Please note that I didn’t claim he spoke Latin as fluently as Plautus or Cicero.
Anything attempted by modern speakers will naturally never amount to more than a variation on the original (a protean original at that!). But I think we can assume Erasmus spoke pretty good Latin.
I admit I was using ‘fluently’ in the general sense of ‘flowing’, ‘easily’, ‘unhesitatingly’, etc, not in the sense that schools grade students as being intermediate, advanced, fluent, native, etc. It’s been some time since I stopped teaching English to adult non-native speakers.
In your view, should all English/French/German grammars and commentaries, in both Latin and ancient Greek, also be translated into Latin or GreeK? Surely Latin is ‘dead’, for all practical purposes.
Not translated, but written in Latin, except for elementary textbooks. I don’t know of any language whose grammars and dictionaries are written in a foreign language. Why should Latin be different, because it’s “dead”? What exactly does that mean, and why should it keep people from mastering the language enough to write correctly? I sometimes suspect that one reason Latin dictionaries and grammars began to be written in the vernacular is because the authors were not competent enough to write them in Latin.
At the time when the old monolingual Latin dictionaries were compiled, Latin was still the common European language for scholarly and even scientific publications; that was the reason why the dictionaries followed suit.
The same holds true of commentaries; take my favourite author, Thucydides. The older commentaries on him, from the 16th century onwards, were published in Latin; however, from the mid-19th century modern languages took over this role. As far as I am aware, the last Thucydidean commentary to be published in Latin was Stahl’s revision of Poppo’s smaller commentary.
I do not feel I am committing some sort of moral impropriety when, in studying Thucydides, I refer to Liddell and Scott’s Lexicon, Goodwin’s Moods and Tenses, Smyth’s Greek Grammar or Denniston’s The Greek Particles; nor am I uneasy about consulting the commentaries of Poppo-Stahl in Latin, Kruger and Classen-Steup in German, de Romilly in French, or Gomme et al. in English. I do not feel that these learned and capable scholars are betraying their ignorance of ancient Greek by not having written their very helpful works in that language.
The primary objective of studying ancient Greek and Latin is surely not to attempt to communicate in them, but to read the remarkable and often challenging texts written in them. The idea that all lexica, grammars and commentaries which help us to achieve this should, as a matter of principle, be written in the language of the original text seems to me entirely without foundation or merit - which is probably why it has been rejected by modern scholars.
I don’t know of any language whose grammars and dictionaries are written in a foreign language.
Sumerian? Akkadian? Biblical Hebrew? Old Irish? Middle High German? Old Norse? Gothic? Ge’ez? Old Church Slavonic? Navajo?
There are plenty of English-language grammars and dicitionaries of living non-English languages, which are more useful for native speakers of English because they bring into relief the ways in which the “target” languages differ from English.
For my part, I’m very much in agreement with John W. My only interest in learning Latin and Greek is in order to read texts. I see no practical utility to mastering the ability to speak these languages–who would I speak with except the very few individuals who make an attempt to acquire an oral ability in them–an attempt which is necessarily going to yield highly imperfect results in the absence of native speakers who can correct one’s own imperfections.
You have both brought into evidence the divide that exists between classicists on the one hand and humanists on the other. You are only interested in the language as a means to an end, that is to understand ancient texts. European humanists see Latin (and Greek to a lesser extent) as an end in itself, as part of Western culture. In this way, it is not on equal footing with Ge’ez or Sumerian. For classicists, there is no need to become particularly proficient in Latin, as long as you can decipher the texts with all your tools on hand. For humanists, becoming proficient and possibly fluent like Erasmus and many others for whom Latin was not their native tongue is a worthy goal in itself.
I assure you that I too see Greek and Latin as key parts of Western culture - but isn’t that mainly because of what was written in them? You also (like some others on here) seem to think that anyone who hasn’t followed your favoured method of learning these languages cannot be ‘proficient’ in them, and is a mere decipherer - an insulting assumption for which you offer no evidential support. Try reading Thucydides (or any other challenging author) without plenty of ‘tools’ to hand, and see how far you get.
I’m not sure wherein your ‘humanism’ consists, or how you exercise it - but if you want to converse with others in Latin a la Erasmus, you are of course free to do so. Quite why this should be judged as on an altogether higher plane than engaging in depth with the ancient texts is, however, beyond me - especially as such engagement was surely of great importance to the original humanists themselves.
Assuming that “engaging in depth with the ancient texts” is all that Latin and Greek are good for, even then fluency will help to appreciate the texts as they were meant to be read, or heard in many cases. There is something to be said for acquiring the ability to pick up an author and read him straight through without the need to look up a word every other sentence (if not every other word). This really does enhance the experience. But if your goal is to learn more about the ancient world, then I can see why fluency would not be needed to engage in depth with a text, since the goal is to gather more facts.
