Quality assessment:
On
the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and
familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late,
unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and
lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr
Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr
Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his grubby
imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku
matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of
Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy
of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so
disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and
5/5 is "excellent"): 5/5. Justification: Kmo was able to be a little more thorough in this particular blog posting than in the general run of his postings.]
Revision history:
All
times in these blog "revision histories" are stated in UTC (Universal
Coordinated Time/ Temps Universel Coordoné, a precisification of the
old GMT, or "Greenwich Mean Time"), in the ISO-prescribed YYYYMMDDThhmmZ
timestamping format. UTC currently leads Toronto civil time by 5 hours
and currently lags Tallinn civil time by 2 hours.
- 20180215T1712Z/version 3.1.0: Kmo made a few small improvements in substance, most notably by adding remarks to help non-Catholic readers (highlighting the fact that there are two kinds of canonically permitted "Latin Mass" - the modern, post-1960s, "Ordinary Form" and the earlier, Council-of-Trent, "Extraordinary Form"), and by improving his citation of Sister Julia Holloway, and by correcting some typos stemming from the too-rapid typing of author names. He reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks, over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 3.1.1, 3.1.2, 3.1.3, ... .
- 20180214T1701Z/version 3.0.0: Kmo finished converting t=his finegrained outline into coherent full-sentences prose. (He had brought this work into a seemingly complete, but in fact typo-infested, state by 20180215T0441Z.) - Kmo reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 3.0.1, 3.0.2, ... .
- 20180213T2038Z/version 2.0.0: Kmo finished his finegrained outline.
He hoped to convert this into coherent full-sentences prose by
20180214T0001Z or so, through a series of incremental uploads.
- 20180213T0051Z/version
1.0.0: Kmo had time to upload a coarsegrained outline. He hoped to
convert this into a finegrained outline at some point in the coming 150
minutes, and over the next 60 minutes to make at least a start on
converting the finegrained outline into coherent full-sentences prose.
[CAUTION: A bug in the blogger
server-side software has in some past months shown a propensity to
insert inappropriate whitespace at some points in some of my posted
essays. If a screen seems to end in empty space, keep scrolling down.
The end of the posting is not reached until the usual blogger "Posted by Toomas (Tom) Karmo at" appears. - The blogger
software has also shown a propensity, at any rate when coupled with my
erstwhile, out-of-date, Web-authoring uploading browser, to generate
HTML that gets formatted in different ways on different downloading
browsers. Some downloading browsers have sometimes perhaps not correctly
read in the entirety of the "Cascading Style Sheets" (CSS) which on all
ordinary Web servers control the browser placement of margins,
sidebars, and the like. If you suspect CSS problems in your particular
browser, be patient: it is probable that while some content has been
shoved into some odd place (for instance, down to the bottom of your
browser, where it ought to appear in the right-hand margin), all the
server content has been pushed down into your browser in some place or
other. - Finally, there may be blogger
vagaries, outside my control, in font sizing or interlinear spacing or
right-margin justification. - Anyone inclined to help with
trouble-shooting, or to offer other kinds of technical advice, is
welcome to write me via Toomas.Karmo@gmail.com.]
1. Why Study Latin?
It is tempting to offer, as a justification for studying Latin, the supposed enhancement in a pupil's reasoning abilities. But maths and physics might do the same job more efficiently, especially if the maths were made to include a reasonable presentation of symbolic logic. (Here "reasonable" might mean, "up to the level of formal proofs in first-order predicate logic, without necessarily including formal model theory or formal canonical-model completeness proofs". A reasonable logic course at that level would also give some attention to natural-language subtleties, as in "if p, q" versus "p if q" versus "only if p is it the case that q" versus "p only if q" (four forms of words - expressing, however, just two different meanings), or again the triple ambiguity in "Only A-ish Bs are Cs" (equivalently, "None but A-ish Bs are Cs") and the triple ambiguity in "All but A-ish Bs are Cs", and again the distinction (crucial as soon as we encounter the definition of limit in calculus) between "for every positive real number epsilon there exists a real number delta such that..." and "there exists a real number delta such that for every positive real number epsilon...". The formal-proofs component of the course ought to feature either Smullyan-style semantic tableaux or Lemmon-style natural deduction. In specifically Catholic schools, it might be helpful also to have brisk, mildly irreverent, historical aside regarding the limitations of Aristotelian syllogistic, as an object lesson in the real and yet limited respect we must, in our overarching allegiance to Truth and Science, sometimes accord to Tradition.)
Further, it is tempting to justify the study of Latin as distinctively strengthening the pupil's English. This unconvincing line of reasoning is even a little poignant. For good or ill, that undisciplined free-for-all, that booming discothèque, which is English is the very language to have assumed, since 1960 or so, in our entire shcolarly and scientific world, the status traditionally accorded in the West to Latin. School pupils destined for a career in law or politics might well be struggling with Shakespeare, Newman, Churchill, Eliot, Steinbeck, Hemingway, and the like in the remote future, even as in their counterparts in the West have traditionally struggled with Cicero and Ovid. I sketch what such a (rather grim) future might be like right here on blogspot, in the final section of a posting from 2016-12-12 or 2016-12-13, headed "Resisting One's Depression: The Example of Wartime Britain".
The idea that Latin in a special and distinctive way improves one's English is (to repeat) unconvincing. Some improvement doubtless does ensue. How could it not ensue, at any rate given that the pupil is forced to deal in a rigorous way with grammar? But the same amount of time spent on a rigorous course of English composition, without reference to Latin (and with, on the other hand, due reference to the English pluperfect indicative, to the English present subjunctive, to English subordinate-clause structures, and the like) is likely to confer greater benefits.
Thirdly, it is tempting to justify the study of Latin by claiming that Latin eases a pupil's way into the Romance languages. Here, finally, is an argument with some strength. For the pupil with Latin in hand, fully three major languages (namely, Spanish, French, and Italian - to say nothing of Portuguese and Romanian) assume the same rather straightforward appearance that German has for Anglos and English for Germans, or that Finnish has for Estonians and Estonian for Finns.
