Re: Latin a loglang? (was Re: Unambiguous languages (was: EU allumettes))

Phillipus Canquantius scripsit:

>I remember that we were studying Latin texts just as
>if they were algebric formulas. The first thing to do
>was to find the verb, then the subject and the
>complements. It was just like a puzzle, with
>hypotheses (is this an ablative ? a dative ? Ok, let's
>try it with the ablative hypothese: oh no, doesn't
>work, so let's try the dative, etc.) A little like
>crosswords too.
>
>It was very seldom that we could imagine, or "feel",
>the general meaning of the sentence at first reading.
>We had to decipher, like it was a secret code. This
>was very different from learning a modern language.
>And more, we were reading aloud Latin just as if it
>were French, except for some conventional
>pronunciation rules. We never mattered about stress,
>long and short syllables, etc.
I derive part of me paycheck as the Latin instructor here at school
(Those that can, do. Those that can't, teach.) Most of my approach is
linked to the Cambridge Latin Course, which kinda sorta teaches Latin
like a natlang while I pull in additional material so that the little
gamins learn all the case endings as a mnemonic package. Having
mastered the SOV concept, students are quite adept at translating
sentences in normal word order, so they get the "feel" of the
sentence. But they overly rely on word order and context to translate
(cut 'em some slack; they're ten when they start); if you front
something, say, an accusative, they will still blithely translate it
as a subject. "Is it nominative?" I ask. "No." "Then don't start with
it in your English translation." At that point, we digress from
translating into parsing (endings, what case is it, what does the
verb refer to, etc.), which kinda gets into the "secret code" aspect
you were talking about. It's a fine line to tread. Cambridge, again,
tries to keep it as natlangy as possible, but doesn't clump vocab
items together in a unit as you might in a modern living language
course (colors, clothing, numbers....). Too, Cambridge marks long
vowels in the text, so that students can intuit where the stress goes
with little effort. I remember sitting in on a Latin class in a
private high school for a torturous "professional development" day,
and they were looking at scansion. The rules seemed overly complex:
Things along the lines of --vv---vv----vv (short vs. long vowels) or
whatever they are. I found it really easy (and I'm not a Latin
scholar). But the students didn't already have the intuitive
knowledge of where the short and long vowels went, so they had to,
like, count backwards from the end and multiply by pi. Fortunately, I
hope I've spared my students this.

Kou