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RogerK Triglot Groupie Austria Joined 5076 days ago 92 posts - 181 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian Studies: Portuguese
| Message 25 of 36 01 March 2011 at 11:05am | IP Logged |
Cainntear wrote:
RogerK wrote:
Did they need books to learn Latin?
A child learns his or her mother tongue before they begin to read and write.
If you go to a bazaar in Egypt, Tunisia or one of the many other tourist destinations around the world you will be addressed in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and other languages until you react. Many of the people there speak many languages other than their own and I doubt they can read or write in all of these languages and possibly have never even opened a language study book.
People are more than capable of picking up a language just by ear. It was probably similar with Latin many years ago. And perhaps because their ears were better trained they possibly picked up their languages easier than we do. We tend to tie ourselves down in theory. |
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I disagree.
If you go to France or Spain or Italy, you will see exactly what happens when people try to pick up a foreign language just by ear. Loss of cases, loss of genders, calquing of local-language expressions into the language.
Meanwhile, Latin taught explicitly by tutors and in monasteries stayed the same.
Those market traders you mention speak lots of languages, but not very well. There language never gets to the level of a suitable model for learners. |
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I am terribly sorry Cainntear, I didn't realise that because the market traders I mentioned make mistakes we must discount them, basically they can't really speak a language because they make many mistakes and therefore didn't pick up anything by ear. I make mistakes in everything I do unlike many other people and because I am not perfect in any of my languages I have decided to delete them from my profile. This is ridiculous but is in line with a common line of thought here. If you are not perfect then you shouldn't claim to speak a particular language.
I would have thought that be able to communicate is the first goal, unfortunately I was mistaken. Until I have read Dante's 'Inferno' in Italian, understood each word without looking up the dictionary, can use the simple past, imperfect subjunctive etc. perfectly when conversing then I can't really speak Italian.
1 person has voted this message useful
| mr_chinnery Senior Member England Joined 5758 days ago 202 posts - 297 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French
| Message 26 of 36 01 March 2011 at 5:12pm | IP Logged |
RogerK wrote:
Cainntear wrote:
RogerK wrote:
Did they need books to learn Latin?
A child learns his or her mother tongue before they begin to read and write.
If you go to a bazaar in Egypt, Tunisia or one of the many other tourist destinations
around the world you will be addressed in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and
other languages until you react. Many of the people there speak many languages other
than their own and I doubt they can read or write in all of these languages and
possibly have never even opened a language study book.
People are more than capable of picking up a language just by ear. It was probably
similar with Latin many years ago. And perhaps because their ears were better trained
they possibly picked up their languages easier than we do. We tend to tie ourselves
down in theory. |
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|
I disagree.
If you go to France or Spain or Italy, you will see exactly what happens when people
try to pick up a foreign language just by ear. Loss of cases, loss of genders,
calquing of local-language expressions into the language.
Meanwhile, Latin taught explicitly by tutors and in monasteries stayed the same.
Those market traders you mention speak lots of languages, but not very well. There
language never gets to the level of a suitable model for learners. |
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|
I am terribly sorry Cainntear, I didn't realise that because the market traders I
mentioned make mistakes we must discount them, basically they can't really speak a
language because they make many mistakes and therefore didn't pick up anything by ear.
I make mistakes in everything I do unlike many other people and because I am not
perfect in any of my languages I have decided to delete them from my profile. This is
ridiculous but is in line with a common line of thought here. If you are not perfect
then you shouldn't claim to speak a particular language.
I would have thought that be able to communicate is the first goal, unfortunately I was
mistaken. Until I have read Dante's 'Inferno' in Italian, understood each word without
looking up the dictionary, can use the simple past, imperfect subjunctive etc.
perfectly when conversing then I can't really speak Italian. |
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I think what Cainntear was getting at is the market traders can say the same thing in 6
languages, but are not proficient in any of them. The first goal in medieval times when
learning Latin was definitely not to verbally communicate, and certainly not like a
market trader. It would have been very important for the learner to become as
proficient as possible, as a sign of status and learnedness.
Cainntear wrote:
If you go to France or Spain or Italy, you will see exactly what
happens when people try to pick up a foreign language just by ear. Loss of cases, loss
of genders, calquing of local-language expressions into the language. |
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This is interesting...it could be a factor in how the romance languages developed out
of vulgar latin.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh
| Message 27 of 36 03 March 2011 at 10:32pm | IP Logged |
RogerK wrote:
I am terribly sorry Cainntear, I didn't realise that because the market traders I mentioned make mistakes we must discount them, basically they can't really speak a language because they make many mistakes and therefore didn't pick up anything by ear. I make mistakes in everything I do unlike many other people and because I am not perfect in any of my languages I have decided to delete them from my profile. This is ridiculous but is in line with a common line of thought here. If you are not perfect then you shouldn't claim to speak a particular language.