I myself studied French before Latin, and so cannot speak effectively to the French side of the (strong) argument just offered. As far as Spanish goes, it is at any rate true that, having Latin, I can glance without fear at the Spanish of two currently key texts - at the Taizé hymn "Nada Te Turbe", and at the contemplative counsels of Padre Fray Alberto E. Justo, O.P. (The counsels are even available here at
blogspot, in the original Spanish and someone's good English version, as my posting of 2016-04-18 or 2016-04-19 headed "Regla para Eremitas - Rule for Hermits", as a reprint from Sister Julia Holloway's
http://www.umilta.net/eremit.html. If the Gentle Reader has Latin without having Spanish, she or he could follow in my footsteps.)
And as far as Italian goes, I gather from one or two quick experiments that Dante proves more or less readable without a dictionary, given an accompanying English translation, and given also a certain willingness to think laterally and fuzzily (approaching Italian, in this fuzziness, as some delightfully deformed Latin-of-the-Lombards).
The real - the conclusive - reason for studying Latin is different from the two rather weak reasons and the one rather strong reason just considered. Latin is a time machine. With it, we can to some extent enter into the inner lives of people from even before our own Middle Ages.
To do this in Greek proves harder, unless we a little artificially confine our horizon to the easy "Koiné Greek" of the New Testament.
To do this in Blblical Hebrew is to my mind decidedly hard. I have remarked on the hardships in at least three postings here at blogspot:
- on 2017-07-03 or 2017-07-04, under the heading "Further to Mr Kaller: Three Theological Shocks"
- on 2017-07-10 or 2017-07-11, under the heading "Study Aids for Biblical Hebrew"
- on 2017-07-17 or 2017-07-18, under the heading "More Study Aids for Biblical Hebrew"
Latin, by contrast, has a grammar just one level of intricacy up from something straightforward, namely modern German. Latin has a compact, logical, system of cases, memorably parodied in Alice in Wonderland ("A Mouse, Of a Mouse, To a Mouse: O Mouse!" - but more pedantically accurate, while less vivid, would have been "A Mouse, From a Mouse, Of a Mouse, To a Mouse: O Mouse!"). It is perhaps even an advantage that in Latin the modern German case simplifications - the blurrings, the collapses of dividing walls; in other words the duplications of forms in distinct case-gender combinations - are absent. The Latin verb, although intricate, lacks the dreaded classical-Greek Middle Voice, confining itself in a pleasingly sober way to just the two-way distinction between Active Voice and Passive Voice.
Further, thanks to almost two millennia of systematized teaching, we know just how long it takes to master Latin declensions and conjugations, for the pupil of average intelligence at or beyond late adolescence. With decently brisk instruction books, such a pupil does not need six hundred desk hours. Three hundred, perhaps even two hundred, or in the case of a really gifted pupil under two hundred, are known to suffice. An efficient school would ensure that the pupil is not wearied with too many auditorium hours on top of those desk hours. (This is perhaps as good a place as any to remark on the striking difference between the inefficient campuses of North America and the much better methods of Oxford, at any rate as I knew them in the 1970s: on the North American side of the Pond, you are expected to cut up your working day with lots and lots of "lectures", whereas in Oxford lectures took up scant time, with people expected to labour for the most part at their private desks, for the most part teaching themselves.) And compact tables of what needs to be mastered abound, even in the municipal libraries (let alone the university libraries) and the same middle-brow big-chain bookstores as sell Grisham novels. So here is a project that can be taken to completion, as "Foundational Latin", in just two academic semesters, clearing the way swiftly for the more stimulating vistas of "Latin Authors".
The British philosopher, and also eminent historian of Roman Britain, R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943) asserts somewhere that historians - real historians, as opposed to mere chroniclers and compilers-of-dates - rethink the identical thoughts of their long-dead protagonists. For him, when historians stand, as it might be, on the masonry of those low Roman remains at Manchester, the same thought forms in their minds as formed in the mind of some long-departed legionary.
Quite how far to take this rather Teutonic-seeming, rather "British Idealist" (in the sense of Bosanquet and F.H. Bradley) reflection of Collingwood's, I do not know. Collingwood took it with the highest seriousness, I think positing the act of thinking as a contingently existing, and yet time-spanning, reality identically formed by individual minds in distinct historical epochs, even as one and the same comet might be seen by two observers on two continents.
But I do remark, in some sympathy with R.G. Collingwood, that the direct, visceral thrill of reading, say, Caesar's account of Vercingetorix gets lost in every translation. In something at least approximating R.G. Collingwood's exalted sense, we are there, right in Caesar's mind, when we grapple with Caesar's surviving words, contemplating with him the ruin of Vercingetorix's Alesia.
In particular, it is upon reading the Romans themselves, in their own language, that we best apprehend what they themselves (correctly) saw as setting them apart from the other nations in Mediterranean history. They were not in a deep sense set apart by their material achievements, distinctive though these were. (Nobody else in the Mediterranean world invented concrete, the substnce to which we owe that miracle of present-day conservation - dome intact - which is the Pantheon. Nobody else built roads, sewers, and aqueducts that remained in municipal service for two millennia. No city was as huge, and perhaps no city as filled with public works, as the Roman capital. Even the fact (cf
http://factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub369/item2066.html) of 29 public libraries in the Rome of 350 A.D., to say nothing of its baths and temples, is astounding.) They were aware how far they fell short, in all their prowess as engineers, of the philosophical and mathematical brilliance of the Greeks. A well-placed Roman male did not consider his education complete until he knew at least something of Greek philosophy and Greek geometry, and was able to compose (as, most famously, Marcus Aurelius composed) in Greek.
The Romans also at some level realized how wide a gulf separated them from the theologically deep Hebrews. The awareness might perhaps go some distance toward explaining their blind, Shoah-like, fury at Jerusalem in 70 A.D. Toward the end of their civilization, the Romans indeed took the greatest pains, under Saint Jerome's leadership, to disseminate all canonical Hebrew scriptures in a suitably simple, direct, vernacular, popularizing Latin. (Saint Jerome's
Biblia Vulgata, while by no means far removed from the language of Cicero and Caesar, nevertheless strives to put everything into the simple, direct terms of the "vulgus", in other words of the toiling Roman masses.)
