Language instruction in the US is atrocious, and I learned nothing from 3 years of French courses despite good grades. Grammar-translation might not be ideal (I didn’t do it for long either), but at least it has rigor.