Michael Rosen writes in the Guardian (archived) in the form of a letter, “Dear Gavin Williamson, if Latin in schools is about levelling up, I have other ideas”:
Just as many of us are thinking ahead to winter and a possible next wave of Covid, worrying about whether schools have proper ventilation and what emergency measures you might have up your sleeve if a major outbreak occurs, you choose to put Latin at the top of your agenda. […] Let me lay out my cards about Latin: where there are the staff who can and want to teach it, I’m 100% in favour of Latin being offered as an option. But that option exists right now. This makes me ask, where are the teachers to teach it?
Then again, though I’m always delighted to hear of young people enthused by reading what and how people in ancient times thought, is there a big demand for it? […] For whatever reason, there doesn’t seem to be a great will among most young people to learn modern languages. Would it not be better to address that problem first? […]
Assuming Latin will not have any preferential status in the GCSE offer, its place should be up for examination. It helps you learn other languages, say some. This seems to be an odd way to justify learning the one language you may ever learn, but even so I don’t think it helps you learn the languages of Asia, Africa and Oceania, though it’s great for Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian, assuming that is what the students are going to do for A-level … bearing in mind that university language departments are closing down.
Of course, some people like learning Latin as an intellectual exercise in itself – all those declensions and conjugations that can be dissected out of the words you read. That is because the Latin we read is the highly rarefied, standardised language of a tiny educated elite. Everything we know about “whole language use” is that when spoken across a wide area and across all classes, people speak it in many varied ways. Those forms of Latin, in so far as we can ever reconstruct them, will not be what is taught.
Naturally, you made your announcement in English, a language whose origins lie with the Germanic tribes of northern Europe who, you will remember, mostly resisted Roman imperialism. Is there a good reason why you are not also championing the teaching of Old, Middle and late medieval English – with Norman French thrown in? That way, students would be able to unlock the archaeology in most of the words, grammar and sentence structure of what they say and write every day.
Polemical, sure, but he asks some good questions. Thanks, Trevor!
A government as thoroughly Gradgrindian in its whole ethos as this one would clearly not introduce Latin on the grounds that they felt that people from all backgrounds should be exposed to the beauty of the language and its literature, that they might have their intellectual horizons broadened.
The only argument that would make sense to these pitiful intellectual and moral gnomes would be that Latin made people more likely to enrich themselves and the country financially. This means that, so far as this was a serious policy announcement at all (rather than a piece of Potemkin window-dressing meant to score some political points with their elderly voters) they subscribe to a view of the value of Latin which is (a) wholly mistaken as a matter or cold fact and (b) reduces the tongue of Virgil, Catullus, Lucretius and Tacitus to a mere means to the really important Great Task of perpetuating Tory rule for ever.
I’m reminded of Thatcher’s comments about Christianity (si parva licet componere magnis*) in which it became clear that to her, its value lay in (she supposed) making people behave better and hence being more easily governable. Anathema!
[Incidentally, trying to find an actual source for the commonly-attributed-to-Seneca “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful”, it seems that (horrible man though he was), L Annaeus Seneca was innocent of this particular piece of irritating sixth-form would-be worldly wisdom. Pity. It would have gone in the Black Book … To be fair, it seems a highly unSenecan sentiment.]
*It’s all about the bees. I am proud to say that knowing this has never done me the least financial good at all.
In the winter of 2003-04, I was living in a modestly sized Manhattan condo with my first wife (not yet my late first wife …), our two-year-old, and another imminent child in utero. We were plotting an escape to the suburbs, to get more space for the kids and, as we say in AmEng, “good public schools.” In evaluating the latter criterion, it turns out that the NYC suburbs are very complicated, with a map of school-district boundaries overlaid on top of town/village/etc boundaries (which the school district boundaries often do not track in New York state) looking much like that map in the historical atlas of “the Holy Roman Empire after the Peace of Westphalia.” I told my then-wife I thought that as a simplifying heuristic we should only consider buying a house in a school district where they taught Latin in the high school, which was maybe a third of them. She looked at me as if I were insane, but (probably only because she liked the area for other independent reasons) we ended up buying a house in such a district.
Aftermath:
1. That two-year-old took five years of Latin before graduating from high school, and is now a junior in college majoring in what her university calls “Classical and Mediterranean Studies.”; and
2. The district’s Latin-instruction program has now completely fallen apart (retirement of long-term teacher, cancer-death-at-tragically-young-age of replacement teacher, ensuing bureaucratic muddle and confusion), which is no skin off the nose of that baby in utero, who is now in 12th grade and taking her sixth year of French.
Moral: Given the right local set of social conventions, pretty much any L2 can in theory be usefully taught to Anglophone kids in ways that will benefit them, but in the actually-existing world we deal with actually-existing social conventions rather than theoretically possible ones, and the highly contingent historical circumstances that make Latin more likely to be taught with a certain rigor and ambition when compared to its other likely competitors can be more easily destroyed than replaced. (I think our school district’s trendy new Mandarin instruction program is still around, but I wouldn’t bet cash money on it being around in ten years.)
