Long blog entry, with lots of links, but quite interesting. I’d like to get any feedback from our forum’s leading luminaries, a certain Michael in particular, if you have time to read it.
Hi, many thanks for the link. Lots of interesting links and author references in there.
The article does not, however, seem to engage very much with the first main point at issue: the author raises Mary Beard’s acknowledgement that sight-reading complex Latin is hard, and then goes on at length about things other than sight-reading complex Latin (giving oral lectures, having conversations, writing in Latin and “high-end” spoken Latin, etc.). Next the author asserts that medievalists and renaissance scholars develop good reading proficiency in Latin (without however allowing any inference that they can do better with the complex parts of the texts that Mary was talking about).
The only part which seems to really engage with the point at issue seems to concede Mary’s point: reading complex parts of Latin history, says the author, can be “mystifying at times” – isn’t that what Mary was saying?
What would be really great to hear/see is evidence that these living language practices help with the sight-reading of complex texts. I’m definitely not sceptical about this, and even open to the idea – what I’ve love to see is some actual support for it. I don’t assume that if someone can fluently speak a language, we can automatically infer that they can also sight-read (and properly understand) complex texts (that’s definitely not the case with modern languages!). Reginald Foster was someone who could apparently speak Latin fluently early on, but it took 20 years for him to be able to sight-read “almost” anything: https://livingchurch.org/2021/01/07/learning-latin-from-fr-reginald-foster/. One does not automatically produce the other. Also, I wonder whether the “almost” anything excluded the hard bits that Mary was talking about…
However individual testimonies aren’t very solid support for the counter-claim either. It would be great to see e.g. studies (maybe they already exist? Have people tested this with unseens I wonder?) for how, and under what conditions, the skills championed by the author can help one sight-read complex texts.
Cheers, Chad
Like Chad, I think the post doesn’t always make as strong a case as it could, but overall, I’m very sympathetic to this kind of reflexions. Latin teaching in general is so far down the road of “Latin is different, there’s no way you can read it with ease” that anything trying to change that is welcome.
You don’t have to read many posts on various Latin online forums to see that the idea of reading Latin is seen by many either as a very elusive goal, or conflated with (painfully) writing down a poor translation.
Just the other day, I was reading an interview in which long-time Latin readers were discussing Hale’s The Art of Reading Latin. One (maybe both) of them said things like “I tried reading a bit of Cicero using Hale’s method and it was so painful. I had to force myself not to hunt for the verb first, etc.”.
This jumped at me for two reasons:
- in what world is doing what Hale advises (basically reading the Latin text in the order it was written) a “method”? Isn’t this just what “reading” means? Do we see people proudly saying “I read German using Hale’s method instead of hunting the verb first”?
- it is apparently possible to “read” Latin for years, running to and fro inside each sentence, without thinking there’s another way of doing things.
This, to me, is the biggest problem Latin teaching has: it is setting up students to fail right from the start, “Don’t even try reading the Latin as Latin, it’s impossible anyway”.
Breaking up this mindset is important if we want people to be able to read Latin. Then come the debates about which method is best suited, etc., but I really do think that emphasizing that Latin is a language you can read is first and foremost.
The rest of your post makes good points, but I wanted to address this one. I was fortunate to have excellent teachers all the way through grad school, who never said anything remotely like this, but especially my high school Latin teacher (Mrs. Eakin, the best HS Latin teacher in the known universe), and my undergrad profs. They simply assumed it was possible to master, and taught us accordingly. Yes the method was largely grammar-translation, but it was clear that they themselves understood the text on the level we are talking about, and that included Livy and Thucydides. Not knowing what we were doing was impossible (though we surely recognized it as difficult at times) we largely succeeded.
I knew this sentence would come back to bite me 
I was in a hurry and couldn’t find a suitable way of making it sound less universal. Maybe something like “This, to me, is the biggest problem Latin teaching often has (…)”. Sorry for this.
But apart from this (important!) nuance, I think the point still stands. There are too many people asking what Latin author they should “translate” next, or people spending years hunting verbs/subjects first, without even suspecting another approach is possible, to make me think this is not a very widespread approach in Latin teaching nowadays.
Nor has my personal experience shown me otherwise. I’m not a Latin teacher but I taught Latin in highschool for a short while and it was all about using different colors to underline sentence parts (verb or subject first, I can’t remember), treating the text as nothing more than a jigsaw puzzle. I quickly realised that enabling the pupils to read the (very basic) texts they were presented wasn’t really the goal their teachers had in mind.