Yet the Romans correctly insisted that the achievements of Greeks and Hebrews notwithstanding, they themselves would be remembered for their skill in government. Here is one of the various fields of activity foundational to culture, and in its distinctively successful Roman incarnation so readily open, through so simple a time machine, to our own apprehension.
****
I will now add a few remarks for the benefit of two particular groups of people, each of which has its own special reasons for taking Latin seriously.
First, we have my own Church, in its Anglosaxonia branches forever fretting over liturgy. The more one delves into questions of Anglo-Saxon liturgical propriety, the more one realizes how deep the bog goes, and how liable laity (I among them) are to err in one direction or another.
On one side are the "conservatives" (to use a rather inappropriate schematizing shorthand): the people who rightly point out what a disservice has been done to English-speaking Catholics by recent, post-1960s, Mass translations. In Latin, the current Ordinary Form runs,
Domine, non svm dignvs vt intres svb tectvm mevm; sed tantvm dic verbvm, et sanabitvr anima mea. So what did we, the laity, sitting in our humble American or Canadian (or whatever) pews, say until just a few years ago? We unfortunately prayed, "Lord, I am not worthy to receive You, but only say the word..." Now at last the error is repaired, and we more appropriately pray (bringing Anglo practice into line with. e.g., the canonically approved Estonian translation of this same Mass, and I suspect likewise into line with canonically approved French, German, Flemish, Hindi, you-name-it practices), "Lord, I am not worthy that You should enter under my roof, but only say the word..."
I should explain for the benefit of non-Catholics, and perhaps also of some Catholics, that this is a notably strong passage, which it is good not to water down. The quotation is in fact the Gospel plea of a Roman officer (in other words, of an officer from the hated occupation), asking Our Lord to heal his "pais" (παῖς). (The Greek word "pais" here means either "servant" or "boyfriend" - take your pick, folks.) Well might that occupation officer say in deference to rabbinical sensibilities - especially, we might add, if here was a bit of typical Roman-culture same-sexery, so unthinkable in respectable Hebrew circles - "I am not worthy to have you come into my home", or in straightforward and literal terms "under my roof". It is the same terrible physicality of the Eucharist, in which the Host (the hostia, the Sacrifice) is received between tongue and hard palate at the communion rail, in a Reality for which words fail us, that the Ordinary Form communicates. And this is the physicality that the inadequate English translation tried to cover up, even as post-1960s Anglo culture inclines to cover up realities of disease, disgrace, and death, with its euphemistic prattle of "health issues", "personal challenges", and "funeral homes".
On the other side are the "liberals", who rightly point out - I saw this argued in compelling terms last week in the rather distinguished columns of the Catholic online Commonweal - how stilted is some of the recent Ordinary Form English translation, in its misguided recent efforts at rendering the Ordinary Form Latin phrase for Latin phrase. What is wanted (as the Commonweal journalist, to my mind persuasively, maintained) is not a phrase-for-phrase correspondence, as in some mere Latin Semester Two exam, but a concept-by-concept equivalence, duly sensitive to post-1960s Anglo culture even its sterile banality, as its 1970s-through-2000s predecessor translation, with its faults, tried to be. The Commonweal writer cited, tellingly, some such ancient theorist-of-translation as Saint Jerome, thereby showing how Roman antiquity had a grasp of translation superior to what is currently on offer from the Catholic liturgical authorities.
The more we dig into this tussle between "liberals" and "conservatives", the more treacherous seems the boggy ground under our feet. And yet there is a solution, appropriate at least for those Catholics of a somewhat literary, scholarly, inquisitive, and skeptical bent. Let us participate in the English-language Ordinary Form, respectfully enough, as everyone else here in Canada and the USA (and I suspect elsewhere in Anglosaxonia) does. But let us additionally refer to the Latin of the Ordinary Form in our private devotions, while perhaps also eventually learning about that Form's predecessor, the "Extraordinary Form" in Latin use from the Council of Trent right up to the 1960s Second Vatican Council. Further, let us in our private devotions do the easy, pleasant, natural thing with the Liturgy of the Hours, selecting the Post-Second-Vatican-Council Latin in place of the English, from our iBreviary smartphone app or our www.universalis.com browser download.
There is nothing reactionary, in other words nothing smacking of arch-"conservative" dissident Marcel Lefebvre, in selecting Latin on those terms. The Latin breviary is the current, modern, breviary, canonically promulgated, with the full liturgical authority of the post-Council Catholic hierarchy. But by using it, we step back from any possible squabbles between "liberal" and "conservative" factions within the Church.
Some will ask: what, then, about Pope Francis? How does he handle this one, not in his Papal capacity but as a private Catholic? I know the answer, thanks to some online reading in some Catholic journalism such as
America or
The Tablet or
Commonweal or
Catholic Herald or
Crux: Francis himself uses, without being at all loud about the somewhat private fact, Latin. I suspect only that he is careful not to flash his battered Latin hardcover breviary in front of such potentially excitable organizations as CNN, NBC, the BBC, Aljazeera, or Deutsche Welle.
The second of my two groups of target people (I mean, people in a position to benefit from Latin) will be less obvious.
Nowadays, Latin is predictably neglected in the West in impoverished K12 schools, and is being taught with predictable vigour in such K12 schools as are favoured by parents from the élite. (Here are two examples of schools teaching Latin, out of many: in Ontario is tony, dignified Upper Canada College; and in Estonia's Tartu County there is the correspondingly, though I suppose more modestly, tony and dignified Hugo Treffneri Gümnaasium.) What, then, happens in Russia?
I have not studied this question hard. Nevertheless, the assertion by Aleksandr Podossinov that thirty schools in Moscow, and seven even in Smolensk, teach Latin is suggestive. (For this particular observer of the educational scene, one might Google under the string
Podossinov classical education in Russia today.) Also suggestive is the existence of the pair of allied Sankt Peterburg institutions readily googleable as
Bibliotheca Classica Petropolitana and
Gymnasium Classicum Petropolitanum.