Addendum to moral: I am certainly open to the possibility that everything about educational policy in the UK is objectively even stupider than it is in the US, although I don’t want to be an American-triumphalist and assume that too quickly.
Obviously, if we were writing on a blank slate, kids looking for a rigorous education should just be started ASAP on ancient Greek without wasting time on the language of those ancient Italian rubes, thugs, and administratively-competent road-builders, but we are not writing on a blank slate and nothing good will happen if we imagine that we are.
In Austria, apparently by the millions.
Huh. I’ve only seen it attributed to Gibbon, in a form like “all the many religions of the Roman empire were regarded by the common people as equally true, by the philosophers as equally false, and by the magistrates as equally useful”…
By the way, say what you want about the policy initiatives of the Rt. Hon. Gavin Williamson, MP, but how can you not like the following (from his wikibio): “Williamson is a patron of the World Owl Trust and while chief whip kept a Mexican redknee tarantula, known as Cronus, in his parliamentary office,[6] for which he was criticised by parliamentary authorities in November 2016.”
DE, thou shouldst be writing for the Graun!
I’ve only seen it attributed to Gibbon
Ah. Yes. So it is. I should have remembered that. And it is a thoroughly Gibbous sentiment, too.
(He was wrong, though. Bad case of projection …)
Attribitions to Seneca are all over the intertubes: I suppose the nasty man would be gratified to know that he has become an Attribution Magnet.
how can you not like the following
Genuine tarantula-lovers do not leverage their pets to burnish their image in this distasteful way. I’m sorry. A tarantula is not merely a means to an end; it should be loved for itself.
If the idea is that learning Latin (and Greek too) makes one a better person, then we have a clear counterexample in Mr. Boris Johnson himself.
Quite.
It is not clear to me that Mr. Williamson himself sought to draw the attention of the media to his tarantula, rather than just reacting after other, perhaps more sensation-seeking, politicians fed the story to the media. I note also that he himself does not have a particularly posh-on-paper educational resume. Far from being an Old Pederastonian, his story seems to be “Went to to Raincliffe Comprehensive School and Scarborough Sixth Form College; studied social sciences at the University of Bradford.” Dead learned languages do not appear to be the U. of Bradford’s bag, although it will give you a bachelor’s degree in dubious-sounding modern topics like “Software Engineering” or “Virtual and Augmented Reality.”
pretty much any L2 can in theory be usefully taught to Anglophone kids in ways that will benefit them
I very much agree; moreover, the supposed benefits of Latin grammatical study that are not reducible to mere snobbery, such as developing an understanding of how languages can work in general, and how similar thoughts can be expressed very differently in different languages and cultures, would be best served (if competent teachers were available) by picking as exotic a language as possible (Mandarin is not a bad choice on these grounds by any means, though of course Kusaal would be even better. Navajo might be expecting too much, at least of some pupils.)
Mandarin is, in fact, a bad choice for Anglophone kids because the bandwidth necessary to grapple with the writing system and with phonemic tone is by definition bandwidth not available to just deal with “how similar thought can be expressed very differently” etc. What you want on those criteria for Anglophone kids, if cultural considerations are completely discarded, is a non-tonal language conventionally written in the Latin script with radically different syntax than they’re used to. Maybe Bahasa Indonesia?
But koine Greek is still better because it is the non-English language in which the LORD Himself condescended to make Himself known to the Gentiles, innit? He could, in His ineffable providence, have chosen Kusaal, but he didn’t, innit?
If the idea is that learning Latin (and Greek too) makes one a better person, then we have a clear counterexample in Mr. Boris Johnson himself.
Perhaps it did make him a better person. You don’t know just how awful he might have turned out to be otherwise.
a non-tonal language conventionally written in the Latin script with radically different syntax than they’re used to.
Spanish fits the bill pretty nicely then. Conjugating verbs, understanding the subjunctive and dealing with gendered nouns is more radical than Indonesian verb affixes and duration words.
My seventeen-year-old daughter dropped her A. P. Latin class last week. It was only offered online by the district, and scheduling problems meant that the students from her high school that were enrolled got just one collective meeting with the teacher each week—starting at 8 p.m. on Saturday. She and some of her friends decided it was not worth it trying to learn the material under those circumstances.
I would have felt the same way.
He could, in His ineffable providence, have chosen Kusaal, but he didn’t, innit?
He did though. I have his very words in the original language in front of me at this moment …
Not convinced about (even Koine) Greek. I have often felt that the main benefit of teaching Greek to schoolchildren is to show them how very simple Latin is.