Chad got there before me, whom I ditto. Plus Shenoute in his last post. I didn’t have the advantage of good teachers myself, but I managed somehow, but only through hard work. Nothing is easy (except maybe hunting down the verb in German 
). I once reviewed a book whose distinguished author wanted students to be taught “how to translate,” to which my churlish response was “If only he’d said how to read.”
Hi Shenoute and Michael, I completely agree: spending all one’s time doing analysis/translation is not the goal. That’s one extreme. The other would be spending all one’s time doing sight-reading without analysis of tricky bits. That’s the other. The mean point between these extremes (sight-reading often, delving into analysis of tricky bits) seems to be something on which many advanced academics and non-academics converge (see e.g. the grammatical analysis in Foster’s Ossium book on Cicero’s letters—a fluent speaker of Latin who promoted both sight-reading and analysis, just like many advanced academic classicists), and a goal worth pursuing for the rest of us.
Just to add, the best part of the blog article for me was its reference to Tunberg’s De rationibus: I didn’t know about this. Have just started reading it and it’s written very nicely from what I’ve read so far, even if it hits the non solum … sed etiam button quite often, and some words seem to be used in a silver Latin sense (although this is not a criticism, as not all compositions aim at golden; a personal observation only). Worth checking out!
Cheers, Chad
Levels of languages.
I am a native English speaker, but there are things written in English that I have great difficulty understanding or cannot understand at all e.g. contracts, Doctoral dissertations in fields I am not familiar with (physics, chemistry, medicine, philosophy, psychology or Shakespeare for that matter). What makes us think that the average Roman could easily read or understand everything that was written in Latin at the time. In fact were some things intentionally written to exclude the plebs? This is true in all languages. For example. The bible was translated into the Western Arrarnta, language (an Australian Aboriginal language) in the late 1800s. The translation with the help of the elders used the correct technical Western Arrarnta terms, but it had to be re-translated because the average Arrente person could not understand that rarefied language. And poetry is often hard to understand because the author is forced to use unusual sentence structure or rare words to fit either the rhythm or the rhyme, or both. Should we really beat ourselves up because we have difficulty reading the most challenging Latin. Jacobulus
Higher and lower registers of the language. One of my undergrad professors as a graduate student was struggling with a section of a German text for his dissertation. It so happened that the housekeeper for their dorm was from Germany, having come over after the war. He showed her the text and asked for her help. After perusing it for a few minutes, she said “I can’t understand this. Nobody understands this.” He had to go over to the ML department and ask one of the German professors, who was finally able to help him.
I strongly suspect that some of the literature we love, written in the highest literary register, would have been difficult for “the Roman on the street.”
We’re a bit off-topic here, so I look warily over my shoulder as I type this, but it’s an interesting feature of English that when we talk about ‘high’ or ‘low’ registers of the language (I think I prefer literary, official, technical, colloquial, journalistic etc.) we are almost always talking about the choice of vocabulary from our rich pickings (lacuna or gap, derriere or bum) or the level of syntactical virtuosity on display, rather than more fundamental differences in grammar you get in other languages.
Milton takes more than 120 words to reach the first full stop in Paradise Lost and sends us round the houses to get to the main verb, but there’s no grammar or vocabulary there that’s incomprehensible for a native speaker of English. Shakespeare needs more glossing but mostly because he’s a show-off - something like Sonnet 29 is ‘hard’ to read because the whole poem is a single sentence that we have to hold in our head, not because it’s written in ‘high’ English. Fowler’s infamous “Shall and Will” sociolect distinction might be difficult to reproduce in your speech unless you are ‘to the manner born’, but it’s never difficult to understand when you hear it.
The way literary English has always remained so close to the spoken language makes it hard, I think, for English monoglots to understand the quite radical differences between the literary and spoken registers of other languages. Welsh has a literary register that means even simple sentences are unrecognisable to someone who only has spoken Welsh. For example, “I say” in spoken Welsh would be “Dw i’n dweud” (or even “Wi’n gweud”) but in the literary register is “Yr wyf fi yn dywedyd”. They’re so different that you end up effectively learning the core grammar for two separate languages. Greek (Katharevousa vs spoken Greek) and Arabic (MSA vs local flavours) are similar, as I understand it. I would be interested to know whether the core difference between vulgar Latin and Cicero was as marked as this in the first century BC, or whether the difficulties for Iosephus Bloggs would just be the syntactical fireworks and terminology?
