Eheu! Pheu! (Latin & Greek for “alas!”) I knew I couldn’t write a post without making a mistake somewhere. “Bonum dictu” means “a good thing to say,” “Bene dictu” means “well said.” I doubt I would have gotten called on this, but who knows what classics scholars are out there.
Another reason to study Latin:
It gives us an appreciation of a complex society whose thoughts, customs, and even language form much of the basis for our own today, thus perhaps helping us to understand ourselves better. Deep
that was, indeed, a book. rather daring, i realize, to refer to print literature and not hypertext. not anachronistic, however, i hope. published by Harper & Row, under the Perennial Library imprint, first edition, 1987.
Monty, you misunderstand. The Vulgate was a complete translatoin of the bible and was avalible in the fifth century. When I said that Jerome translated only the gospels and the OT I meant that that was the portion translated by the historical Jerome.
Here is an article from Encyclopedia Britanica (I love that they are free now!) that explains it better than I can:
Because they are snobs. But this has nothing to do with learning Latin–this is snobby behavior from people who happen to know Latin.
Opus
No, most of the time you aren’t there, so you don’t know. By definition you are only present when someone who has no background in Latin or the classics is in the room. Using Latin in these cases may be inappropreite (unless you are crashing a Classics party, or touring Rome with a Latin class, obviously). But the vast majority of people who use Latin use it appropriatly–whiuch by your own definition means using it when you can’t hear.
Now, I write this to show my complete support of learning the languages our “modern” languages are based on. We must learn the so-called “dead” languages in order to understand our own language. And what better way to learn than by using! We should be enrolling our children in immersive education courses to learn them to speak and write fluently in the important languages of the best.
So go out and do it, people. Start learning proto-Indo-European today!
I meant to say, “important languages of the past”. Don’t know how “best” got in there. Must be Freudian.
But there is a grain of seriousness in my post. Latin students I know are always talking about how important it is to learn the meaning of roots in English. I say, Yeah, it is important. It’s why you should pay attention in English class. I’ve never taken an iota of formal Latin, but I could muddle through a translation of Fretful Porpentine’s Latin thang. I thought it meant, “And I too add death. Dang!” Cheating a little, looking at Green Bean’s post, I see it means, “And I too am dead. Alas!”
Why Latin and not Greek? Why Latin and not Sanskrit? Old High German? Norse? I guess I’m just not sure why we’ve decided to skip blithely over the first few thousand years of our linguistic roots, have a huge trainwreck when we hit ancient Rome, skip blithely over the next thousand years or so, have a whistle-stop at Shakespeare, and move right on up to the modern day (“modern day” defined as “when the English teacher du jour was in College”, and not a day after). Just irks me.
And as a counterpoint to those of you who’ll just list a bunch of influential writers in Latin: Chaucer, Plato, Magna Charta, Beowulf, Hammurabi’s Code…
It occus to me that the Magna Charta was probably written in Latin. Hence its name. Well, I tried. Once you’ve quit pointing at me and laughing, substitute the name of some important document written in Old/Middle English.
The reason (I think) that we study Latin more than most other ancient languages is twofold, number one, the ancient Romans’ ideas, art, architecture, political science, etc., all influenced us a lot more than those of the Norse or Tibetans (Tibetans are the ones who use Sanskrit, right?), not to mention the fact that their language influenced English a lot more than Sanskrit or Norse. Number two, there is a wealth of ancient Roman literature that has survived, certainly more than Norse, Old High German, or Sanskrit.
In my experience why we study Latin more than Greek is one of tradition, probably influenced by the Church, and because Greek is harder…I take both though.
Why stop at Shakespeare? For much the same reasons, his writings were extremely influential, and there is a fair amount of them. There just doesn’t seem to have been that much overly influential literature written in English prior to the late Middle Ages, probably due to the lack of the printing press and because writing in the vernacular had not yet come into wide acceptance.
My school doesn’t “blithely skip over” the period from Shakespeare to modern writing, I have read things from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries (admittedly not much else that I know of from the 17th). Of course, that’s just my experience.
Bzzzt. Sanskrit is an ancient Indo-Iranian language and is the classical language of India, in use from Vedic times several thousand years ago up to the present day: it remains the standard liturgical language of Hinduism. Tibetan is (at least sometimes, I’m not sure how many Tibetan scripts there are) written in a script similar to the one used for Sanskrit (due to the influence of medieval Buddhism), but it’s not linguistically related to the Indo-European family that includes Sanskrit.
