Misunderstanding Greek and Latin in eighteenth-century Britain | Hacker News Reader

Misunderstanding Greek and Latin in eighteenth-century Britain

laphamsquarterly.org

92 pointspepys36 comments

> To commit the very Accidence and Grammar to memory, requires three or four years, sometimes more, (as many can witness by woful experience) and when all is done, besides declining Nouns, and forming Verbs, and getting a few words, there is very little advantage to the Child.

[I know the article is about understanding the cultural level of Latin and Greek understanding in 18 century Britain, but as a Latin teacher I feel obligated to comment about Latin teaching methodologies]

This is a common complaint and is encountered many times in modern contexts. I contend that this is due to the method of teaching; namely in language courses that lack sufficient amounts of comprehensible input (i.e. simple text that one can read quickly without needing to pause to consult a glossary).

Using a Comprehensible Input method, one can acquire a language much better and faster. For example I was able to read books in the Vulgate comfortably after only 200-300 hours of language learning. There are also people who have learned to speak Latin fluently, for example SaturaLanx or ScorpioMartianus on Youtube.

So what was your source of comprehensible input?

Primarily Familia Romana by Hans Oerburg, and then a lot of public-domain Latin readers.

There's a guy named Justin Armstrong who maintains a pretty good list here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TugURNkc0461IQoToKIl...

I love this comment a lot. I am not fluent in Latin, but have also experienced amazingly fast progress using CI methods (relying on the resources you mention below).

Currently I'm brushing up on Spanish in the same way and absorbing (for instance) the subjunctive painlessly.

I think most people still underestimate how easily an adult can learn a language.

"Paul Nation in a 2014 article estimates that to acquire a vocabulary of about 5000 words a student needs read about 2 million words."

If you absorb about 3000 words a day, after less than a year you'll have read 1 million words. With a vocabulary of 2500 words you can do quite a lot. For me, in Latin, that's about 40 minutes of reading (I read faster in Spanish, slower in Ukrainian).

Read/listen/watch 3000 words a day, understanding the majority of the words so you understand the whole passage, and after a year or so you'll be mostly fluent.

These figures line up with your 200-300 hours to read the Vulgate, as well.

What resources do you use for Spanish?

The great thing about CI is that it implies less is more. Don't do anything elaborate, don't memorize, don't practice grammar, just consume media you understand.

I'm at a somewhat intermediate level, so mainly I am just watching The Mandalorian, Clone Wars, etc, in Spanish with Spanish subtitles. I'll often repeat a phrase or sentence into Google Translate, or repeat it into ChatGPT mobile and ask for a grammatical explanation or if the phrase is colloquial.

I do copy transcribed phrases I like, so I can read them again later. That's all the review I do and is more than necessary.

I've also signed up for News in Slow Spanish but not sure how much that adds over watching TV tbh.

In a few months I'll think about adding conversational practice in some way.

In retrospect, I wish my secondary school French had been as you suggest.

The tables of verbs and conjugations into tenses whose group-names made little sense, and my difficulty with them, was a permanent source of woe at the time.

Ugh, the conjugaisons are a torture. I was lucky and knew how to speak and read and write in French before I had to study them or I'd never learn the language.

I learned to read and write in French before I started school; I'm not a native French speaker btw, but Greek. I learned by reading Asterix and Tintin and I'm not half joking. That's how I also learned to read and write in Greek (by reading Disney comics in that case), also before starting school.

I don't know if it was just me, but the combination of text and images in comic books is almost as good as being immersed in the culture of a language. Illustrated books, that simply have a few images along with the text aren't as good for that purpose. With comics you get to read text that directly relates to the goings-on in the images, and it's the next best thing to living in the real world and observing people speak as they go about their day.

It also helps that text in speech bubbles tends to be short, and the things said aren't too complex, but not too simple either. There's some puns in Asterix that I only ever got much later, and one in particular (a Roman named Oursenplus) that I only finally got when I heard a French colleague say it out loud (with a "sh" sound at the end rather than "ss").

Of course, no school is ever going to stoop so low as to teach kids to read and write in their language or a foreign one with something as base and vulgar as comic books. Or it'd be something along those lines. Even in France where comics are big they wouldn't think of doing that. And yet, in my case at least, that worked out much better than all of school taken together.

I bet computer games would also work in the same way. Good luck convincing educators that kids can learn anything useful from playing mere games. Unless it's chess I guess.