The trouble with Spanish (regarded as a means to the end of Developing the Infant Mind, rather than for its own abundant worth, which is undoubtedly a much more sensible way of looking at things) is that it’s SAE, so the differences from English are not nearly as profound, once you get beyond morphology and basic syntax, as with Indonesian. Less to stretch the brain. Even Latin is much less like English than Spanish is.
I take JWB’s point about bandwidth, though. Obviously the best compromise is Welsh. After all, one could present it in Pinyin, to avoid issues with the writing system.
Re “how very simple Latin”: well maybe the moral of the story is you need a boringly simple language if you’re gonna be administratively-competent road-builders, innit?
Re the rest of D.E.’s most recent comment, the momentary Babel-reversing flash of the first Pentecost confirms that He *could* have chosen any language, but that’s not the same thing, innit. He chose first, in His inscrutable providence, some weird-beard Semitic language that no one not born to it would ever learn unless they were a fanatic. Then he adjusted his strategy by the obvious choice of shifting to the lingua franca for the portion of the world in which speakers of the aforementioned weird-beard obscure language were at the time situated. No doubt He knew that what was conveyed in that tongue could in the fullness of time be translated in turn into Kusaal as well as into each and every language spoken anywhere in Papua New Guinea where the locals didn’t go hide in the woods when the SIL folks showed up. But that’s a subsequent step in the narrative.
As to Vanya’s point, even bracketing the issue of whether or not (standard) Spanish has enough *distance* from (standard) English given its SAE-ness to give the sort of useful perspective I’m talking about, we are stuck with the problem that for contingent historical reasons Spanish is the default “foreign language” taught to L1 Anglophones in early-21st-century American high schools, which necessarily means (for contingent but unsurprising political and sociological reasons) that it is typically taught in an undemanding and unrigorous sort of way, where the convoy moves at the speed of the slowest ship and with much attention to alleged practical benefits. The number of Spanish-taking students’ parents who think “you’ll be able to talk to the cleaning lady!” inevitably outnumber those who think “you’ll be able understand the nuances in Lorca that are lost in translation!”
He could, in His ineffable providence, have chosen Kusaal
Well, of course not. That would have been anachronistic. He chose Proto-Western-Oti-Volta-Buli-Konni. I am confident that the manuscript evidence from Qumran will turn up Real Soon Now (though the vowelless script is not a good fit for the language, which is bound to lead to some difficulties of interpretation. But I am ready for the challenge.)
Tarantula-ranching is not difficult, a good exercise in responsibility for 10-12 year-olds. In the late summer when the ground gets cracked and dry, look for what might be mouse or vole-holes; three or four inches down you’ll often find silky bags about the size of a golf ball or testicle. Keep them cool and dry in a closed glass jar; eventually the membrane will become thinner and more transparent, full of pale teeming youngsters about the size of match-heads. Show them to your mother before they begin to eat each other, and when she tells you to get rid of them, release them in the tall grass (if there is any). If there is, you can soon sit back in cool evenings and watch that grass rustle as the grown-ups prowl.
Not being ever taught Latin, I would still conjecture that Latin instruction consists mainly of studying written texts. This is alright if the pedagogical purpose is to teach the younglings that “books can talk” and some skills in forensic examination of artefacts. This is in addition to obvious reason that Latin can have some intrinsic value, of course. As for the general linguistic skills, learning Latin is positively detrimental because it shows that language exists primarily in a written form and that spoken language is just a rough and inferior sketch. Which, to use a demotic English expression, is bollocks. The best language instruction perpetrated for the purpose of intellectual development should be based on a spoken language, whatever one chooses.
I’m reminded of Thatcher’s comments […] Anathema!
Wasn’t it Voltaire’s point of view as well?
In Serbia, about 1/3 of all high school students go to a ‘gymnasium’ type school, where Latin is compulsory for either one or two years (depending on whether the student opts for the Sciences track or Humanities track).
“Is there a good reason why you are not also championing the teaching of Old, Middle and late medieval English – with Norman French thrown in?”
He says this as if it is self-evidently ridiculous, but one semester for an annotated Beowulf and another for Chaucer would have appealed to the teen version of me. Replace the Norman French with an introductory Sanskrit course, and I’d be in heaven.
watch that grass rustle as the grown-ups prowl.
That’s great, jack, a blog comment as scary story ! Please do more whenever you have the time. All the bushy-tailed phonemic speculation here gets me down.
Hmm, what is it that’s different about a small number of very old, very expensive, very exclusive schools that makes their pupils disproportionately likely to get into Oxbridge and go on to become government ministers, high court judges and hedge fund managers?
Oh I know, it’s the Latin!
Elamite is specifically mentioned.
Noun conjugation has divine sanction.
@do
“L’idée la plus utile aux tyrans est celle de Dieu.”
Stendhal, le Rouge et le Noir, XXXVII
Voltaire has one about people being like cattle , but this one seems closer to the one attributed wrongly to Seneca.
