- Is the Latin taught in schools for SAT II/ IB / GCE A Level designed to be able to read Classical Latin, medieval Latin or both?
- If you could learn it from scratch again how would you have done it differently?
My experience (traditional English grammar school, 50+ years ago) was very much classical for O-level (16+ national exam - Caesar throwing yet another bloody bridge across yet another bloody river, plus chunks of the Aeneid). Later on, I had to do some early mediaeval Latin for a Cambridge entrance exam, which was much more fun (St Columba meeting the Loch Ness monster, and Bishops’ parish visitation reports of various sorts of priestly shenanigans and hanky-panky).
But I believe there have been substantial changes since, bringing in more context. A quick google for curricula and exams produces a lot from different exam boards/providers, but here are some examples:
O-level (taken at 15-16):
https://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/220702-specification-accredited-gcse-latin-j282.pdf
A-level (taken at 17-18)
I did well enough at O-level, and a fair bit of it has stuck even after all these years, but I would certainly have got more out of it with more cultural context. Had we had today’s TV documentaries with the likes of Mary Beard and Michael Scott, it would have been much less of a grind.
Thanks PatrickLondon. It certainly is easier to learn Latin today. I’m fascinated with the language but have zero knowledge of the grammar. I’m just trying to decide on an efficient course that would suit me and show real results. There are most likely some useful strategies that take the monotony out of rote memorization.
I took Latin in high school (in Toronto; my school, which is one of the older ones in the city, was probably in the minority to offer the subject). We used the Cambridge Latin Course, which had entertaining readings (the first book centered around Lucius Caecilius Iucundus, a real-life citizen of Pompeii, around whom they invented stories connected to his fictionalized family, slaves, acquaintances, etc.) There was of course basic grammar; the more advanced books of the course continued with fictional stories set in a historical 1st century AD Roman context, contained a lot of cultural/historical files, and finally at the upper level introduced us to some authentic texts from Ancient Rome, which we had to translate.
Already the 3rd year of Latin at my school was classified as an OAC (Ontario Academic Credit, a “grade 13” or pre-university-level course, this was abolished in Ontario 20 years ago). I applied for a 4th year (second OAC) Latin course, but this was not opened for lack of interest. Had I taken it, I’m sure my vocabulary would have been expanded and I would have been introduced to more difficult authentic texts.
Then I took Latin at university (eventually completing a Classics major). In my first year, my first semester went OK, but in my second semester I found the texts we had to translate quite daunting and the instructor, Professor T., quite strict. I spoke to him about the leap in difficulty of course content that I had seen, and he told me that what we had done in high school was “not real Latin”. He was right. Authentic classical Latin has a much freer syntax than what I think we had in the Cambridge Latin Course, and you often really have to look at the endings of all the words to see what the sentence is saying.
If I could do things again, I would make a point of studying prepositions (words like “in”, “on”, “over”, “under”, “around”, or “through”) in more depth. And I would focus on syntax more and try to be quicker in lining up the endings of the words in a sentence and parsing them.
The holy grail - but I fear there’s no alternative to rote learning conjugations and declensions, if you want to get past a basic level, in most languages. If memory serves, that’s particularly the case with Latin, since word order doesn’t help you disentangle subject/object/verb in the way modern languages tend to do.
My school was old-fashioned enough to have us parsing English sentences from the start. I suppose I should be grateful now, but it was a grind at the time.
Thank you themapleeaf. You make some excellent points. I suspected that school Latin is “not real Latiin” even now in school. I had read about the fluid nature of Latin syntax. Thanks for verifying that point. Prepositions will be absolute priority for me going forward.
When I took Latin in the US in the 90s, it was all classical.
The biggest thing I would warn you is to be aware of what sort of teacher you’re getting. There are two sorts of Latin scholars: There are those who want to embrace the language, and those who want to embalm it. The embalmers seem to basically have the notion that Latin is and must always be a dead language, and that it’s therefore impossible to express any concept in Latin that wasn’t already expressed two thousand years ago. My Latin teacher in college was of this mold: He told us, for instance, how he was once approached by a motorcycle club for advice on how to translate their motto into Latin, and he told them it was impossible, because the ancient Romans didn’t have the concept of riding a motorcycle. Never mind that they did have the concept of riding horses, and they’re the same sort of “riding”.
Good advice. I tend to look for creative language books, and I’ll be looking for a creative approach to Latin that will treat it like a living, evolving language.
Perhaps Ørberg’s Familia Romana: Lingua Latina per se Illustrata is a creative approach as in not exposing the reader to any non-Latin language. Which is the same approach I have experienced learning living languages: the instructor never uttered a word not in that language.
How reactionary and narrow-minded.
Latin is “dead” in the sense that no countries or peoples use it regularly in everyday communication. But it is not dead across the board. Latin was used until not so long ago by royalty as a lingua franca or language of diplomacy; in the Middle Ages a lot of charters would be written in Latin rather than in the vernacular; if I recall correctly, it was used in the Hungarian parliament as recently as the 19th century (probably because there were various ethnic / language groups so not everyone knew Hungarian; some would have spoken Slovak, German, Serbian, Romanian, etc.) You can imagine that during these periods, neologisms developed. There are words/forms in Medieval/late Latin that don’t occur in Classical Latin. Furthermore, Latin still finds some use within the Catholic Church, and Classicists find ways of applying it to modern life. I remember a commemorative sign placed on my university’s campus, written in Latin about a modern-day professor.
To see how stupid this professor’s attitude is, it’s enough to peruse Vicipaedia, the Latin language version of Wikipedia, to see how competently one may write in Latin about modern-day topics.
Ireland, 1970s. The Cambridge Latin course. Slim volumes with line drawings There was not a huge amount of rote memorisation - it was learning through simple and engaging stories about a (real?) family living in Pompeii. I imagine there’s still a substantial cohort of people in Britain and Ireland who remember Grumio, Metella, Caecilius et al with some affection.
I had an awful lot of Latin in high school in Germany (nine years as a core subject) in the 1990s and early 2000s. Very much focussed on classical Latin, which means first centuries BC and AD, simply because that’s when the high-quality stuff was written. Also a bit of late antiquity writing and some from the early modern era; very little medieval stuff, I suppose because much of Latin vocabulary and grammar was corrupted during that time, i.e., not in line with classical rules - Renaissance scholars did much to clean that up.
It’s certainly a learnable language, also via self-study, but be prepared that it will be different from studying a modern language. You’re not going to do speaking and listening comprehension exercises, you’re basically doing written translations only.
Caecilius est pater. Metella est mater. Quintus est filius. Clemens est servus. Grumio est coquus. Cerberus est canis.
That, as I remember, is the first lesson. Ah, if only translating Cicero were as easy.
Remember Modestus and Strythio, the two awkward Roman soldiers on service in the province of Britannia? I think their story arc was one of students’ favorites in the series.
A lot of Latin teaching in the last generation has tried to hide the work of memorization and learning grammar so that people will like the language.
These modern methods are actually great, but you just can’t skip the grammar and expect to progress. I tell my students to buy English Grammar for Students of Latin.
Instruction is all Classical, but once you have Classical it’s an easy step to medieval and Neo-Latin.