> one in particular (a Roman named Oursenplus) that I only finally got when I heard a French colleague say it out loud (with a "sh" sound at the end rather than "ss")

Be kind to us who still don't know enough and explain it here.

Of course. "Oursenplus" sounds Latin because it ends in "-us", like "Gaius", "Julius", etc. It's a standard joke in Asterix to make up "Latin" names that are in fact French words or short phrases with an "-us" (or other Latin-like) last syllable. e.g. "Gaius Faispaslgugus" (appearing in "Le Devin") - from "ne fais pas le gugusse" which translates roughly to "don't be ridiculous".

The same goes for making up Gaulish names, except the last syllable is usually "-ix" e.g. Abraracourcix, from "[prendre quelqu' un] a bras racourcis", which means to beat someone up. And the same with all the other cultures satirised in Asterix [1].

Now, "Oursenplus" (appearing in "Le Domaine des Dieux") sounds like "Ourse en peluche", meaning a plushie bear. "Peluche" is felt. In a native French accent it is pronounced with a silent "e", so more like "plush" with a long "u" as in "heuristics". Well, OK, it's hard to explain the pronounciation without sound.

The funny thing is that I know the word "peluche" and what it means (I learned it from another comic book, Bob & Bobette) but just seeing "Oursenplus" written, I didn't get it, because I was confounded by the "enplus" at the end, which could as well stand for "en plus", or "one more"; as in "one more bear". Or, more unlikely "en plus, c'est un ourse", as in "also, it's a bear". I figured that was some kind of saying I didn't know and I only caught on to the actual meaning when I asked a French colleague whether the knew the character in Asterix, and what the name meant. My colleague in turn, who didn't know the character, misheard the name and asked me "Comment, ourse en peluche?". And then I started laughing with the confusion of decades finally lifted, the joke finally understood :)

___________

[1] See: Epidemaïs, a Phoenician merchant, from "épis de maïs", "ear of corn"; Okéibos a Greek javelin-thrower, from "OK Boss"; Soupalognon y Crouton, the Iberian chief, from "soupe à l'oignon avec des croûtons", oninon soup with croutons, etc.

Many more here:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_personnages_d'Ast%C3...

I think that the comic books worked well because they provided extra context with the illustrations. And, as you point out, the text is directly tied to the illustration in each panel. With that extra context, the texts became more comprehensible, so you were able to learn more advanced and interesting sentences earlier.

Some other examples of high-context sources: - TV shows in the target language (subtitles may be helpful) - stories that one is already familiar with (in my case, I was already really familiar with the plot of the Vulgate). - stories that aren't familiar, but where you can read the same plot repeated in several sources. For Latin, John Piazza's Narratioines Faciles de Historia Romanorum does this well https://archive.org/details/piazza-john-narrationes-faciles-... . For living languages, probably looking in a kid's library section for books all on a similar topic would be good. - Talking with someone in the language, since they'll give you real-time context.

>> I think that the comic books worked well because they provided extra context with the illustrations. And, as you point out, the text is directly tied to the illustration in each panel. With that extra context, the texts became more comprehensible, so you were able to learn more advanced and interesting sentences earlier.

Absolutely!

300 hours realistically amount to 3 years of school teaching.

You’d be surprised to learn how unrealistic it is to expect someone that has learned Latin from 3 years of grammar drills/translation exercises to read any intermediate text comfortably (without translating sentence-by-sentence).

> ordinarily Boys learn a Leaf or two of the Pueriles, twenty Pages of Corderius, a part of Esop’s Fables, a piece of Tullie

I wonder when and why we started calling him Cicero instead.

(We might also ask why Julius Caesar wasn't called "Julie", but the historical significance of the name "Caesar" is pretty apparent.)

> She recommends a simple course of learning a thousand sentences in six to nine months, and dismisses the idea that students might try to learn a whole language and its grammar

Looks like the sentence-mining method goes all the way back to the 18th century!

This language learning methods where created for world war times so introduced soldiers could learn fast enemy or foreign language just to get to certain target and do their action, steal, bomb, etc without being recognised (not for coming back)

Spoiler: it did not work, that is why I whole new methodology based upon modern pedagogy and linguistics was created. War method had best selling points like speed (you know nobody has time this days, like we are missing something) thus it still exists in different shapes (such as mobile apps) And also, sometimes at certain points drilling techniques should be used, but not only.