He says this as if it is self-evidently ridiculous
I didn’t get that sense at all.
One potentially relevant quotation attributed to Voltaire (I have not fact-checked the attribution but you can find it in academic-press books where one hopes the author and editors were doing more than uncritically cutting-and-pasting internet memes …) goes something like “I want my attorney, my tailor, my valets and even my wife to believe in God, and I fancy that then I’ll be robbed and cuckolded less.”
Wikiquote asserts that “”There is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night” is misattributed to Voltaire, but that’s a sufficiently different phrasing of the same underlying idea that it doesn’t IMHO debunk the prior quote. One online translation of the Philosophical Dictionary has “I shall always ask you if, when you have lent your money to someone in your society, you want neither your debtor, nor your attorney, nor your judge, to believe in God,” which also manifests the same underlying idea, although it seems entirely plausible that over the course of his entire writings he might have made the same underlying point in a variety of different phrasings. Perhaps there’s an interesting compare-and-contrast to be made between this idea and that expressed in R.W. Emerson’s “the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”
To DE’s point, SAE or not I find Spanish more “mind bending” than Bahasa Indonesian, which I could read fairly fluently within a month. Don’t forget that English doesn’t share all SAE features. Monolingual Americans with limited exposure to foreign languages find concepts like gendered nouns, dative external possessors and verbs that conjugate to indicate person pretty weird. Granted that Bahasa would provide a lot of exposure to Sanskrit roots, which is a good thing. I am definitely on board with Welsh, but after more thought it seems to me the language that best fits Mr Brewer’s requirements is actually Turkish.
I should also note that this “Christianity is functional because it reduces the crime rate” notion is directly contrary to the thoughtful concerns expressed by King Herod (as transcribed by W.H. Auden) about the significant moral hazard the Christian message of radical forgiveness would create for civilized society:
Citations/VOLTAIRE:
The script in which Kemalist Turkish is written deviates slightly from the “pure” ASCII-without-diacriticals shared by e.g. English and Bahasa Indonesia, but I am open to the idea that some small-but-manageable variation in the script would be a feature rather than a bug for my proposal. I suppose my own historical dislike for Kemalist Turkish arising from the brutal circumstances of its creation is neither here nor there now that there have been enough generations of native-speakers for whom it seems a natural and normal language.
Modern standard Uzbek could be an option – it uses far fewer diacritics than the other Turkic languages. On the other hand, a Turkic language with no vowel harmony just seems like a crime.
On the other hand, a Turkic language with no vowel harmony just seems like a crime.
Seconded. How about Hungarian? Sure, it’s got diacritics, but one quickly gets used to them, and the grammar is fun.
The Latin script for Uzbek may or may not be getting reformed in the near future to add more diacritics, sez the internet, so we may need to wait for the situation to stabilize. (Plus there are apparently plenty of folks who are fully literate in Uzbek-in-Cyrillic who are not particularly enamored of the government’s attempt to change script, which is another potential source of future instability if the political winds shift.)
But to shift continents, there’s a candidate whose orthography uses only a single diacritical mark, albeit sufficiently eccentrically that not all internet-friendly fonts can keep up with it. But widespread adoption of the tongue as a school-taught L2 could change that. Indeed, perhaps we could cover all bases by making it normative for Anglophone students to study both Latin AND Guarani as school-learned L2’s? Yes, yes, I know it sounds like a Jesuit plot …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guarani_alphabet
Choosing Urdu or Bengali as the medium of instruction for boarding schools would be a nice gesture… (why no one is discussing it, the lnaguage of instruction?:()
All the handwritten Uzbek in a documentary I watched recently was in Cyrillic. The Cyrillic orthography is much better designed than the current ASCII one.
Best Jesuit plot ever. Sign me up.
For best outcomes, the language of instruction should be the pupils’ native language as far as possible.
Hungarian and Turkish also make polysynthesis seem less exotic.
Jesuits give good plot.
BTW, some updates on the underlying news story Rosen’s letter was reacting to.
1. Mr. Williamson is no longer Education Secretary, having lost that post in a mid-September reshuffle of the UK cabinet by the Prime Minister. The Latin-promotion concept does not seem to be listed among the various alleged gaffes and missteps that may have led to this outcome.
2. In an excellent The Way We Live Now detail, Mr. Williamson reacted to his unsought return to the status of ordinary back-bencher MP by unfollowing the Prime Minister’s Instagram account.
3. Who knows if the new Education Secretary (Nadhim Zahawi, who was educated in the UK from the age of 9 after his parents found Iraq uncongenial and appears to have gone to posher schools than Mr. Williamson did) will continue the Latin initiative, but it was rather modest – 4 million quid to add Latin instruction in 40 state schools (out of a total universe of what I assume is thousands) for a four-year trial period. Not sure how many new students are going to be added to the pool of Latin-learners on a budget of 25 thousand quid per school per year.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/gavin-williamson-latin-department-for-education-england-b948533.html
“For best outcomes, the language of instruction should be the pupils’ native language as far as possible.”