Ever since Mr Putin's disastrous 2014 decisions regarding Crimea and Donbass, Russia has been looming, now for the umpteenth time, as our leading Western diplomatic problem. A problem this vast - it bulks now pretty much as huge as it bulked in 1990, even in 1986 - lacks a simple solution. All we can do is chip away at barriers, bit by bit. We do this in the knowledge that diplomatic understanding comes less from governments than from citizens, dealing in kindly ways across cruelly patrolled frontiers with their citizen counterparts.
One way for individual Russians to now open a window to the West, without getting themselves into police trouble, is through the humble K12 teaching of classics. In this worthy enterprise, some particular attention might be given to Roman conceptions of governance, especially to the Roman respect for law. If nobody else in Russia will buy into this, at least parents in the élite will. I have most particularly in mind the kind of parents not rich enough to send their sons to Eton-Winchester-Harrow, or their daughters to Switzerland, but all the same gainfully employed in decision-making positions. Soon in this present posting, I will be mentioning a few practical books for Latin work (Betts, and the Revised Kennedy, and Gildersleeve-with-Lodge, and Allen-with-Greenough).
My readers - more vigorous than ever this week? - in the organs of Russian state security are not Hollywood cardboard-cutout villains. Some of them will, on the other hand, be from the very section of the Russian élite to which I have just now been referring. Although I am too poor, and too busy, to get copies of good Latin reference books into Russia, some within the Russian organs may be sympathetic to what I am writing here regarding international understanding, and may accordingly prove able to act.
2. How to Study Latin?
Latin presents in an extreme form the appeal, indeed the distinctive glory, of a dead language. Here is not the appeal of the living garden, but the specialized dignity - in its own way soberly appealing - of the herbarium. People who write Latin will find scant scope for disputes on what is "fully correct grammar", or even on what constitutes "best style". All is rigid, all is codified, in a way that might shock the freedom-loving Anglo-Saxon, but nevertheless smacks of rational government, in a rather severely Roman spirit.
The grammar is what we get in the reference works (all of them, as far as their prescriptions go, agreeing: what can be disputed is only the extent to which the various individual surviving authors, in conforming to or departing from the rules defining best practice, are "good" or "less "good").
Further, the best Latin prose style is by universal consent what we get in Cicero.
Caesar is not quite the acme of style, being a bit self-consciously sparse. Caesar, alas, recalls those parodies I like to write, explaining How to be Hemingway: "Short words are good. Short words work best when you have to write your stuff out. Why? Well, you see, short words pack a hard punch. You will find that tough guys choose short words. Yup."
Authors later than those two contending contemporaries, the too-bare Caesar and the exactly-right Cicero, are likewise not the acme of style, becoming in one way or another too ornate - until, indeed, we get to Saint Jerome's very-very-late
Biblia vulgata, which is once again in a forced way plain.
It is remarkable, and perhaps (for all I know) it is even without parallel in other world literatures, that one single prose writer could come to embody all that is best in a language in daily use over centuries, by tens of millions of rather literate people, with ethnic backgrounds ranging from Egyptian and Bithynian to Welsh.
It is in addition in a pragmatic sense appealing that the total surviving corpus of classical Latin literature should be so compact. Let the Gentle Reader visit the stacks of her or his nearest large university library. The Latin classics will be found to fit into just a few tens of shelf-metres.
Here there has been a strong winnowing effect. Of every hundred published words from Roman antiquity, perhaps around ten have survived. That figure is mentioned with caution at
http://www.historyofinformation.com/narrative/loss-of-information.php, as one estimate among others, and with the warning that the true figure cannot be known. While rejoicing in the practical fact that the corpus is now compact, we must all contemplate the Roman catastrophe in a silent awe, wondering to what degree, and how soon, what is said at
www.historyofinformation.com regarding Rome will apply also to us. (There was a "gradual overall deterioration of institutions"; "as the Roman army, government officials, and business classes assumed the styles and customs of the conquering Ostrogoths and later the Lombards, Roman civilization faded, Roman education slowly diminished, and the body of literature studied and revered by the educated in Antiquity ceased to be read, cherished, and most of all, ceased to be copied, distributed and preserved"; "gradually, and at varying rates in different regions, many of the functions of writing lost importance in society or disappeared altogether": to be sure, this fine analyst does underscore the survival of religious reading.)
Of the surviving prose from Latin literature up to 476 A.D., something like a fifth or a quarter, or perhaps more (I have not been able to dig up reasonable statistics on a quick Web search) is from just one author, the universally praised Cicero. And from Cicero, what a haul! We have from him not only forensically powerful speeches, but also stylistically engaging family letters, right down to the banal bathroom level, in the
ad Familiares 14.20 which I translated for myself this week:
in tvscvlanvm nos ventvros pvtamvs aut nonis avt postridie. ibi vt sint omnia parata. plvres enim fortasse nobisvm ervnt et, vt arbtitror, divutivs ibi commorabimvr. labrvm si in balineo non est, vt sit; item cetera quae svnt ad victvm et ad valetvdinem necessaria. vale. ("We think we shall be coming to the Tusculan estate either on the Nones of this month or on the day following. So let everything be prepared over there. Several people will possibly be with us; and, as I am judging it, we shall be staying for a longer period. If the tub happens not to be in the bathing-place, then let it be there; and likewise for the other things necessary to life or health. Be well." - This is exactly like seeing Churchill, as known in the formal setting of his parliamentary speeches and his World War II memoirs, writing home from school. If I recall accurately what I read a long time ago, somewhere or other, he sent a letter to nanny or parents complaining that his personal "exchequer" was at that instant "depleted".)
Also from surviving prose are good hauls, albeit now with painful losses, from Tacitus and Livy.
On the side of poetry, the frightening, occasionally arbitrary, winnow of history has managed to see to it that Vergil (universally applauded) comes through intact.
It is also remarkable that some really creepy poetry - some beyond-pornographic Juvenal, which I have so far not read in Latin - made it through the Dark Ages winnowing. How were such things even possible? Surely dear Brother Wulfstan and dear Father Albertus, scratching so diligently with their big quills on their precious vellum in their dim and chilly Dark-Ages scriptoria, while dreading the next Viking raid, were strong enough in their Latin to understand the so-un-Catholic Juvenal?