I would have thought that be able to communicate is the first goal, unfortunately I was mistaken. Until I have read Dante's 'Inferno' in Italian, understood each word without looking up the dictionary, can use the simple past, imperfect subjunctive etc. perfectly when conversing then I can't really speak Italian. |
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You're overinterpreting me here.
If we look at mediaeval Latin, you've got something which is practically identical to Classical Latin. (The U/V and I/J distinctions excepted.)
This alone is evidence that Latin was not taught in the same way as the language of the market traders you mention -- traders would have passed on their errors and the language would have changed quite distinctly.
And on the other hand, we have the Romance languages. While the upper echelons of mediaeval society were still writing in unchanged Latin, the people round about them were speaking in a very different way, because they were unschooled.
There is a fairly widely held theory that the spread of the Romance languages was the work of trade and commerce. The traders, just like the traders you mention, learnt enough Latin to make deals with others, many of whom were non-Latin speakers themselves.
In fact, there's a theory that Castillian (AKA Spanish) was not named after the kingdom of Castille, but that Castille was named after the Castillian language, and that Castillian meant "Castlese", because it was the pidgin people spoke to each other when they visited the castles to trade. (This theory also gives a very plausible explanation for the similarity between the names "Castillian" and "Catalan".)
In modern times, we can see the same process in creoles. The speech of the traditional upper classes in Jamaica is English, the speech of a rural farmer is recognisably derived from English, but is a new language. Similarly, the speech of the upper classes in Haiti or La Réunion is French, but the speech of the lower classes is a distinct language.
The difference between modern creoles and the early Romance languages is that the wide availability of education and written material in English and French means that the standard language still exerts its influence on the creole speakers and the creoles are starting to reconverge with the standard language. But education and written material wasn't easy to get your hands on 1000 years ago, so the spoken languages of the masses steadily diverged from the language of the elite.
2 persons have voted this message useful
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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 Personal Language Map
| Message 28 of 36 04 March 2011 at 11:13am | IP Logged |
I once read an lecture from the late 19. century where an English professor commented rather unfavourably on the prevalent teaching methods for Latin. I have unsuccesfully tried to find it again, but during my search I found something else:
Approaches and methods in language teaching, by J.C. Richards, Theodore S. Rodgers (p.3)
The Decline of Latin also brought with it a new justification for teaching Latin. Latin was said to develop intellectual abilities, and the study of Latin grammar became an end in itself. (...) As "modern" languages began to enter the curriculum of European schols in the eighteenth century, they were taught using the same basic procedures that were used for teaching Latin. Textbooks consisted of statements of abstract grammar rules, lists of vocabulary, and sentences for translation. Speaking the foreign language was not the goal, and oral practice was limited to students reading aloud the sentences they had translated. (...) By the nineteenth century, this approach based on the study of Latin had become the standard way of studying foreign languages in school.
(end of quote)
So because Latin gradually became a dead language the study of this language was redefined to an intellectual game which students had to endure like cold showers and flogging because it was supposed to strengthen their thinking in general. Which of course is rubbish. And this absurd practice spread to the study of living languages.
However the thing that isn't made clear in the quote is that those students actually did learn vocabulary, grammatical rules and Latin classics - the method taught them what it was supposed to teach.
I was lucky to learn Latin after the demise of the cold showers and flogging (whoa!), but apart from that the quote above is pretty close to the way I was taught Latin in the 60s and 70s. When I decided to relearn Latin I wanted of course to learn it as a living language. At the time I could barely read a line in Latin, but once I got back to the language the grammar and much of the vocabulary came back to me in a flash.
So my conclusion is that the aim of the old Latin teaching was totally wrong, the hype about the beneficial effects of studying it is and was pure bull****, but within its own narrow limits the old method was effective enough. In other words: the study of grammar and vocabulary through books and wordlists is in itself not a bad thing - it just has to be done within a very different mindset where you study languages with productivity in mind, and where you try to work with comprehensible, preferably genuine texts that also are appealing in their own right.
Maybe a few scholars can be satisfied with the ability to read Latin as you solve sudokus, but no language deserves to be seen just as an extended riddle.
Edited by Iversen on 04 March 2011 at 1:12pm
1 person has voted this message useful
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6273 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French
| Message 29 of 36 06 March 2011 at 3:19pm | IP Logged |
Cainntear wrote:
RogerK wrote:
I am terribly sorry Cainntear, I didn't realise that because the market traders I mentioned make mistakes we must discount them, basically they can't really speak a language because they make many mistakes and therefore didn't pick up anything by ear. I make mistakes in everything I do unlike many other people and because I am not perfect in any of my languages I have decided to delete them from my profile. This is ridiculous but is in line with a common line of thought here. If you are not perfect then you shouldn't claim to speak a particular language.
