Language brought back to life (Specific Languages) Language Learning Forum

Language brought back to life
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Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages

27 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3 4

sipes23
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
pluteopleno.com/wprs
Joined 4871 days ago
134 posts - 235 votes

Speaks: English*, Latin
Studies: Spanish, Ancient Greek, Persian

Message 25 of 27

22 December 2011 at 6:48pm | IP Logged

Iversen wrote:

It is clear that the Neo-Latinists (those who want to use Latin as an active language and not
just to read old texts) already have gained much from the electronic media and from easier travel opporetunities,
and I don't say that they do a bad job. But they might still benefit from looking at the systems used by
Esperantists to see how a parallel group with similar status tackles recruitment etc.

However there is one big difference between the two communities. For sound historical reasons the Esperantists
don't have anything like the historical perspective of the Latinists. The point is however that this historical
perspective also is a liability insofar that those who just want to keep Latin "artificially, hermetically sealed to not
change as the linguistic environment changes as it does", and who have dropped any ambitions of using Latin
actively. My point is that the Neolatinists in fact have more in common with the mentality of the Esperantists than
they have with the purely passive learners of Latin - or with those who only want Latin back as a liturgical
language.

As a daily user of Latin, I'd like to see more Latinists who actually spoke the language. It is really frustrating that
our conferences are conducted strictly in English (and the bits of Latin presented are always translated). I've even
met grad students in the Classics who were resistant to the idea of spoken Latin. They be the future of Latin
teaching, and they want no part of a living language.

For those of us who do speak Latin, I'd say we've got varied motivations. One of the, if not the, big reason is to
get most quickly to a visceral understanding of the literature, which makes it that much more engaging. There is
a yawning gap between the intellectual processes of parsing and translation and the gut feel of meter and music
in poetry.

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Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6704 days ago
9078 posts - 16473 votes

Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan
Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian
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Message 26 of 27

28 December 2011 at 1:57pm | IP Logged

Latin courses should be labelled clearly in accordance with the aims of the teacher: only teaching how to read or teaching the whole thing
1 person has voted this message useful

wv girl
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5240 days ago
174 posts - 330 votes

Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Spanish

Message 27 of 27

28 December 2011 at 2:19pm | IP Logged

sipes23, although I don't study Latin, I remember seeing in a language teaching magazine that there has been a
resurgence of teaching spoken Latin to students and that Latin was gaining in popularity among students because
of this. Maybe it painted too rosy a picture of the situation ...

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