It is also striking how large Augustine looms, as a kind of transitional colossus, with one foot in the classical and the other in the mediaeval world. So far, I have scarcely even tried reading the Latin Augustine. He is one of those late stylists, burdened by the ornateness of an age that overvalued rhetoric. But oh (the deplorable ornateness notwithstanding), what a wonderful radical, and at the same time what a wonderful Roman!
The sometime imperial capital fell. The ancient city - at that stage capital no longer, but still dominating Italy in population and opulence - got totally bashed. Alaric did it, in 410 A.D., as the culmination in a series of political-diplomatic misjudgements (many of them on the side not of Goths but of Romans). Hearing of the celebrated Sack, Saint Jerome apparently became quite the Drama Queen - "It is the end of the world ... The city which took captive the whole world has itself been captured." (I have not, to be sure, yet tried this celebrated Jerome epistle in Latin, mindful though I realize one must be of R.G. Collingwood's precepts regarding historical reconstruction.)
And Saint Augustine? So far, I have read just perhaps the first third of
De civitate Dei contra paganos, and this almost entirely just in English. But I do know - everybody knows - the essence of Augustine's so-ornately-worked argument. Here is the Reader's Digest Condensed Books version of what Augustine prolixly said: "Well, get over it. Stuff happens. Rome is not in the final analysis of the first importance."
Of these two commentators - the Drama Queen with all that time spent in the Levant, and the eminent Bishop-Get-Over-It down in North Africa - which, O Gentle Reader, strikes you as the truer Roman? I have an easy, made-up-Latin, school reader entitled
Civis Romanus ("Roman citizen"). The claim
svm civis romanvs could be uttered with pride, and was uttered with pride even by Saint Paul.
Anyway, all I am really trying to say here is that the surviving corpus of Latin literature is pleasantly compact, and that it pays all the respect rightly due to the so-well-conserved Cicero, and that its last towering intellect (Saint Augustine) is also in his own kinky, scary, way fun.
****
Various pitfalls await the person - perhaps, as I have now sketched, in Catholic Anglosaxonia, perhaps in troubled Russia; but perhaps elsewhere also - seeking to start Latin. I want next to report, from my admittedly thin experience, two things suggestive of looming barriers.
(1) One might think YouTube a good source for Latin pronunciation. And there are indeed some good clips, including a stunningly bravura reading from the orations
in Catalinam (or from some similar Cicero legislature-or-trial speech). There is likewise a stunningly clear, accurate, crisp declamation of a political manifesto by those
novaroma.org people who are trying, in a colourful defiance of
De civitate Dei contra paganos, to revive the Roman Empire. On the other hand, mixed in with the good is also some surprisingly bad material. Someone on YouTube goes so far as to present the Catholic ecclesial pronunciation, without explaining that he is working from a distinctively ecclesial standpoint, and that the Classics Department on pretty much every campus in pretty much every industrialized country in our current world will pronounce every seventh or fifth word a little differently.
(2) I have spoken directly with a student at the University of Toronto, intent on a scientific career, and around 2006 or so taking the necessary humanities "Breadth Requirement". "Breadth" was in her case achieved in part through the Classics Department, through some course of Latin. What could go wrong? Well, her course consisted not of Latin but of "scientific Latin" - with week upon week wasted on the etymology of individual Latinate scientific terms, without the systematic reading of authors, without (I strongly suspect) even an appropriate grounding in syntax.
Concerning the first of these two abuses, it is helpful to put ourselves, somewhat in the spirit of R.G. Collingwood, into the minds of the people who devised the Roman alphabet.
The Romans themselves were obsessed with public speaking, and had a correspondingly strong interest in pronunciation. One of the poets, I think some such major poet as Catullus or Horace, at one point ridicules a Roman who mishandles his aitches, in a Roman anticipation of the comedic Cockney heroine Eliza Doolittle. Further, we know that one of the emperors was ridiculed by his subjects for retaining a Punic accent (and for therefore sounding provincial, rube, and redneck).
The archaic, pre-Republican, Romans had sophisticated Greeks nearby - not just in Greece, but in the Greek colonies within the Italian mainland and Sicily. And yet the Romans elected to make a heavy, and one therefore suspects a duly pondered, modification in the Greek letters which they had come to know from their Hellenic neighbours. Even before we consult the Bible of Latin pronunciation, W. Sidney Allen's
Vox Latina (optimally using the second edition, published in 1989 at Cambridge University Press, and still in print), we might well conjecture that the Roman aim was to construct a fully phonetic, fully rational, writing system, tailored to the peculiarities of Latin speech. So, in particular, we might well suspect the
C and
G, because similar in visual appearance, to be also phonemically similar. Sidney Allen (along with every abridged, competent modern discussion of Latin pronunciation, in every competent modern handbook) bears the conjecture out:
C is hard, as in the English "cattle", and
G hard, as in the the English "gift". It makes good sense that the Romans, departing from the Greek gamma and kappa, should have chosen pretty much the same shape for writing these two sounds, adding just a little decorative lower-right-hand flourish to signal the gamma-like voicing of their unvoiced kappa-equivalent.
So the name
CICERO is to be sounded with a pair of hard kappa-sounds, as in "cattle", rather than (as has been traditional in Anglosaxonia) with a pair of sigma-sibilants, and the name
GELLIVS likewise with a hard "g".
I do have here to concede the surprising fact that the professional Roman phonetic theorists themselves - so says Sidney Allen, and he is, I repeat, authoritative - failed in their own surviving corpus of phonological theory to introduce the elementary-seeming concepts of voiced consonant and unvoiced consonant.
In our own writing of Latin, we perhaps do well to drop the modern, un-Roman, distinctions between "u" and "v", and between "i" and "j", reverting to the styling we see chiselled in Latin inscriptions - so
GELLIVS indeed (not "GELLIUS"), and moreover
IVLIVS (not "JULIUS"). For the classical Roman, the latter was "yoo-lyuss", not "dzhoo-lyuss".