When exactly are native speakers of a language using grammar drilling methods?

Is it part of kindergarten?

It’s ridiculous to compare native language acquisition by children with second language acquisition. A child has so many advantages: 100% surrounded by ghe native language, people who constantly talk to the child at levels they understand, teachers who work with the child (and yes native children do get grammar lessons). And children also get constantly corrected when making mistakes.

A second language learner lacks most or all of these things.

Readable text provides immersion and context, which allows implicitly absorbing the most common grammatical constructs and intuiting vocabulary.

Anecdotally I can’t recall being anything more than a middling student of English until I reached the end of the translated discworld volumes and figured there was a lot more to read if I but acquired them in the original English. Some contribution can also be credited to getting into computing although mostly because EverQuest required daily interactions with English sites and speakers.

Now try to learn another foreign language as an adult and report back on how easy it hard that was :)

I have, multiple times. I’ve also raised bilingual kids. Adults fare vastly better (an order of magnitude) than kids, when compared on a basis of hours invested. The thing is, kids are exposed to a language learning environment 24/7/365 with few other responsibilities or a mother tongue to fall back on to express themselves.

If you were able to put in the same immersion effort as is forced upon a kid, you’d be fluent in less than a year and native-level a few years later, for most languages.

It’s not so ridiculous once you realise that it’s entirely possible for a second language learner to surround himself in the target language and constantly consume level appropiate (and interesting!) input.

If someone lacks those things, IMO the method isn’t very good.

It's not ridiculous at all.

I learned English in exactly that way: Massive input. I learned nothing back in elementary and middle school - they tried to drill grammar, in the form of "I am, you are, he/she/it is, we are, you are, they are". Didn't work. But I got interested in microcomputers in the mid seventies, when I was a teenager, and most of the material available was in English, so I subscribed to Personal Computer World after finding issue 1 in a local shop. Drank it all up, slowly at first, then faster, and later on I just continued - not in order to learn English, I just wanted to read what I wanted to read. And there were of course movies etc. I didn't get past technical English until much much later, when I started to read English books because that was what was available when travelling. I got all my English vocabulary and grammar from that.

English is admittedly a bit special in that it's easy to immerse even if you don't live in an English-speaking country. There's no problem finding comprehensible input (a term I hadn't heard until recently, but looking back that's what I was doing). I can manage in more languages, to a survival level, using exactly the same method. And I've worked for many years trying to learn Japanese, by more traditional methods (I couldn't just start reading.. I thought) - and I got almost nowhere. Yes, I can describe basic grammar, but I can't (or couldn't) understand Japanese outside of greetings, and I couldn't speak to save my life. But some months ago I switched to what we're discussing: Acquire the language by comprehensible input. Fortunately there are now people around who prepare material for you, and that's what I'm using. Suddenly I'm finally getting somewhere. It works. The fog is lifting.

As to "And children also get constantly corrected when making mistakes" - no, that's not really true. That's a myth. If you look, you'll see that children's mistakes are only corrected if it's serious. For the rest, except for a small amount of corrections, children simply gradually correct themselves. And they don't need teachers to work with them to learn the language. Children are fully fluent when they enter school, what they learn is more vocabulary (something which continues for the rest of their lives, of course), expressions etc. But that's not teachers teaching them said expressions. They simply come across them as part of everything else they do.

"people who constantly talk to the child at levels they understand" Again, that's not how children learn the majority of speech. What they do is to constantly (but in a relaxed, passive way) listen to adults and other older people talking between themselves. They're surrounded by input. And that's how they acquire their language.

An adult actually has an advantage most children don't have: A great ability to read. If they can read, and understand a lot of interesting topics, adults have access to massive input which is not typically accessible (at least to that level) by children.

I think the nature and number of corrections a child receives depends upon the people. For example I'm a parent of a bilingual child, and I've spent literally years correcting pronouns - as his native language doesn't have them.

So many times I've said "Your mommy is a she, not a he". Or "She said". Similarly correcting words like "I did fall" to "I fell".

I accept that teachers probably wouldn't be that picky, and most of the other English-speaking / bilingual children let things slide so long as he's understandable.

(I don't want to be "strict", but I have a social circle here who ask for corrections so it's an easy habit for me.)

They start in the womb, and are still being corrected at times in elementary school. So if you're willing to take that kind of time under that level of immersion, then you don't have to drill, either.