Though I think I can detect your ideological reasons for stating things in these terms, Nesrad, I don’t actually recognise the distinction you draw between humanists and classicists, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. My acquaintance with other classicists (a good many of whom, incidentally, would not reject being called humanists also) leaves me feeling particularly perplexed on their behalf by your assertion that for classicists “there is no need to become particularly proficient in Latin”. Are the people who cultivate the art of speaking Latin (as opposed to the “mere” readers and occasional writers) necessarily the people who most live and breathe the language and want to uphold its legacy?
OK, you’ve hit the nail on the head. You’ve exposed me for the fraud I am: I’m a classicist and not a humanist, and I’m really not particularly proficient in Latin because I can’t speak Latin fluently. When I read a text, I look up every word in the dictionary and then check every construction in an English-language grammar book. I have no interest in the texts beyond deciphering them word for word, and no sense of their true humanistic value. If only I could speak Latin fluently, I would be able to appreciate the humanism of the texts as part of “Western Culture,” but in my benighted state, all I can do is parse them laboriously.
Assuming that “engaging in depth with the ancient texts” is all that Latin and Greek are good for, even then fluency will help to appreciate the texts as they were many to be read, or heard in many cases. There is something to be said for acquiring the ability to pick up an author and read him straight through without the need to look up a word every other sentence (if not every other word). This really does enhance the experience. But if your goal is to learn more about the ancient world, then I can see why fluency would not be needed to engage in depth with a text, since the goal is to gather more facts.
If you’re capable of writing this self-satisfied, insulting nonsense, I can’t imagine that you’ve progressed very far in learning Latin yourself.
I apologize if you thought I was referring to you. You hadn’t crossed my mind. I don’t know you, and to be honest, after your last reply, I don’t care to know you.
If you’re capable of writing this self-satisfied, insulting nonsense, I can’t imagine that you have a very solid knowledge of Latin yourself.
The only insult I’ve seen on this thread so far has come from you.
I can’t understand why you should be so apparently eager to belittle in-depth engagement with the masterpieces of Greek and Latin literature, especially since, as I said before, the early humanists attached great importance to this. You also seem curiously oblivious to the fact that, however ‘fluent’ you think you are, in terms of ancient Greek and Latin literature it is rarely possible for anyone to simply ‘pick up an author and read him straight through’ without previous in-depth study of said author. I’m sorry to return (for convenience) to Thucydides, but even the ancient Greeks (who really were ‘fluent’ in their language) struggled to read many parts of his work; and Aeschylus and many other authors are far from straightforward. Why do you think so many scholars have devoted so much effort to writing commentaries on these texts, if some generic ‘fluency’ can enable one to simply breeze through them?
You also seem to have a highly distorted view of why ‘Classicists’ read texts; we are not just trying ‘to gather more facts’. I have devoted years of study to Thucydides not primarily to accumulate ‘facts’ about the Peloponnesian War, but to encounter one of the great works of world literature, and engage with the mind of a highly complex and endlessly fascinating author whose book truly represents, in various ways, a major contribution to Western civilisation. Does that sound ‘humanist’ enough for you?
I agree with Victor that you are setting up an artificial clash between ‘Classicists’ and ‘humanists’, for which there really is no need.
I don’t think the ability to speak Latin would offer much in the way of help in reading and engaging with ancient Latin texts. With the exception of Plautus and Terrence (and maybe Petronius), the texts are written in a language that is literary and far removed from the language of everyday conversation. Every author’s language is different, and the ability to read one is not always sufficient to read another. If you come to Tacitus or Sallust after having read nothing but Cicero and Caesar, you will have a great deal of difficulty at first. Grammatical analysis and lexicographical information are absolutely essential to getting at what teh authors were trying to say. And they lived in a society and an environment that was very different from ours, so that a substantial amount of background information is necessary, too. It’s only by acquiring the requisite grammatical, lexicographical and background information that anyone can begin to read some ancient authors more or less fluently, without parsing each sentence and looking up every word. But a limited ability to string together sentences of spoken Latin isn’t a skill that’s going to help with that. Reading as many Latin texts as possible is the activity that leads to the level of fluency and mastery necessary to engage with the texts on a fluent basis. Trying to speak Latin, which no one will do very competently, particularly in the absence of native speakers, may be fun, but it’s not going to help anyone engage with Vergil or Livy.
