For whatever it’s worth, I had second thoughts about my “joke” or whatever you want to call it, and went back in to try to remove it before anyone else had posted any more responses, but I couldn’t find any way to remove it. Afterwards, I likewise hoped it would remain buried, but no such luck.
As for generations, I will clarify: I was a Classics major at the Univ. of Arizona from 1974-1978 but I focused on Greek, not Latin. I had taken Latin and French in high school and my favorite thing in life is studying languages, so I don’t recall ever having a problem learning/understanding grammatical terminology. But I went back to school in my mid-forties to work on a Master’s degree in Chinese, which, somewhat to my surprise, I discovered is mostly about learning to read Classical Chinese which is considerably different from modern Chinese, so I was somewhat ahead of the game compared to the other students who had never studied a “dead” language. I was a TA during two semesters (2004-5) and I observed that the 18-22 year olds taking first year Classical Chinese were somewhat mystified at times when/if I or the professor teaching the class would use grammatical terminology like “relative clauses”. So, I guess by “this generation” I meant here in the 21st century.
When I was in college, all courses had a part in their presentation called “prerequisites”, and they were mandatory to have mastered before starting, they were not studied in the course. They were basic to be able to advance. The study of Latin requires many, many prerequisites, and much, much time.
Generational, golden age? I think so, language education in all parts of the world has become a kind of “fast food”, and I think that everything depends on where and with whom you study, and above all, who studies. Latin in 90 days, playing an instrument is 30 days? What a nonsense and waste of time! I don’t think that a Latin teacher should waste time teaching English or Spanish grammar, etc. it is something that the student must already know beforehand. Perhaps the most appropriate, and I think that if it is important, to clarify things and clear up doubts, beyond that, no.
I also have many doubts when I read that someone is studying Latin with a certain book or method and is “bored”. The pleasure is in learning, in loving what is studied. To learn a stringed musical instrument, for example, you have to get calluses on your fingers before you can play the piece of music you love. And yes, it’s true, Latin teachers don’t die, they just decline.
Dave,
For what it’s worth, I took the joke for what it was and nothing more, well maybe a little more: You’re just expressing the enormous frustration we all feel when trying to explain a grammatical concept to someone who’s never learned the lingo. Just like Seneca and Wibbleypants, my introduction to grammar and syntax came from studying another language, in my case Modern Greek. My wife, who is a native Greek speaker, would be hard-pressed to name all the tenses and I consistently beat her at spelling duels (especially when we had the polytonic system), but she immediately recognises any mistake I might make, and yes, even after 60 years of speaking Greek, I still make mistakes.
To tell you the truth, for some reason I can’t remember there being a specific part of English class that dealt with just Grammar. I remember in high school reading, analysing and writing and in college taking the obligatory English Composition classes. I think for a native speaker of English, most of his instruction in Grammar comes in, well, grammar school (couldn’t resist- that’s what we used to call elementary school). As for relative clauses, conditionals, indirect speech, complex sentences-those concepts and constructions I learnt from Latin.
No need for apologies! I was being over serious. The only point I really wanted to make is that grammatical knowledge is probably linked to educational opportunity rather than particular generations. Its difficult to generalise of course.
I think the best way to understand relative clauses is the follow:
Marcus est puer qui cum Iulia ludit
“qui cum iulia ludit” is of course a relative clause, it tells you something about the antecedent and, above all, if you isolate the relative clause and change the relative pronoun to the antecedent the clause makes total sense:
“Marcus cum iulia ludit” I think its a good criterion to recognize this construction, and this allows to understand a sentence like this:
Interrogatur Marcum, cuius pater ei vehementer irascitur.
cuius it really means Marci, then it´s easy to understand why relative pronoun sometimes has a different inflexion.
Sometimes linguistic definitions are ambiguous, and functional criteria make things distinguishable and recognisable.
