Have any of you reached the culmination of learning latin or greek? This forum has been here for almost 20 years I’m just curious if there are people who stuck with such a difficult task and mastered all the forms and constructions(and the literature of course).
I don’t think you can ever be “done” when it comes to learning a language. Now, mastering the forms and constructions of Latin is quite a doable task that can be completed in the span of a few months or years, depending on one’s dedication, by going through a course like Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, which covers pretty much all one must know about the grammar of Latin - of classical Latin, that is.
Vocabulary and idiom is a different matter. It is quite possible to become well-acquainted with the words and expressions that are common in a certain genre (e.g. epic poetry) or that are used by a certain author (e.g. Caesar, Cicero), but I would say that whenever you start reading a text by an author you’re not familiar with or from a genre you have little experience with, you’re going to come across at least a few words you don’t know. This doesn’t mean you won’t understand the text, of course, because your knowledge of the language will allow you to infer the meaning of many of the unknown words, or to at least understand the gist of the passage. No matter how well you know the language, the only way to make sure you know all the words in a text is having read that same text before.
This brings me to literature: The corpus of classical Latin, if compared to that of languages like English, German, French etc., is tiny. The classics library at my university has pretty much all Latin texts that survive from antiquity in a single room, and this room contains various editions of many of the texts, commentaries, and translations, too. So it is possible for an individual to read all of the ancient texts, but I don’t think many people do that, because they usually specialise in a certain area. However, the corpus of Latin literature written during the middle ages and the early modern period is estimated to be about 10,000 times bigger than that of surviving classical Latin (if I recall that number correctly), which means it is absolutely impossible for a person to read all of that. Even if you could: Having read a text once doesn’t mean you’re “done” with it. Really knowing a literary work means reading it several times, engaging with it, studying the secondary literature, and so on.
I guess I haven’t really answered your question, but these are my thoughts on the topic. I’m curious to see what others will have to say.
Done?? I’ve barely even started.
I don’t agree that “you can never be done learning a language”. You learn a language and then you move on. I’m aware that you can’t read every book in existence, when I say literature I mean all the best writers only. You don’t want to waste time reading tripe just because it’s coming through Latin. That is my mistake I should have been clearer when I said “literature”. I don’t mean the entire Literature of the Latin language.
The topic says “Question for long time students”.
One does not just learn a language and move on. Just because I can recite nearly every grammatical form for Latin doesn’t mean I can always apply them correctly in my reading of Latin works. Even in my native English, I learn things about the language, whether it be grammar or vocabulary, quite frequently, and I am not a spring chicken. I have been speaking and reading English for decades now, yet I still encounter things in English that I have to reread to understand. Even after more than 20 years of working with Latin (including teaching) the reading and comprehension still take a significant amount of mental energy. To add to this every author has enough stylistic differences from others that it takes time to gain comfort. For example I have recently read books 1 and 2 of Livy and am currently working on 5, and while it is still much slower going than it would be in English, it comes to me more rapidly than books 1 or 2.
I agree with Laurentius Mons’s and ronolio’s posts and profoundly disagree with tayuyasboy ("You learn a language and then you move on. ")
Understanding a language is not a matter of simply learning grammatical constructions and then thinking I understand this language. Firstly writers use these constructions differently. Secondly the language changed between Plautus and Augustine ( to take two random end points.) Writers are not always consistent in the way they use constructions either. Perhaps most importantly grammatical constructions whist necessary for understanding texts dont really help much with the difficult and never ending problem of interpretation.
To give an analogy its like thinking that mastering scales and arpeggios will enable you play music. You have to learn them and practice them if you are going to play music but you can’t just learn them once and “move on”.
And who is going to tell us who the best writers are? And what Latin is tripe? People devote their lives to studying things which you may not like or appreciate.
This is a very curious thread and I wonder what prompted it. I remember particularly in the early stages of my study of Greek the mountain seemed enormously high and the material never ending. An early teacher only half jokingly said Greek gets harder the more you study. That may be so and mastery whatever that might mean eludes all but the most dedicated professional classicists. But we can have enormous fun on the way without burdening ourselves with the thought that one day we will be able “to move on”.
You didn’t define in your title or your post what time period you consider to qualify for “long time students.” I’ve been studying Latin off and on for about five years, longer than I’ve been on Textkit. I didn’t specify that in my reply, which would perhaps explain the point of my reply. I consider myself to be a long time student and yet also feel that I’ve barely even started.
Yes, a bit of an odd but still interesting question. Very simply, I don’t think anybody who loves Latin and Greek ever feels that they truly have arrived at a culmination point to which nothing can be added. If you simply keep up with it, eventually your language skills get to the point where you are able to handle pretty much any text you meet, although even for those with long experience authors can always provide the occasional challenge. The reason for this is that beyond the basic grammar and syntax there are large variables in different authors’ use of the language, and since we can never be native speakers, this often takes a bit of time to adjust. But we don’t study the language for the language sake and then move on, we do it because we see real benefits in reading ancient literature in the original. One can find the same motivation for learning a modern language. If you love Tolstoy enough, then maybe you want Russian better to appreciate and understand him (and you gain a whole lot more than just a better appreciation of Tolstoy).
I took your initial response as a tongue-in-cheek refutation of the idea of a “culmination learning Latin or Greek”.
I’m not a long time student, I study it almost two years but i agree with Laurentius Mons’s, ronolio’s, Barry Hofstetter and seneca2008 posts. We need define what’s a culmination of learning latin and greek. Is it to know latin like Cicero, Caesar, Virgil and others ? I don’t think that’s possible. Anyway we have ever something to learn in any language. I’m keep studying latin for one reason basically : latin is improving my reading ability in portuguese ( my first language) ; I feel i’m getting more intelligent( i think every person who studies Latin has that same experience).
I’ve been working on Latin for about ten years, thirty minutes to an hour each day. I usually don’t have to look up the inflections now, but if unsure I use William Whitaker’s Words for parsing. I keep a student dictionary handy, The Bantam New College Latin & English Dictionary, which has forms tables at the beginning. It’s only about six dollars US, and I’ve worn out three or four of them. My phone also has dictionary apps, including Whitaker’s Words.
I started studying Latin when I had my first health scare of old age (I’m 81 now) to keep my mind off my health worries. This has worked pretty well; it also helps me keep annoying thoughts about political strife at bay.
The gurus here have been very helpful to me. To make their work easier, I’ve tried hard to learn how to ask a good Latin question.
There’s no end to learning Latin. Imagine if you have taught it at uni for twenty years. You’ll know Cicero Caesar etc well, but there will be loads of other authors. Then, especially after learning a lot of poetry, you’ll know how it sounds, and some lucky people will start to speak it, and the very talented will speak it well.
Robin