Comments on: Latin for the masses

By: Evan Millner

Evan Millner — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 18:41:18 +0000

You might be heartened to hear about Latinum, a latin language teaching podcast, that makes a complete three year advanced course in Latin available at no cost, worldwide. Since going online in 2007, approaching 3 million audio files have been downloaded from the podcast, and there are a handful of thousands of regular students following along with the course. Students using Latinum, will actually be able to speak and write in reasonably good Latin. To help them with this, a social networking site called schola was set up, which has a latin language chatroom http://schola.ning.com
There is now a daily Latin new bulletin in audio – there is a link to it on the schola pages, in addition to radio Finland’s weekly online offering. The internet is helping Latin stay vibrant. In addition, google books has given the language a huge boost, by making scores of thousands of Latin texts available as pdf files, opening up the entire corpus of Western Culture and Civilisation to the casual reader – thus giving Latin a huge boost.

By: universitydiary

universitydiary — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 23:07:41 +0000

True enough. Actually, though, it was a typo: I had meant to write ‘I still belong…’

By: F Bruynseels

F Bruynseels — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:07:45 +0000

Shouldn’t that be:

I still belonged to a generation that had had to learn Latin at school.

rather than

I still belonged to a generation that had to learn Latin at school.

By: Ellie Clewlow

Ellie Clewlow — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 11:41:09 +0000

Further to Luigi’s point about recent press debate in England, is the argument really about Latin or about the nature of the English language? You may already have seen an interesting contribution to the debate from Mary Beard in The Times (http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2008/11/its-bonkers-to.html) in which she argues that English has over time assimilated words from a whole range of languages. It is therefore misguided to attempt to cleanse English of one particular influence – you don’t, for example, see Bournemouth Council arguing for the removal of words of Norse or Norman origin….

The argument then becomes one of clarity of communication – Latin or not, do people understand what is being said to them? I would argue that much of the problem here doesn’t derive from phrases of latin origin that have been in common usage for a few centuries, but rather the jargon that pervades much official public discourse….’massification’ of higher education anyone?

By: Ultan

Ultan — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:21:43 +0000

This topic seems to be generated some interest here but also on a cross-reference over on Blogos: http://www.multilingualblog.com/index.php/weblog/latin-for-the-masses/

Perhaps a revival could be closer than we think…:)

By: An Cainteoir Dóchais

An Cainteoir Dóchais — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:19:32 +0000

In addition to my previous comment: the English experimental project is called Springboard to Languages. And then Wikipedia has some more information about the propaedeutic value of Esperanto.

By: universitydiary

universitydiary — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:18:18 +0000

Latin is a better basis for learning French than vice-versa – in part because French (like Spanish and Italian and Romanian and Portuguese and – to a lesser extent – English) is derived from Latin. Also, the Latin rules of grammar are much more consistent than those of any of these other languages.

I don’t know much – or even anything if I’m honest – about Esperanto. But it’s been around for a long time and simply hasn’t taken off. Latin would be a more logical; choice. But if we’re honest, the world’s lingua franca is going to be English.

By: An Cainteoir Dóchais

An Cainteoir Dóchais — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:11:11 +0000

The argument that Latin helps one “to understand the origin of words and the structure of grammar” is slightly misguided, in my opinion. It is not completely false, but the same could be said about most other European languages, ancient or modern. Most mainstream European languages are largely similar to one another due to extensive contact and borrowing (hence the notion of Standard Average European). So it doesn’t really matter which one you learn first, the subsequent ones will almost always be easier. French is easier to learn if you already speak Latin, and Latin is easier to learn if you already speak French.

In fact, if you’re looking for a language to teach as a tool for building language awarness and sensitivity to linguistic structures, then you should choose Esperanto. Like Latin, Esperanto has strong parallels with many European languages (mainly of the Romance variety) but has the added advantage of being very easy to learn. I hear it is being used for exactly this purpose in an experimental project in schools in England right now, but I can’t find the reference.

(Displaimer: I have no vested interest in promoting Esperanto. I don’t even speak Esperanto.)

By: Isabelle

Isabelle — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:24:00 +0000

Both Latin and Irish are classical languages, full of grammar, full of rules and with few exceptions, and they lay an excellent foundation for the study of other languages. When I learnt Swahili, Kikuyu and Japanese, they were the only languages I could draw on for the purposes of comparison.

I am rather sorry that the EU did not choose Latin as a common language of communication between us all — now we have 23 languages to contend with, when we could have had just one!

By: Luigi Muzii

Luigi Muzii — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:15:11 +0000

Three town councils in England have banned Latin words and phrases common in English because, as the folks in Bournemouth put it, "Not everyone knows Latin." Even worse, Latin's a problem in Bournemouth no matter what language you speak: "Many readers do not have English as their first language so using Latin can be particularly difficult." Long live Latin.