I don’t know what your comment has to do with what I, or the article was talking about.

I don’t know what method was used to train soldiers in foreign languages during the world wars, but I sincerely doubt it was the modern meme of flash card-based spaced repetition of 10,000 sentences method that the internet has made popular under the term “sentence mining.”

It is, you just don't as you say, it amazes me you say you doubt it. I studied for Second Language Teaching English especialization. They used to sell vinyl records with just repetition after repetition in the 50-60s-80s long before meme was used only for internet stuff.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/333145399151

Linguaphone isn’t sentence mining.

> Despite the number of hours and years dedicated to Latin on the school curriculum, it was a complaint of educationalists from the mid-seventeenth century onward that the considerable linguistic apprenticeship in schools guaranteed only a mediocre output in terms of pupils’ abilities in written and spoken Latin, let alone Greek.

As a schoolboy, I was compelled to study Latin for about 6 years, from age 9. I acquired a better understanding of grammar; but I couldn't compose say, a short essay in Latin. Nowadays I can barely compose a sentence of more than three words.

I also did a term (8 weeks) of classical Greek. I learned the alphabet; that's it.

I'm glad I learned Latin; but in terms of return on effort, it was a complete waste of time.

I wonder how hard to learn these two just to appreciate some of those great epic poems … like Aeneid, not to mention Iliad and Odyssey, perhaps even Latin bible.

The keyword is to appreciate. Not to write or even read like say English.

Latin and Greek generelly weren’t part of womens education, even well educated women. The quip about “the absurdity to speak Latin in a Ladies presence” shows how Latin was understood as a “male only” club.

In 18th Century Britain Latin and Greek generally were not part of a man's education either, of course.

Indeed:

    There was no national system of education before the 19th century, and only a small section of the child population received any schooling. Opportunities for a formal education were restricted mainly to town grammar schools, charity schools and 'dame' schools.

https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transforming...

The majority of British children had no formal education and those that did largely had perhaps six years of basic primary school. It was essentially only the wealthy and|or children of some clergyman that received an education ... and perhaps surprisingly it was not uncommon for well off girls to have good education in numbers and languages via private tutors at home, at least, even if they did make a habit of pretending to have none.

Eton, Harrow and Westminster delivered a high quality education to the (only) boys that attended but for a great many if not most attending was less about the education and a great deal more about the social connections and on ramp into the corridors of power.

> children of some clergyman that received an education

The clergy, of course, were one of the major groups that spoke Latin. The others were academics, and government and the law. These occupations were exclusively reserved for men.

That is why the OP added "even well educated women" bit to the claim. The claim about absurdity of speaking latin to women is leading anecdote of the article.

That being said, article does address some contexts in which non-elite boys got latin education.

The article itself is largely a collection of 18th century notables trashing others for their bad latin | poor education | etc. - a montage of amusing literary smack talk.

The GP comment specifically cited "well educated women" as rarely being taught latin.

I'd argue that anyone (in the full population) getting an education was rare, particularly a good education, this was largely confined to the titled generational wealthy and a few of the merchant new rich (at that time of the article anecdotes).

I'd also argue that amoung the wealthy, women were somewhat less likely to get a good education than the men, but it was not altogether uncommon, and of those women that did get an education (the "well educated" of the comment I responded to above) latin was just as likely as other subjects.

As an example, Anne Isabella Noel Byron, 11th Baroness Wentworth and Baroness Byron (née Milbanke; 17 May 1792 – 16 May 1860) (yeah, I know, sliding out of the time frame) was well known for her education and language skills (including latin) in additional for tag lining her husband of some two or three years as mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

Her daughter was equally famous for her education .. but her mother very delibrately did not have her taught literature (save for 'common' language skills such as Greek and French, I can't say whether she was taught latin or not) to prevent her from going down any poetic pathways. Ada did get private tuition from leading mathematicians of the day though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Byron

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

Dropping back to the 14th Century (a time the article cites anecdotes claiming to be 'better educated times') it was common for well off women to be taught the classical languages (including latin) Queen Elizabeth the first being famously fluent from a young age in multiple languages.

https://www.agecrofthall.org/single-post/queen-elizabeth-i-s...

an article that highlights one of the great barriers women (from wealthy families) faced in eduction - access to political education.

I mentioned Eton, Harrow and Westminster above as schools that were exclusive boys only clubs for political education and political contact building.

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