Then we are in agreement. By fluency, I was referring to the familiarity with the language that comes with much practice, not necessarily the ability to speak it, but at least to read fluently. This is not something that I haven’t seen very often in the faculty of classics. I have heard of courses where authors are read in translation, and have met graduate students whose Latin and Greek never evolved beyond an elementary textbook level, and these are not the exception.
hi, i think there are a few valuable ideas being argued for here or underlying this, all of which i agree with (i don’t think they conflict):
resources that use modern languages (eg latin to english dictionaries) are useful for learning
monolingual resources would be useful for learning
resources that use modern languages are currently far better than monolingual ones, because scholars nowadays use modern languages in their works and these are justifiably the leading cutting-edge ones containing the latest results of centuries of work and development, whereas the monolingual ones were done centuries ago and so have missed centuries of scholarship
there are only a few points i would add to this:
4. point 3 above doesn’t mean that good monolingual resources (not better than the current bi-lingual ones, not replacing them, just good ones containing the same level of research) can’t be developed, it just means they haven’t and i think the original poster was expressing a wish for the future
5. i still have not seen research as to whether working in a language using monolingual resources taps into some language part of the brain not activated by using bilingual resources
6. i think the intuition or gut feeling that good monolingual resources would be useful comes by analogy to people who have achieved fluency in a modern foreign language
7. to those who long for monolingual resources, i would say: even better than wishing for a resource to be produced is doing it yourself, you will probably get 1,000 times more use out of producing a 20 word monolingual dictionary yourself (starting from the 20 most frequent words) that you build yourself (as this i think activates yet another part of the brain when you are engaged yourself in constructing something) rather than getting a nice pocketbook from the bookstore
8. take on board the criticisms of people who correctly say that the modern resources are the best ones - why not try to match them by using all the work done in them? when building the resources yourself surely you would not restrict yourself from drawing on this rich work (ie using the bilingual leading resources with the latest research to produce your own monolingual resources to the same level - this is what i do) and only work like an ascetic form monolingual resources themselves, missing out on all that has been discovered in between
9. if you use these types of monolingual resources plus the modern bilingual ones, i can’t see how anyone could criticise that approach (it’s not zero sum, using monolingual ones doesn’t stop you from relying on the latest research), so the monolingual ones are either of zero value or positive (so nothing is lost) and at least they provide exercises otherwise valued by the classical tradition such as prose composition, synonym study, close reading of the authoritative dictionaries, etc.
10. i would personally recommend that you do a quick blast through a latin prose composition before you start and read lexical entries in a few monolingual entries. one of the things that could be criticised in producing monolingual resources is using a butchered form of the language, which would mean that people consulting the resource would be exposed to bad latin - the reverse of the goal of a pedagogic resource. but this is easily avoided as lexical entries are usually super simple in syntax etc and so it wouldn’t take long to complete enough prose comp to mitigate that risk.
11. i went down this same path but then personally took the view that writing scholia in the text language was the best approach because this means that you focus on the core vocabulary itself - ie the pool of words that you would want in your intermediate dictionary to include is the set of words you find in the authors you read - and so you can avoid the middle mand and just go straight to the texts themselves and start putting in monolingual definitions yourself, that you generate from reading the LS and OLD and other leading authorities as well as commentaries on the work to make sure the meaning you include there is not inappropriate. also you can add pictures for things that don’t need words. eg why define FAGVS into english when you can just pull a picture of one from the net? i pull these from wiki commons to avoid copyright infringement. either this is a simple recreation - in which case nothing is lost, nothing gained, which is fine - or it will help me stay in monolingual reading when i come back to these texts in the future when my skills in classics decline (inevitable, since the work i put in is decreasing over time as i am not a classicist), and so this store of work is a little gain. just my personal approach.
I think much of this boils down to what you mean by ‘fluency’ in reading. No one coming to the Greek text of Thucydides for the first time can read it fluently in any meaningful sense; the only way to be able to read such texts with any degree of fluency is to have already read them at least a couple of times carefully and slowly with the aid of plenty of ‘tools’ - i.e. the results of over two millennia of study of the text by others.
One complicating factor with challenging texts which hasn’t really been mentioned in this discussion is that, however ‘fluent’ one may think oneself, there are many passages whose exact grammatical construction and/or meaning is still far from clear, and has been disputed by excellent scholars for centuries. There are, I suppose, three main reasons for this:
(i) the impact of textual corruption;
(ii) the obscurity of individual authors’ styles;
(iii) deficiencies in modern knowledge of aspects of the ancient languages themselves.
To be sure, there are some authors (and some passages in more difficult authors) which can be read more straightforwardly; however, the issues I have mentioned above in my view militate against any straightfoward concept of ‘fluency’ in reading Classical literature (cf. the ‘Is Classical Greek fluency possible?’ thread in the ‘Learning Greek’ section of this forum).