But what is the conscientious Catholic to do about pronunciation? Our Church makes a significant minority of words non-classical, in an Italianate scheme not really nailed into place until the nineteenth century. Before that time, there were many "national pronunciations" of Latin, with the nun, brother, or priest from, say, Flanders pronouncing things differently from an ecclesial colleague in, say, Croatia. Here I simply say, "Let us all relax." In private devotions, we Catholic laity can surely be as rigorously classical as we please. If, on the other hand, we happen to be attending a Latin mass (whether celebrated in the modern Novus Ordo or in its Tridentine predecessor), as at Holy Family in Toronto's inner suburb of Parkdale, then I suppose we do best just to play along, so as not to stick out in the congregation - happy, or at least not desperately unhappy, in the knowledge that since it is only fifth or seventh word that is going put through a nineteenth-century Italianate wringer, Saint Augustine, Saint Jerome, Caesar, and Cicero would still understand us.
It is a bit like Hebrew. If you were to use the Biblical pronunciation of Hebrew in contemporary Jerusalem, you would be understood, even though people would start wondering why (e.g.) your Resh and your Gimel-without-Dagesh are respectively so like a softened Finnish-Estonian R and so like the modern Parisian R. In modern street Hebrew, it is Resh that matches the modern Parisian R, with the softened Finnish-Estonian R unusual or absent. I think that in the modern street language, the Gimel-without-Dagseh and the Gimel-with-Dagesh both kinda-sorta become a Greek gamma, whereas in the Biblical pronunciation only the latter is gamma-like.
It would become a sort of replay of what we read in the Gospels, where Peter is fingered on Good Friday as a Galilean, for having the redneck-or-rube Aramaic (or even Hebrew?) accent of the hinterland, in contrast with the received pronunciation of the Temple precinct. People in Temple circles object to his accent, while understanding clearly enough what he is on the Good Friday morning so noisily denying.
Concerning the second of the two Latin abuses, we simply have to grit our teeth and (unlike the science student who told me of her on-campus Latin experience) read, read, read.
If really necessary, then let us read from simple books of made-up Latin, such as the Latin telling of Winnie the Pooh. I notice today that this is available for free, as a PDF, through the URL
http://www.arretetonchar.fr/wp-content/uploads/2013/IMG/archives/Divertissement/Latine%20Legere/Winnie%20Ille%20Pu.pdf. Without giving the PDF more than a couple of minutes, I do find it a thing of delight, even while stumbling (i did not bother to open a reference handbook or a lexicon) over many of its so-refined phrasings. Here is a sample passage, illustrating what I did read without stumbling:
'potesne Winnie Ille Pvo fabvlam narrare?'
'censeo me posse,' dixi. 'qvales fabvlas diligit?'
'de seipso. nam talis vrsvs est.'
(Translating back, without cheating by looking into the A.A. Milne original: "'Can you tell Winnie the Pooh a story?' - 'I believe I can,' said I. 'What kind of stories does he like?' - 'Ones about himself. For he is that kind of bear.'")
Or, if we haughtily judge A.A Milne to be beneath us, we could, I suppose, use something like my already-mentioned little schoolbook, CIVIS ROMANUS: A Reader for the First Two Years of Latin. (This is a production of "J.M. Cobban, M.A. Headmaster of Abingdon School" and "R. Colebourn, M.A. Assistant Master, Taunton's School, Southampton", "with 4 illustrations and 2 maps", at Methuen in London. My copy is a 1956 reprint. The work first came out in 1936.)
But one should as soon as humanly possible embark on the real, historical, authors. The guiding consideration upon so embarking must be: How extensive are the explanatory notes? For most of us (for me, for instance, at this instant at perhaps the level of competence of a person partway through University Semester Four), it is necessary to have lots and lots of notes, to a point at which the notes make up a third or a half of the printed page.
This job has been done over and over, at least in Anglosaxonia, with endless "school editions", for Caesar, Cicero, and the three or so best poets, and for other reputable authors also. In my own case, I have profited from the old circa-1960 Province of Ontario Latin Prose Selections for Grade XIII, issued without date at Thomas Nelson and Sons Limited in Toronto ("Edited, with Introduction, Notes, and Vocabulary, by D. Beslove, M.A. Lawrence Park Collegiate Institute, Toronto J.H. Cameron, M.A. Hon. J.C. Patterson C.I., Windsor R.H. King, M.A. Scarboro Collegiate Institute Helen C. Toll, B.A. Forest Hill Collegiate Institute H.L. Tracy, B.A., Ph.D. Queen's University - Prescribed by the Department of Education, Ontario, for Grade XIII Examination").
It is uncanny how such old books anticipate one's difficulties, answering 95 percent or 99 percent of the questions that come up (and only occasionally putting endurance and good humour to the test by pedantically spelling out the already obvious). Here is an example, from my Ontario Grade XIII text. Cicero is working himself up into a red Roman heat in the Senate, urging that Catiline be brought to account as a threat to public order. O di immortales! vbinam gentivm svmvs? in qva urbe vivimus? qvam rempvblicam habemus? The notes explain one thing which is already verging on the obvious, namely that qvam rem pvblicam here means "What sort of government have we?" Yet even this does have to be said, to forestall pupils who will robotically, unthinkingly, translate "What sort of republic have we?", carelessly neglecting to point out the particular thrust of the idiom in its particular context. The notes do many of us a big favour, on the arguably more opaque vbinam gentivm, as follows:
"where in the world", lit. "in what place, now, of nations"; gentium is a partitive gen. Nam, when attached as an enclitic to an adverb or interrogative pronoun, signifies impatience or surprise.
This particular example I take from a point in the admirable reader at which Cicero is accorded less than one third of the page, with all the rest going to explanatory notes. We have here one of the most memorable speeches delivered in any legislative assembly, in any epoch. Bestlove-Cameron-King-Toll-Tracy were right in giving Ontario's youngsters assistance "in full measure, heaping over", in a fully laudable attempt at leaving none of their pupils behind.
****
Having just discussed one practical tool in detail, I will round things out with a survey, for the most part less detailed, of other necessary tools.