Quite many in Indian educated class study in boarding schools where it is English since the first grade.
Jesuits
Guarani is known in several forms, one is what everyone speaks, then there are some native tribes, and then there is Jesuit literary Guarani. It is hardly in use since 18th century when Jesuits were expelled. Before that Jesuits controlled a very large part of land, and kept numerous locals in relative isolation from people from Europeanized farms and settlements. Accordingly, there existed at least three speech communities: missions, tribes and settlements. In missions they developed a literary form too. Generally Jesuits are seen as a good force, in that they prevented exploitation.
Paraguay is also funny in that, when Europeans came, there were not many of them. Distinguishing people born in Spain from people born in colonies and people with pure blood from people with n shares of this and m shares of that apparently was inconvenient. For this or for some other reason (I think, it was not too convenient for anyone… ) they just did not do that:-/
All that grammar in Latin doesn’t seem to be very useful for much else. There’s plenty of grammar in modern languages if you want that. But what I think could be very useful is a course that teaches Greek and Latin vocabulary as it pertains to word formation in English. I’m imagining perhaps a one-year course with an option for another year of advanced study.
@drasvi
English in India and the coloniser language in some African countries is the obvious choice for medium of instruction in schools for political, religious and practical, not only historical reasons. Even for a country like Northern Ireland or Belgium people feel strongly about this and there is always a fuss when someone tries to change the law.
That is actually the, or a, native language for many in the Indian educated class…
The usual story about Voltaire and religion was that he felt personal belief was extremely important and played a key role in developing a society’s moral compass. However, his personal beliefs were close to deism, in that he believed that prayers were not answered, except by happenstance—and so the virtuous often suffered and the wicked sometimes prospered. He was also very much opposed to large-scale organized religion; faith should be a private thing, something one shared only with one’s intimates, and above all, religion should be kept out of politics. (I think this becomes plot point in Updike’s “The Christian Roommates.”)
The opposite belief—that political religion was important and played a valuable key role in pacifying the populace—is traditionally associated with Voltaire’s contemporary Montesquieu. Today, this aspect of Montesquieu’s philosophy is often attributed more to motivated reasoning than anything else. Personally, he might have been an outright atheist, but Montesquieu was an important aristocrat, and aristocrats controlled the churches in France. He inherited a barony and, with it, presidency of the parlement of Bordeaux when he was in his 20s, and the philosophy he developed was one of limited and divided government, with a great deal of power devolved to oligarchic institutions like the parlements and the Catholic hierarchy.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that “For Voltaire, those equipped to understand their own reason could find the proper course of free action themselves. But since many were incapable of such self-knowledge and self-control, religion, he claimed, was a necessary guarantor of social order.” I don’t know what is the basis for this statement.
I’ve recently encountered an interesting view that the Jesuits (whose order was banned for quite some time everywhere except in the Russian empire) became Russified during their exile to Russia, absorbed many of the views common to the Russian government elite and after the Restoration, the Jesuits went to instill these very Russian traditionalist views into more enlightened Catholics in Europe and elsewhere.
https://www.sjupress.com/pictures/79.jpg?v=1574788991
I guess if the Second Cold War continues long enough, we’ll get eventually Russia blamed for the Spanish Inquisition too.
That is actually the, or a, native language for many in the Indian educated class…
Yes, exactly. My evil plan is ☯. Two countries swap acrolects.
The sentence that resonated most with me was this: “… the Latin we read [in schools] is the highly rarefied, standardised language of a tiny educated elite.”
I did Latin at GCE O level in the 1960s because it was one of many Oxbridge entrance requirements in those days. I passed the exam but detested the subject as taught in school because I could not imagine ordinary people speaking the language of the classical literary texts with their complex patterns of sentence construction.
Having got into university to do a history degree, I encountered medieval Latin (essentially church Latin) as part of the foundation course and found it perfectly accessible because of its ‘natural’ patterns of word order and sentence construction.
‘natural’ patterns of word order and sentence construction
Mam tʋm bɛdegʋ gaad ban tʋm si’em la.
I work much [and] pass they-that work somehow the.
Today, this aspect of Montesquieu’s philosophy is often attributed more to motivated reasoning than anything else.
How I wish all reasoning were motivated! Often during work I am confronted by unmotivated reasoning churned out by people arguing against me out of sheer orneriness [which in my books is a disposition or character flaw, not a motive].
Of course it’s possible that “interested reasoning” was meant, as they said in the 19C in the old country. Again I would demur: I try to limit my reasoning uptake to the interesting kind.
“Motivated reasoning is a phenomenon […] that uses emotionally biased reasoning to produce justifications or make decisions that are most desired rather than those that accurately reflect the evidence.”
