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

I've stumbled upon this article before thanks to a tweet by @azforeman (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.

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.

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

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.

> 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?)

Shameless plug: my wife produces Latin content for beginners on YouTube (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!

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

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.

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.

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?

There are quite some examples of contemporary Latin speakers, wow! However, I am surprised that Luke Ranieri (https://lukeranieri.com/) is not mentioned.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Latin Perl module:

https://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html

Author’s reasons are fascinating.

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?

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.

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

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.

I think it worth posting this resource for those who might be actively studying the classics: https://geoffreysteadman.com/

>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.

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.

(2019)

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/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.

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)

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327510106_The_Loss_...

Beard has commented on the correct pronunciation of "omicron".

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.

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.