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

On Monday, May 10, 2004, at 08:26 AM, Philippe Caquant wrote:

[snip]
> 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.
We were taught like that in the 1950s - but we were taught French in a
very similar way  :)

> It was very seldom that we could imagine, or "feel",
> the general meaning of the sentence at first reading.
I'm glad to say in the 6th Form (it's got some other name now - it what
you did after 16 while still st school) I did get around to reading it as
one would normally read a language.

And in the 1960s & 1970s things improved not only in the teaching of
modern languages, but in the teaching of Latin as well - especially with
courses like the Cambridge Latin Course and a similar type of course -
called IIRC 'Ecce Romani' - produced by a Scottish group. Latin was taught
as a language, not a puzzle.

> We had to decipher, like it was a secret code. This
> was very different from learning a modern language.
Nah - as I said, the two were much the same in my day - which is largely
why I can read French with tolerable fluency, but can't speak it at all
well   :-(

Also, indeed, since the 1960s, Latin has tended to be taught much more in
similar way to modern languages.

> 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.
Ach y fi! At least we were a little more enlightened on these matter this
side of La Manche even in the 1950s!

Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com    (home)
raymond.brown@kingston-college.ac.uk   (work)
===============================================
"A mind which thinks at its own expense will always
interfere with language."         J.G. Hamann, 1760

Reply