So that really is a paid-up, received expression in Anglophone reasoning circles. I figgered as much, but a little fun never hurt.
And I have brought to the world’s attention the annoying prevalence of unmotivated reasoning.
Are there any prominent political philosophers whose ideas cannot be characterized without too much effort as tending to promote their own self-interest (actual or self-perceived)? What would make Montesquieu an outlier in this regard?
Cleisthenes? The Marquis de Sade (on political, if not social, issues)? Probably Jeremy Bentham?
No one mentioned Jesus or the ideological founders of self-castrating sects.
The distinguishing feature of motivated reasoning is not that it tends to promote one’s self-interest (which is pretty much universal except among the saints) but that it uses emotionally biased reasoning and ignores evidence. The point of, say, Socrates’ dialogues/inquisitions (to take an obvious example) was to get rid of his interlocutors’ emotionally biased reasoning.
Interesting: the OED, s.v. amotivational, has the following citation:
That’s the only occurrence of “motivated reasoning” in the dictionary; I trust they’re planning to add a relevant entry.
All this talk of motivated reasoning for some reason made me think of J K Galbraith’s
@maidhc “what I think could be very useful is a course that teaches Greek and Latin vocabulary as it pertains to word formation in English. I’m imagining perhaps a one-year course with an option for another year of advanced study.”
With the help of this 265-page book, you can accomplish your goal without a course:
Grow your vocabulary : by learning the roots of English words
Author: Robert Schleifer
Publisher: New York : Random House, ©1995.
Would any school dare adapt Reginald Foster’s Latin text? They should.
(Maybe on the side.)
‘natural’ patterns of word order and sentence construction
My inverted commas were there for a reason!
Are there any prominent political philosophers whose ideas cannot be characterized without too much effort as tending to promote their own self-interest (actual or self-perceived)?
I guess, you have to define “self-interest” very broadly to push most philosophers into this category. I mean, Hegel presumably wanted to be a professor in Berlin that’s why he promoted Prussia as the embodiment of the absolute idea (at least that’s what I remember from my history of philosophy course), but it’s not like it was the main thrust of his teachings. He didn’t quite said that university professors of philosophy should rule the world or something. Ditto, I don’t see what Marx or Smith or Weber or Locke standed to gain personally from their views.
WP in the article Hyperbaton says It has been called “perhaps the most distinctively alien feature of Latin word order.”, with a reference to a book Latin Word Order: Structured Meaning and Information. Sounds a bit like what John said.
Latin word order is, for one thing, something that linguists do not understand. DE can listen to Mam tʋm bɛdegʋ gaad ban tʋm si’em la, he has the intonation, context and the speaker to ask questions at his disposal. Also, our goal is to feel Latin as classical authors felt it. I did not feel the need to use English articles until I began to communicate in it, even though I already was a very fluent reader.
Latin word order is, for one thing, something that linguists do not understand.
Oh, pshaw. Two hundred dense pages in Pinkster’s Oxford Latin Syntax will clear it all up for you. Maybe.
My impression is based on (oral) complaints of others and maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_word_order#Theoretical_approaches rather than personal experience.
I do not understand what do they mean by this or that order, but… there are too many things I do not udnerstand about Latin:) Honestly, it is not that any of modern langauges is “completely” described.
From the article: J.G.F. Powell, in his review of Spevak’s book, commented that “nobody has yet succeeded in unifying the insights of all the different scholarly approaches to the fascinating and peculiar problem of Latin word order”.
Following the theories of generative grammar, Devine and Stephens assume that deviations from that basic unmarked order are made to put emphasis on different elements.
“Emphasis” usually means “I do not know what it is, some factor unaccounted for by our theory, likely pragmatics”. A fig-leaf word.
A fig-leaf word
Maybe for a certain sort of palaeoChomskyite; after all, it’s difficult to give a sensible account of things like emphasis if your whole idea is that syntax can be most usefully studied separately from meaning. But I’ve come across papers even by cult members which deal with these issues, although it’s often difficult to get at the actual content buried beneath the customary opaque formalism.*
Meanwhile, in the world of real descriptive linguistics, a great deal of work has been done on questions of focus, emphasis and the like. It is indeed a difficult area, in a good part for the very reasons you adduced above; and even if you do have context and can interrogate the actual speaker viva voce. the investigation tends to be dogged by Heisenberg problems: just knowing the phenomenon is being observed will change the speaker’s construction. And speakers usually can’t actually tell you directly why they have put things in a particular way and not another (but there is nothing specific to emphasis or focus about that.)
Moreover, there is no single accepted theory of focus (say), and the phenomena vary from language to language as much as anything else does.
However, to say that we are far from a full understanding of such matters is by no means the same as saying that we don’t know anything of value at all.
Modern grammars of the Mouton Grammar Library sort pretty much always have a chapter or so dedicated to focus and emphasis. CGEL has loads of stuff on focus and emphasis in English.