BZZZZZZZZT!!! The surviving Sanskrit corpus is hundreds of times the size of the entire surviving classical corpus, Greek and Roman combined. (When you add in medieval Latin and Byzantine Greek materials the proportion gets somewhat more balanced.) We’re talking one of the major pre-modern civilizations here, folks! And there are probably half a billion people who speak a modern vernacular (Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Rajasthani, etc.) directly derived from Sanskrit, which is probably more than those who speak a vernacular such as French or Italian directly derived from Latin. This isn’t to argue that Sanskrit is more relevant to English than Latin is, just that it’s at least equally significant in linguistic history.
Really? I thought it was called the Vulgate because it was translated into “Vulgar Latin”, a more plebean [sic] form of Latin with simpler grammar than the “High Latin” used in the imperial courts and modern Latin grammar textbooks.
Kimstu got all excited at the mention of her beloved Sanskrit and exclaimed:
SDP gracefully and soothingly replied:
Thanks and sorry, I realize that it was just an off-the-top-of-the-head example. It might be interesting to know that the figures for comparative linguistic heritage are closer than I thought: at least according to one website, among the 20 most common spoken languages the Sanskrit-derived ones stack up like this: Hindi (#3) has 320 million speakers, Bengali (#7) 180, Urdu (#13) 88, Punjabi (#14) 75, and Marathi (#19) 61, for a total of 744 million if my addition is right; but the Latin-derived ones run them fairly close, with Spanish (#4) at 310 million, Portuguese (#8) 175, French (#12) 115, and Italian (#17) 63, or 663 million in all—not bad. (French is the twelfth most-spoken language in the world? whodathunkit. I guess we better stop laughing at the purity crusades of the Academie Francaise! Oh wait, we (English) came in at #2, so we can laugh at the French all we want.)
Ahem. I’m sure the ancient race of poets that have marked the ages would be grateful that you have allowed that language could “sometimes be [treated by some as] an art form.” Sadly, it seems they have not left a mark on you and whomever else you’re including it the word “we.”
Horace, a poet considered great by people who find language appealing as an artistic medium, has this to say to you from the grave:
Exegi monumentum aere perennius
And he was right. Those bronze statues that Horace looked upon, which you would have considered more appealing, more traditional, were melted down for cannonballs many years ago. But the voice of Horace still rings.
This is what I was trying to refute. I agree about the Romans’ architecture and engineering being very influential. As to the rest of it, I think the Romans are a drop in the bucket. I’m sure there were some great Roman political thinkers (I mean, as distinct from great Roman politicians), but I don’t know if they really match up to Machiavelli or Plato.
Traditional Norse law provided the foundation for English common law, which is one of the things which makes Britain and the U.S. distinct from continental Europe, with its Romanesque tradition of civil law. I simply don’t agree that Latin influenced English more than Norse did. As to the influence Sanskrit had on English, I’ll leave that up to someone with better knowledge of early Indo-European history.
Okay, “blithely skip over” was an exaggeration. Literature courses in my experience covered the period between Shakespeare and the modern day pretty adequately. It’s more a matter of how rules are taught. Saying “Wherefore art thou” instead of “Why are you” is considered learned and cultured, if somewhat archaic. Spelling any number of words the way they are spelled in the U.S. Constitution would be considered flat-out wrong.
[list=1]
[li]The overwhelming majority of Latin speakers are dead (I suppose that there may a few among the Catholic hierarchy (henceforth “CH”) who have a conversational fluency in the language)[/li][li]The overwhelming majority of Latin speakers have been white (notwithstanding past and present members of the C.H., and a few attested Roman citizens of Nubian origin)[/li][li]Latin is an Indo-European language, Latium is in west-central Italy (and thus in Europe), and the majority of Latin speakers have been European (again not withstanding the CH, the presence of Romans in the Middle East and Egypt, and the Latin presence in North Africa between the fall of Carthage and the Arab conquest (indeed, it is estimated that at one time, 40% of all Latin speakers dwelt in the north African provinces)).[/li][li]Almost by definition, roughly half of all Latin speakers were male (in fact, the CH undoubtedly biases this total, although I cannot say if in a statistically significant way).[/li][/list=1]
Thus not only is Latin the language of Dead White European Males, it is almost the essence of DWEMness. Thus, a conspiracy by definition.