It is often said that Wheelock is a good introduction. That may be so. But Wheelock, in his many editions, looks oddly bulky. The whole aim in Latin has to be to read, read, read, from real historical authors, starting this core activity as soon as possible. My own former teacher Gavin Betts covers what needs to be covered (all the overarching big-picture rules, and all the initially required fine points also) in his affordable 1992 or 2000 Hodder-and-Stoughton paperback,
Teach Yourself Latin.
Admittedly, when I had Prof. Betts (at Monash University in Melbourne, for all three terms of 1982 and for the culminating, Vergilian, term of 1983; the three-term Australian academic year runs from January through October), his book was as yet unwritten. Prof. Betts instead took us, his pupils, through a bad old book, likewise in the Hodder-and-Stoughton "Teach Yourself" stable. This doddering workhorse was from F. Kinchin Smith, and was entitled
Latin: A Complete Course for Beginners.
Folks, it is easy enough to tell the good Hodder-and-Stoughton "Teach Yourself" apart from its weaker Hodder-and-Stoughton predecessor. Open your book to the third set of exercises. If the first exercise in that set reads
pver caprum amabat ("The boy was loving the goat" - the imperfect, as here in
amabat, is often a signal of progressive past action, as yet incomplete), then the one you have is Kinchin Smith. In that unhappy case, you have to try to get Betts instead.
I have already said enough on readers (in the sense of anthologies-with-notes) when discussing the old Ontario Grade XIII offering.
Along with a reader has to go a reference book, covering the fine grammatical points in a way more systematic than is feasible for a mere Wheelock or a mere "Teach Yourself", however good. (For instance, there is the genitive-of-description and the ablative-of-description. A good reference book will explain the difference, giving in each case one or two or three or four examples, in the context of a fully systematic survey of genitive usages and ablative usages.)
In that early stage which is University Semester Three, or its K12 equivalent, it suffices to work from the tried-and-true "Revised Kennedy". Here is what we read in
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/book-of-a-lifetime-kennedys-latin-primer-by-benjamin-hall-kennedy-942649.html, from a 2008-09-25
Independent article by Cambridge University classicist Professor Mary Beard:
It has lived in my desk, thumbed, defaced, treasured and from time to time mistreated, for more than 40 years, since I was 12. Benjamin Hall Kennedy's Revised Latin Primer is the Rolls Royce of textbooks and surely the longest lived: 120 years after its publication it is still the best-selling book in the Classics section of my university bookshop. At school, in our second year of Latin, we were each given our own copies - and told that when we knew what was included within its unexpectedly bright covers, we would then "know Latin".
My own experience matches hers perfectly. My own Revised Kennedy, bought new as a sewn-binding paperback, is thumbed and thumbed and thumbed, now to the point at which its spine is coming off and its binding thread is threatening to break. (And on the flyleaf I have fine Ciceronian words, in some fountain pen of mine from long ago:
Haec stvdia advlescentiam alvnt, senectvtem oblectant - "These studies nourish youth, they entertain old age.")
Readers here at
blogspot proposing to buy the Revised Kennedy for themselves might, however, beware of the recent publishing history, which has involved some (possibly contentious?) reformatting, or some other potentially significant changes. The Amazon purchaser reviews should be consulted before money gets paid out. For what little it is perhaps worth, I do remark that my own now-battered copy, in which I do have full confidence, is at the publisher Longman, formally under the authorship of "Bemjamin Hall Kennedy, D.D.", and under the imposing title
The Revised Latin Primer - Edited and Further Revised by Sir James Mountford, D.Litt., D.C.L, LL.D. What I have is a "New edition 1962", as "New impression 1975", under ISBN 0 582 36240 7.
The Revised Kennedy, while authoritative, does not in and of itself suffice. It would be nice if a single Bible existed, in English, for the syntax and idioms of classical Latin, matching the authority commanded in pronunciation by W. Sidney Allen. As far as I can make out (though I am happy to be corrected now, by the
blogspot readership), no such English-language Bible exists. We must instead, if we are working within Anglosaxonia, make do with a pair of very old authorities. These I managed to buy in rather cheap, hard-covered, durably bound, facsimile reprints from India, just a couple of years ago:
- Allen and Greenoughs [sic] New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges: Founded on Comparative Grammar (by Joseph Henry Allen, J.B. Greenough, George Lyman Kittredge, and Albert Andrew Howard; my 2016 reprint, under ISBN 8888000021087 from "Facsimile Publisher 103 DDA Market Ashok Vihar, Phase-3 Delhi-110052" incorrectly represents this work as having appeared in 1916, when in fact Ginn and Company (in Boston, New York, and a string of other cities) seem to have brought it out in 1903)
- Gildersleeve's Latin Grammar: Third Edition, Revised and Enlarged_ (by B.L. Gildersleeve and Gonzalez Lodge, originally at Macmillan in London in 1903; my reprint, again from "103 DDA Market Ashok Vihar", is dated 2016, and is issued under ISBN 9789333372671)
Neither Allen-and-Greenough nor Gildersleeve-and-Lodge seems to merit an A-plus. Each, however, tends on my own rather limited consultations to fill, in with fresh examples, or with caveats, or with detailed explanations, points treated too lightly by its companion. So we have here a pair of authorities individually at the USA-Canada academic level of plain-vanilla-A, and yet cumulatively and jointly constituting an A-plus team.
It would also be handy to have, for light and casual work, some laminated cards, reminding one of basics. (What, for example, is the genitive singular of a noun like
res or
dies? The question is so elementary as to make a lookup in the Revised Kennedy seem like overkill. And yet it does illustrate the kind of thing too readily forgotten, especially for those of us who can only hope to be in our Latin intermittently. We can remember
rervm for the plural, even while remaining a bit shaky on
rei for the singular.)