Chad - thank you for your usual sane and balanced analysis.
I’m very happy for people to use whatever approach to learning Latin and Greel works best for them; however, I do think that some of the arguments for the monolingual approach are founded on what seems to me a simplistic and false analogy with modern, ‘living’ languages. With the latter the main aim of study is generally communication (oral and written), whereas with Latin and Greek the primary goal is surely reading the ancient texts. Moreover, whereas with modern languages there are plenty of native speakers to consult as to idiom and usage, with Latin and Greek there are none, which will almost inevitably at some stage result in the use of dubious idiom.
Even if it were genuinely possible, the sheer effort entailed in translating modern bilingual dictionaries, grammars and commentaries into Latin and Greek would in my view be far better employed in reading the ancient texts themselves. That said, if people have the time, expertise and consummate command of the languages required to undertake such an enormous task, and genuinely believe that it will confer commensurate benefits beyond those achievable for them by more traditional study methods, they should by all means do so.
It seems to me that you are exaggerating the difficulties, or at least generalizing them unduly. Reading fluency is possible with classical texts, perhaps more so in Latin than in Greek, as Latin texts are less removed both chronologically and linguistically. I’m not talking about understanding perfectly, nor am I talking about grasping the content matter which can be obscure because of the subject and not necessarily because of the language, as is the case with philosophical or technical texts. The same is true for modern texts, such as medical journals or legal treatises. Understanding them is less a question of language than of training.
I sometimes wonder if classical exegesis goes too far, reading into the text meanings that the author never intended, or at least that the common Greek or Roman would never have seen. They sometimes fail to see that texts like Homer and Virgil were popular literature and were meant to be enjoyed, not dissected. If a lack of reading fluency keeps a man from enjoying the text, or of personally benefiting from it, though he may understand the minute subtleties of each phrase thanks to his library of German commentaries, he is not necessarily grasping the text at its most basic level which is the reaction elicited in the reader.
I personally have more difficulty with Shakespeare and Molière than I do with Virgil and about equal with Plautus. Yet nobody would dream of telling me that I cannot correctly understand S. and M. without careful lexical and syntactical analysis, historical research, and all the rest of what you deem necessary for understanding classical texts.
You make some interesting points, which perhaps tend to shift the discussion towards what is meant by ‘reading’!
Your comments beg the question as to how ‘popular’ individual literary works were meant to be (and what level of so-called ‘popular’ readership we are talking about), which will of course vary from author to author, or even from work to work. However, it by no means follows that what was in some degree ‘popularly’ intelligible or accessible to the ancients will automatically be so for us today - hence one of the reasons for commentary and exegesis.
Even in the ancient world, a ‘popular’ text such as Homer was thought to require commentary - surely that is far more the case today.
No doubt one can over-interpret texts; equally, however, one can under-interpret them by failing to recognise or pay attention to intended allusions and deliberate literary effects.
If one is talking about a sort of skim or superficial reading, gliding over difficult passages and paying limited attention to content, then I suppose one can more or less breeze through a lot of ancient texts; the question then is, however, whether the game is really worth the candle, and whether one might not be as well (or indeed better) off studying high-quality translations.
There’s a safely indeterminate degree of latitude there to hide away in.
No-one is exaggerating the difficulties. It strikes me that John (out of diplomacy, no doubt) understates the case, if anything, when he says that texts can be under-interpreted if there is a failure to recognise intended allusions and deliberate literary effects. They can be under-interpreted even more fundamentally than that of course. When you’re analysing (nobody I’ve ever met can truly be said to read them, unless, as John says, they know the text well already) certain passages of Thucydides or Pindar or Aeschylus’s choruses, of course there is a danger, as with all texts, of taking exegesis too far, but the main problem is usually simply wringing a coherent meaning out of the language in the first place - something that has to be achieved before exegesis in any meaningful sense can even begin to happen.
Your meaning is a little obscure, but the inference seems to be that there is a level of grasping a text even more basic than understanding the meaning of the words - a level that bears little relation, in fact, to how successfully you have interpreted the message of the text but is related primarily to the nature of your “reaction” to whatever the text may or may not be saying.
I’m sure there is a measure of enjoyment to be derived from reading a text when you have limited comprehension of it, but how extensive is your incomprehension able to be before all enjoyment evaporates? And if there is little or no correlation between comprehension and enjoyment we might be expected to be able to enjoy any text just as much as the next man when he understands it perfectly and we understand barely a word of it. And does this happen? Did Milton’s daughters enjoy the Greek they uncomprehendingly read to their father just as much as he did? Were they “grasping the text at its most basic level”, perhaps, while their father, with his understanding of its minute subtleties, was failing to do so?