* Not a problem limited to Chomskyite works, incidentally, as anyone can tell you who has had the misfortune to try to get anything useful out of a grammar written by an adherent of Tagmemics or Stratificational Grammar. Ugh …
Re Latin word order etc: Very intelligent people have been known to wax lyrical about the Latin period. For a long time I’ve had this nagging feeling that there was something peculiarly psychotic about it though.
People do indeed wax lyrical/psychotic about Latin in a way I find hard to grasp. I mean, Latin’s a perfectly fine language, I have nothing against it, but it’s just another language except that it happened to give rise to a bunch of languages that have been important for a long time in Europe. And those people tend to worship Virgil and Horace rather than Catullus and Propertius. Imperialists, the lot of them.
And those people tend to worship Virgil and Horace rather than Catullus and Propertius
I think that that is more to do with whether one values form over content in poetry or vice versa, though of course you can only appreciate form properly if you have a pretty thorough grip on the detail of the language. Contemporary Latin speakers valued a poet like Horace in a way which is often a little difficult to follow, partly because they valued form for itself more than we do and partly because as L1 speakers they were in a better position to appreciate that aspect of his poetry. Horace expresses fairly banal ideas, masterfully*; Lucretius (my own favourite Latin poet) is technically much less accomplished, but (of course) much more interesting intellectually. (I also find him much easier to engage with emotionally. I don’t like Horace as a personality.)
* Reminds my of someone’s comment on Maud, that the opening lines were “perversely memorable.” Tennyson is at the Horatian end of this scale. As Auden said, he “had the finest ear of any English poet” but was also “undoubtedly the stupidest.” Which is unfair, but you do know what he meant. Our Victorian forebears appreciated Horace more than we do for similar reasons to the fact that they also appreciated Tennyson more than we do. They were not wrong; they were just appreciating different things from us.
Well, if you insist on being fair…
Poetry and literature do not play a comparable role in other langauge courses.
Chwarae teg iddyn nhw …
Poetry and literature do not play a comparable role in other language courses
They certainly used to play a major role in French and German A-levels* in the distant days when I was at school; all the more so at university level, of course.
Given that there is no call in these Latter Days of the Law for conversational Latin, it seems pretty inevitable that poetry and literature will bulk large in the syllabus. There are many good reasons for studying mediaeval Latin, of course, other than the literary, but I can see why that would be difficult at school level.
* Exams taken after the final two years of high school, by eighteen-year-olds or thereabouts.
They were not wrong; they were just appreciating different things from us.
They also appreciated being held in esteem for appreciating something difficult to learn and appreciate. They wanted to be distinguished, not just different. In that respect we are not different from them. Only the things we appreciate are different.
One Peter Hamilton, writing about the theories of Talcott Parsons, says: “There are several types of sanctions : esteem , approval , acceptance , and response.” Dunno that I want to go all out on that depth of discrimination. Luhmann boiled Parsons down to a few useful distinctions.
People now don’t want to be distinguished, they want to be popular. There’s a difference.
I’m talking about everyday intellectuals, not Britney Spears. I myself don’t want to be popular. I would prefer being respected and feared.
I’ve achieved that, by accident rather than by scheming, in a small corner of IT. The crowd-pleasers hate me, and I despise them – just as it should be.
I think Latinate snobs mostly feel good among Latinate snobs. They do not need illiterate people to sing hymns to their erudition, they need them to make clothes, and even this job they happily outsource to Bangladesh.
Exactly.
While even nowadays there may be a few people who are, or affect to be, snobbish about knowing Latin (the quintessentially fraudulent Boris Johnson has part of this in his concocted persona, as does the ineffable Rees-Mogg), I would think that they are now greatly outnumbered by those who genuinely appreciate the language and its literature, whether difficult or easy. Mary Beard is much more representative of UK Real Existing Public Latinity.
My own Latin is Above Average; I have never, ever, had the impression in the UK that anyone regards this as anything but a charming (or irritating) personal quirk. Nobody cares. (Which is good; valuing Latin for its supposed cachet is like valuing Christianity modo Thatcheriano as tool of social control, or keeping tarantulas to make yourself appear formidable instead of because you just think they’re cool. Which is where we came in …)
[The fact that I can cope in French, on the other hand, routinely attracts gobsmacked wonder and admiration. I despair of my increasingly insular fellow-countrymen …]
I would prefer being respected and feared.
Oderint, dum metuant, as we say when not trying to be impressive in any way at all.
I once as a trainee went to the consultant who had to approve our annual leave, on an occasion when (for good reason) I was slightly under the six-week deadline for application. He said (after approving my application): “I’m getting tired of these late leave applications. I’m going to start turning them down; but at random, so as to be feared.”
Electronic forms are peculiar.