Katharavousa vs. spoken Greek (Demotic) is an appropriate analogy, thanks to the more complex morphology and ‘replacement’ vocabulary. Use of Katharevousa was finally discontinued in 1976, after a relatively short life of about 180 years. However, διγλωσσία still exists and has existed between ecclesiastical Greek, which preserves many features of the Attic dialect and Demotic, which ultimately is descended from Koine.
Here’s an example of ecclesiastical (Byzantine) Greek vs Demotic:
Βασιλεῦ οὐράνιε, Παράκλητε, Βασιλιὰ οὐράνιε, Παράκλητε, Πνεῦμα Ἅγιο,
τὸ Πνεῦμα τῆς ἀληθείας, ποὺ ἀπὸ Σένα πηγάζει ἡ ἀλήθεια·
ὁ πανταχοῦ παρών, καὶ τὰ πάντα πληρῶν, ποὺ βρίσκεσαι παντοῦ καὶ μὲ τὴν παρουσία Σου γεμίζεις τὰ πάντa·
ὁ θησαυρὸς τῶν ἀγαθῶν, καὶ ζωῆς χορηγός, Ἐσὺ ποὺ εἶσαι ὁ θησαυρὸς καὶ ἡ πηγὴ κάθε ἀγαθοῦ καὶ δωρίζεις τὴ ζωή,
ἐλθὲ καὶ σκήνωσον ἐν ἡμῖν, ἔλα καὶ κατοίκησε μέσα μας,
καὶ καθάρισον ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ πάσης κηλῖδος, καὶ καθάρισέ μας ἀπὸ τὰ στίγματα τῆς ἁμαρτίας
καὶ σῶσον, Ἀγαθέ, τὰς ψυχὰς ἡμῶν. καὶ σῶσε, Πανάγαθε, τὶς ψυχές μας.
Here is a very nice English translation (much better than I can do!):
https://ccel.org/ccel/brownlie/earlyhymns/earlyhymns.body.d6.H53.html
In high school I took 2 years of Latin. As a freshman in college I took 2 more semesters of Latin, and also 2 semesters of French. After the 2 semesters of French, I discovered that I could actually read Jules Verne novels. That was quite a revelation for me. I discovered that after all the Latin I had taken, I was deciphering Latin rather than reading it. I had discovered that there were 2 completely different mental processes. One I call “deciphering”, and the other “reading”.
Let me describe each mental process. When deciphering, the mind tends to be conscious of individual words, and some basic meaning for that word. And so the mind is left with a sort of puzzle which it proceeds to solve. But when actually reading, the mind is not very conscious of individual words. Groups of words are fed into a sort of mental hopper, where after accumulating, they suddenly result in an idea consistent with the context. And while reading the mind is not even very conscious of words, either single or in groups, but more conscious of ideas, emotion, and images. While reading, the mind is totally unaware of grammatical concepts, just as it is when communicating or reading in the native language. “Reading” is enormously superior to “deciphering”.
In recent years my hobby has been to learn to read Latin rather than decipher it. I never look at an English translation of what I am reading. I force myself to scan the printed page at a fairly good speed. If I don’t understand it the first time, I go over it a second or third time. If I still don’t understand it, I just move on. If I understand enough so that the text is interesting, I consider that I am reading the text.
And should a classicist be able to really read Latin rather than merely decipher it? Well, as some religious fakir might say “Who am I to judge?” I do know that the way Latin is taught results in the student learning to decipher rather than to read it. And the habit of deciphering is a habit that takes some effort to break. It is more difficult to learn to read a dead language than a modern one. Perhaps in many cases it is not worth the effort, and deciphering is sufficient. But in my case it is worth the effort, because that is how I amuse myself.
And I would like to add that I am very much in favor of the intellectual approach to learning Latin–studying grammar and so forth. But ideally the student of Latin can turn off the intellectual part of the mind, while perusing Latin text, and so be able to actually read the text, rather than decipher it.
We don’t generally write “spoken English”
Whatcha doin? Whatcha gonna do? Gimme some! Whaddaya know! Hit’m! D’ya wanna beer? I gotta go now. G’day. If we wrote spoken English, there would be many versions (dialects) of English and words would be spelled differently in the different dialectics. And English would not work as an international language. LOL