I would have thought that be able to communicate is the first goal, unfortunately I was mistaken. Until I have read Dante's 'Inferno' in Italian, understood each word without looking up the dictionary, can use the simple past, imperfect subjunctive etc. perfectly when conversing then I can't really speak Italian. |
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You're overinterpreting me here.
If we look at mediaeval Latin, you've got something which is practically identical to Classical Latin. (The U/V and I/J distinctions excepted.)
This alone is evidence that Latin was not taught in the same way as the language of the market traders you mention -- traders would have passed on their errors and the language would have changed quite distinctly.
And on the other hand, we have the Romance languages. While the upper echelons of mediaeval society were still writing in unchanged Latin, the people round about them were speaking in a very different way, because they were unschooled.
There is a fairly widely held theory that the spread of the Romance languages was the work of trade and commerce. The traders, just like the traders you mention, learnt enough Latin to make deals with others, many of whom were non-Latin speakers themselves.
In fact, there's a theory that Castillian (AKA Spanish) was not named after the kingdom of Castille, but that Castille was named after the Castillian language, and that Castillian meant "Castlese", because it was the pidgin people spoke to each other when they visited the castles to trade. (This theory also gives a very plausible explanation for the similarity between the names "Castillian" and "Catalan".)
In modern times, we can see the same process in creoles. The speech of the traditional upper classes in Jamaica is English, the speech of a rural farmer is recognisably derived from English, but is a new language. Similarly, the speech of the upper classes in Haiti or La Réunion is French, but the speech of the lower classes is a distinct language.
The difference between modern creoles and the early Romance languages is that the wide availability of education and written material in English and French means that the standard language still exerts its influence on the creole speakers and the creoles are starting to reconverge with the standard language. But education and written material wasn't easy to get your hands on 1000 years ago, so the spoken languages of the masses steadily diverged from the language of the elite. |
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Medieval Latin could be quite different from Classical. It was nobody's first language, and interference from a native language like French or German could have an impact on Latin. Also, some who used Latin had a less than total mastery of it. Humanists like Erasmus winced at what had passed for Latin, and were determined to get back to Classical models.
Edited by William Camden on 06 March 2011 at 3:20pm
3 persons have voted this message useful
| Gorgoll2 Senior Member Brazil veritassword.blogspo Joined 5147 days ago 159 posts - 192 votes Speaks: Portuguese*
| Message 30 of 36 13 March 2011 at 1:19am | IP Logged |
Charlemagne had builded many schools in Germany. All the schools taught it as second
tongue. The ancient people didn´t have such lack of culture. Dante and Camões were
proves.
1 person has voted this message useful
| aldous Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5243 days ago 73 posts - 174 votes Speaks: English*, French
| Message 31 of 36 13 March 2011 at 4:28am | IP Logged |
Bear in mind that there was a difference between classical Latin and the speech of everyday life even in Roman times, especially outside of Italy. The form of Latin that people grew up speaking (called Vulgar Latin) was rather different from the classical form people now think of when they think of Latin.
In the Late Empire and the early medieval period, well-to-do families who could afford it sent their boys to grammar school to learn Latin grammar and composition. Their incentive was that the education would give their sons opportunity for jobs in the imperial bureaucracy.
When the Germanic kingdoms set up shop in the western part of the Empire, they didn't maintain the big, centralized bureaucracy, so the demand among rich families for a Latin education diminished, though there was still prestige associated with it.
Meanwhile, Christian bishops stepped into a lot of the administrative responsibilities that had formally been managed by the secular bureaucrats, and monasteries became important institutions in social life. A local baron or chieftain didn't have much need for Latin. He'd just speak the same vernacular as his subjects. But the Church, as the only "international" institution in Europe, still needed Latin. It served as a common language for members of the Church from different dialect areas, and also a lot of Church Fathers wrote in Latin so there was a sense of continuity. So mostly it was just Churchmen who had a demand for Latin.
Now the actual place of instruction in Latin, after the secular grammar schools and private classics teachers died out, was cathedral schools and monasteries. If you're a young man going to work for the diocese, you'd go to the cathedral school and learn Latin. If you joined a monastery and were assigned to copy manuscripts or do something else that required Latin, then you'd learn Latin in the monastery's school. Your instructor would be a cathedral canon or a fellow monk, respectively, and he typically would have had access to a written grammar book.
1 person has voted this message useful
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6273 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French
| Message 32 of 36 17 March 2011 at 12:38pm | IP Logged |
A related issue is how people learned languages, especially Latin, before the advent of printed books. Manuscripts were expensive, although students seem to have worked out systems to borrow them or make them more accessible. Manuscripts in book form were often chained to lecterns in monasteries. Classroom teaching seems to have involved a lot of rote repetition, accompanied by corporal punishment if mistakes were made.
There were manuscript glossaries but proper dictionaries of Latin giving translations into the vernacular did not make an appearance until well into the 16th century, as far as I am aware.
Edited by William Camden on 17 March 2011 at 12:39pm
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