Normally early birds send their applications in 00:01, others do it in 1 or 2 or 3 a.m. Some keep correcting their applications all night long. The assumption is that the person who will be processing the applications is sleeping anyway, and the organization is interesting in having more applicants anyway.
But then in 00:00 the site ceases to accept applications and several very large and very international projects go to shit:)
So that’s what they see in the Queen! ^_^
That’s probably it. Does Charles speak French? Much may hinge on the answer to this question …
More importantly, does he speak Welsh?
Alas, we just don’t know.
He does speak Plant.
Now, I think I’ve got a handle on this. You either learn Latin and join the enlightened classes who do not need religion or you remain Christian. Who knew that Latin was a ticket out of Christianity?
@D.O. You’re picking up on how the Jesuit plot works …
In 1980 or so, when he officially became Prince of Wales or something along those lines, he gave a speech in Welsh that, in any case, did not sound like English.
Don’t they all speak their mother tongue – German?
[ducks for cover]
Alpha Draconian, I heard. Still, they are both very guttural languages, the pair of them.
it’s got diacritics
And lots and lots of sandhi to boot, like barátság [ˈbɒraːt͡ʃːaːɡ]. (See Part III of The Phonology of Hungarian or The Phonotactics of Hungarian.)
Latin, is it? Greek? Ha!
“Bloody thou art; bloody will be thy end” —Shakespeare in Richard III, 4.4, 198.
“Object there was none. Passion there was none.” — Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”
“The helmsman steered, the ship moved on; / Yet never a breeze up blew” — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
“For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, seem here no painful inch to gain” — Arthur Hugh Clough, “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth”
“Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.” — Wolcott Gibbs’s 1936 parody of Time
magazine.
only a single diacritical mark
Two, eh? Tilde for nasalization (or circumflex as a backup), acute for stress.
Given that there is no call in these Latter Days of the Law for conversational Latin, it seems pretty inevitable that poetry and literature will bulk large in the syllabus
In some countries there has been a shift from literary Persian to conversational Farsi (why “Farsi” is a question) … right before the Revolution.
drasvi: Normally early birds send their applications in 00:01, others do it in 1 or 2 or 3 a.m. Some keep correcting their applications all night long. The assumption is that the person who will be processing the applications is sleeping anyway, and the organization is interesting in having more applicants anyway.
But then in 00:00 the site ceases to accept applications and several very large and very international projects go to shit:)
My stepson spent several days working up a job application that had an electronic deadline, but he missed it by 20 minutes and it wouldn’t take his application.
However I am convinced of two things:
He didn’t really want the job and so unconsciously sabotaged his application.
The job ad (it was a government job) was targeted to a particular person who had already been selected to get the job, but because of regulations it had to be publicly advertised. So even if he had his application in on time, they probably would have come up with some other reason not to choose him.
But if he really wanted to work in that field, applying would have brought his qualifications to the attention of the department, which might have found a place for him later on. But he dropped the whole thing right away, so I think he didn’t really want to work in that field anyway.
The job ad (it was a government job) was targeted to a particular person who had already been selected to get the job, but because of regulations it had to be publicly advertised.
Back in the day Princeton Town Topics (a weekly supermarket rag sheet) would occasionally run advertisements for tenured math jobs at fashionable places like UC Santa Cruz (go banana slugs!), I suppose for just that reason.
In 1980 or so, when he officially became Prince of Wales or something along those lines, he gave a speech in Welsh that, in any case, did not sound like English.
According to
an impeccably reliable historical sourcethe Netflix show “The Crown”, he took Welsh lessons to write that speech. I assume this information can be verified, but it’s bed time for me.For the benefit of DE: Nietzsche dismissed Seneca’s writings as “unbearably sage wishy-washy”.
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Friedrich Nietzsche verachtete Seneca, dem er unterstellte, der philosophische Inhalt sei bei ihm sekundär gegenüber der pointierten Formulierung, weshalb er seine Schriften in der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft als „unausstehlich weises Larifari“ abtat.[180]
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Oh, it’s not “wishy-washy”. It suggests a circus.
Langenscheidt suggests “rubbish, nonsense.”
I think Stu wanted to preserve the nonsense rhyme in Larifari, so maybe “fiddle-faddle”?
He does Stoic-lite kitsch with added hypocrisy. Guaranteed to get on Nietzsche’s wick.
(His plays are merely tasteless and unstageable.)
so maybe “fiddle-faddle”?
Works for me.
Langenscheidt suggests “rubbish, nonsense.”
It’s more like “empty talk”, so not so much nonsensical, but a low content to verbiage ratio. It can also mean a lack of commitment or purposeful action, which is what Stu probably wanted to express by “wishy-washy”.
The cur foretells the knell of parting day,
The loafing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The wise man homeward plods; I only stay
To fiddle-faddle in a minor key.
—Ambrose Bierce
A species of a distant dog bark.