Most of the Latin we read is in a very artificial literary language, which the Romans themselves had to learn in school As I understand it, the difference between literary Latin and ordinary conversational Latin was much wider than that between literary English and ordinary conversational English.
The differences between written and spoken Latin can be rather varied, but the variations only increase as you get closer and closer to our point in time. The language itself is not artificial - its the style of the language. There are differences, whether they seem apparent to us, between literary English and conversation English. There are even differences of style in literary English (some of which are rather difficult to understand even for educated people). We know for a fact that, regardless of the style, it was understood by the Romans and we know many works, some surviving but many lost, were recited in public. And regardless, we do possess some written forms of Latin that are rather close to the more colloquial forms of the language at the time (depending on the actual time period). Latin literature itself varies considerably, and one can spend years learning Ciceronian Latin and have to learn a completely new set of ideas for reading Plautus’s plays, which are considerably more in Latin with the spoken Latin of his day.
I’m not saying the grammar-translation method is ideal and should be followed slavishly, but there is a place for it. At the very least, if you’re going to produce Latin or Greek you need to have some understanding of grammatical terms to discuss where you’ve gone wrong. And you will go wrong. If your teacher just says this should be sperarent not speraverunt without being able to say why that doesn’t help you in similar sentences. I have corrected many drafts from ‘suggest you to apply’ to ‘suggest you apply’, but until I tell my client that we don’t use the to form of the infinitive with suggest, they generally keep on doing it.
Grammar does have its place, but not in the forefront. You do not learn to read a language by studying its grammar. You do not learn to write a language by studying its grammar. Grammar is nothing more than a set of observations about the language - nothing more and nothing less. And those “observations” hold true only to an extent. Exceptions are galore.
The point I have been trying to make is that by learning grammar and translating, you aren’t doing any reading at all. By translating we are doing nothing more than rendering one language within another - in this case either Latin or Greek into English. Languages by their nature are not entirely compatiable with one another. Something is always lost when one translates. The only understanding involved in translation comes from the English that is created. Therefore, you aren’t understanding the Latin or the Greek. You are looking at the original words, considering the sentence in pieces and not at all as it is presented to you. You pick out one word and translate it either as many examples have shown or as the dictionary has told you, and then you continue to do the same thing over and over again until you have every word picked out. Then, when it is all over, you combine what you have translated into one big mesh of an English sentence and then, only then, do you attempt to make sense of it. The only understanding you are achieving is in English and in terms of artificial “rules” of Latin or Greek grammar.
I have seen the fruits of years of nothing but Grammar study. I had a teacher in Latin unable to translate the first sentence of a letter of Cicero. The translation she eventually came up with after several minutes was, I feel, not in the same intention or feeling that Cicero meant.
The one reason anyone should ever desire to read Latin or Greek is for its literature, yet if all you are doing is translating from the original language to English, why bother learning at all? There are several classes and books on the classics “in translation.” If all I wanted to do was spend years learning Greek so that I might translate Plato’s The Republic, it would be better to just go out and buy a translation of the Republic from a bookstore, for doing the translation myself will in the end achieve very little. Knowing Greek grammar, piece by piece, won’t help me understand the language any better than reading an accepted translation of it.
Grammar is something to look back upon once you have already made the journey, so to speak.
I will say this in ending, however. It always gladens me to see people willing to learn and understand a subject such as Latin or Greek. They are truly treasures worth knowing, and my one hope is that people wishing to understand the Aenied, for example, as it was meant to be understood would seek to learn Latin as it is.