Here I lack good news. Like (surely) many people interested in dead languages, I do swear by quick-lookup laminated cards. For Latin, I have bought, at the local campus bookstore, the "BarCharts, Inc." "Quick Study Academic" offering for Latin. This four-page lamination touches on all the topics appropriate in such a quick-lookup tool. And it does encouragingly say, right at the outset, "Revised". However, for Latin we need to do as the Revised Kennedy commendably does, marking all long vowels with a macron. Vowel length does not matter too much, except in poetry. For poetry, vowel length matters as providing a sufficient-yet-not-necessary condition for a syllable's being long. It is syllable lengths, not vowel lengths in their own right, that are needed for dividing poetic lines into feet, as a necessary preliminary to metrical recitation. All the same, we do want to get all vowel lengths right, in poetry and prose alike, as a point of honour in pronunciation. On Wild West tombstones, HIC IACET ("Here lies", as in "Here lies Jake Slingerfinger McFiggis") is "heek yucket", not the incorrect hiccup-sounding "hikk yucket".
If time allows, I may someday have to photocopy all four pages of my already-rather-expensive BarCharts purchase, mark the macrons in by hand on the photocopies (one cannot write easily on laminate), and then lay out the price of a whole Tim Horton's, soup-with-bagel, lunch upon in turn laminating the photocopies.
I suspect many determined students of languages swear by books that enumerate verbs, highlighting both irregularities in conjugation and (through a suitably long run of examples) nuances in idiom. Gavin Betts, working with Daniel Franklin, published, at McGraw-Hill, in 2004, a fat paperback reference entitled The Big Gold Book of Latin Verbs - 555 Fully Conjugated Verbs. My sole quibble regarding the Betts-Franklin "555" is that macrons are not used to mark long vowels in all syllables, but only in those syllables not "long by nature" (i.e., only in those syllables not forced to be long by the patterns of their bounding consonants).
Finally, I come to the easy topic of lexicons.
Cheap, short lexicons are a bad investment, instilling the misleading impression that dead languages share the simplicity of living languages. The reality is that in working with a dead language, we are working with a subtle tunnel into the past. Words from the remote past emerge from a thought-world at various points unlike our own. Consequently, words in dead languages can take on what are to the modern eye unexpected clusters and groupings of meanings. In Latin, things vary significantly even from one classical author to the next, and again vary from the early times of the Republic, before Cicero, to the imperial twilight of Saint Augustine. We accordingly need a lexicon with abundant examples (and with authors other than Cicero in all cases named). There has to be enough guidance, through some system of flags (such as "Cs.", for "Caesar", or "post-class.") to let us to flag post-Augustan (and yet mainstream-classical) usages as post-Augustan, post-classical (for instance, Augustinian) usages as late, very early usages (as with Ennius) as very early, and non-Ciceronian-albeit-eminently-classical usages as mainstream-yet-non-Ciceronian.
The pupil in Semesters One and Two will survive well enough, as generations in the leading British schools have, with Charlton T. Lewis's An Elementary Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891; my own now-battered copy is an impression of 1979). After Semester Two, it is appropriate to get the real thing, an unabridged Lewis-and-Short (or better). Here I cautiously write, "or better", in the knowledge that although in all my own modest reading the unabridged Lewis-and-Short has performed well, nevertheless there is these days something else, about as bulky, I think again from Oxford University Press - and for all I presently know, perhaps ranking now as more authoritative than venerable Lewis-and-Short.
For what it is worth, I add that that my own Lewis-and-Short I bought in the 1970s, second-hand, as the "Impression of 1927" from the "First Edition, 1879". On the title page of this roughly 2000-page reference is a due homage to its distant German roots: A Latin Dictionary Founded on Andrews' Edition of Freund's Latin Dictionary Revised, Enlarged, and in Great Part Rewritten by Charlton T. Lewis, Ph.D. and Charles Short, LL.D.
3. Postscript: Have I Been Too Traditionalist?
Some might argue that the approach to Latin urged here, anchored as it is in the academic (and notably British) mainstream, is too traditionalist. In Firenze, one of my Catholic-social-teaching comrades-in-arms, the British hermit Sister Julia Bolton Holloway, has been urging an approach in which pupils work, in the earliest stages of reading, not from the usual prose models but from dramatist Terence. How feasible this is, I cannot say. Maybe it is feasible. Here, at any rate, is how Sister Julia puts it, on her Web page
http://www.umilta.net/terence.html:
We begin Latin in tears, at least I did, with imperial and boring Caesar. The Middle Ages and the Renaissance began Latin with the laughter and the humanity of the freed slave, Terence, Publius Terentius Afer. This website discusses African Terence's importance through time, arguing for his restoration to education's canon.
And in America, there is iconoclastic Reginaldus Foster, formerly with the Latin Letters Section of the Secretariat of State at the Civitas Vaticana. The corresponding Wikipedia article explains that this particular teaching authority eschews the Gavin Betts path I have, in a traditionalist way, been recommending: "from day one students are exposed to genuine Latin literature rather than dry paradigms and tedious, rudimentary constructions." Encouragingly, the Foster pedagogical experiment is continuing, although now in America rather than in Rome, with Web outreach presently at
http://thelatinlanguage.org/.
We must all wish such radical experiments well - salvete, o socii ivlia reginaldvsqve - even if some of us stubbornly continue treading well-worn paths, in our private replays of "Good Bye, Mr Chips".
4. Postpostscriptvm: etiam nvntii?
And what about listening to the news in Latin, or at least reading it in Latin? With this, it is perhaps as with getting a Spiritual Director. (That point was explained to me once by one of my three best friends in College, a serious Anglican, thus: All may, none must, some should; he then repeated, solemnly, in a kind of tone of Earnest Hinting, All may, none must, some should.)
Although I myself have made relatively little use of the Latin service at Finnish "Yle" (the national broadcaster, analogous to ERR in Estonia), some may become heavy users. People reading this blog might start their own investigations with Wikipedia - if in English, then through
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuntii_Latini, and if in Latin, then through
https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuntii_Latini_(Finnia). The polite warning in the English Wikipedia version, that the Yle pronunciation fluctuates in accuracy, is unfortunately corroborated in my own limited Yle listening experience.
But less important than listening is reading. Fortunately enough, what Yle commits to the studio microphone it also issues as transcripts. Both the audio and the transcripts are readily Google-located, under such obvious strings as
news read in Latin from Finland.
The announcement from last December, that Yle would be ending its thirty-year tradition of Latin newscasting, has happily been rescinded, with its weekly broadcasting presently alive and well.
[This is the end of the current blog posting.]
