> I once was sitting in O’Hare airport reading a book of Latin poetry when a guy looking like a monk walks up to me looking utterly lost and asks “Loquerisne Latine”? (Do you speak Latin?) To which I answer “Ita, possumne te adiuvare?” (Yes, can I help you?.)

> Turned out he was indeed a Polish monk and knew only Polish and Latin. Had never been outside Poland before, or even seen the inside of an airport, and needed help finding his way.

> That is my personal story of Latin as an auxlang.

I think there is some parallel to "secondary school languages." If you compare secondary school (or k-12) language programs, you will find a vast range of outcomes. Vast. In one context, kids acquire usable language skills. In others, basically nothing.

I studied French for 4 years, as did all my classmates. Almost none achieved any level of proficiency. I've challenged several language teachers over the years with a "why bother?" If year after year kids matriculate without gaining enough proficiency to take a bus or order lunch... why not shut down the program and teach something else?

Usually, the answer is (understandably) defensive. Highlighting of meta/peripheral benefits of learning a language. Noting that out-of-classroom context plays a big role. Ultimately though, IMO.... classroom language learning is hard, and we accept low levels of performance.

Classicists, generally, learned latin in an undergraduate classroom setting. This is, very often, a very ineffective way of learning a language. Being normal and common, this standard is deemed acceptable. We don't really know how to fix the classroom. The Latin classroom also has less competition than other languages. High school French learners don't become French language scholars, at least not without actually learning French. With Latin, you can get away with it.

So that's basically my take. We don't teach languages very well. Formal education settings often achieve pretty weak results. By and large, we just accept whatever results are achieved. Language programs don't "declare bankruptcy" if results achieved are weak. They accept it.

It seems like you could generalize this for most of the curriculum. Once kids arrive at the conclusion "I'm never, ever going to use this," it's over for most of them. And, naturally, that's self-fulfilling. Most kids who didn't learn math ended up not needing math – and some proudly trumpet that back at their teachers later in life! Should we shut down math?

Just anecdata, but among my friend group's children, I've seen a number of middle schoolers go from completely uninterested in a second language (English) to totally engaged once they discover YouTube or Netflix or a gaming community or whatever.

And classroom learning is apparently useful for those kids. The last time one of my linguist friends enlightened me, the research pointed at classroom learning being really important for those who don't learn the L2 in the home. If those learners are left to absorb the language solely through immersion, they most often end up at a middling level with the language.

That may be because with L2 immersion, a non-native speaker almost never gets feedback about language mistakes and so never has the chance to correct them. Instead, they see that what they say is understandable and keep repeating the same mistakes. (Maybe like, "Yesterday, I go to the store." Incorrect, but understandable.) That's not the end of the world, but it limits the speaker's opportunities with the language. Past a certain blurry threshold, they're unlikely to be hired to do a job that involves the language, for example.

Most people do learn some math skills. Many kids learn more than the basics. Obviously experiences vary. Yes, there are a lot of out-of-classroom factors.

I think second language learning is a more extreme case though. Many language programs seem to produce very little. Math doesn't have that kind of variance. If kids' math skills are years behind another school system's... that gets noticed and acted on. If a language program produces almost no language skills, it tends to just be accepted.

I agree but I think the difference with languages is that it's almost impossible to avoid that for most people. Most children go to countries speaking other languages very rarely.

I live in the UK and "learnt" French in school. I went to France twice before I was 18.

Obviously there are places where it's different. I bet schools in California have some success teaching Spanish for example. But it's easier for subjects like Maths and English to answer "why will I ever need this" (even if they still usually do a pretty terrible job).

A trip to South Kensington is probably easier for almost the same result ;)

I also think that most kids do actually learn a lot math in schools. Some don't and are totally clueless, but most of them are acceptably good and most of them don't make all that much fuzz about having to learn it.

Math teaching in school? Maybe. It doesn't seem to be very efficient, and mostly a waste of time.

(And I say that as someone who has studied math at university.)

My father, who was a biology teacher, advocated that high school biology should be taught largely for the benefit of the vast majority of students who would never take another biology class in their life — a self contained curriculum focusing on nature observation and on practical interactions of biology with the world.

I went through a high school curriculum focused on classical languages, and went on to a math-heavy CS school. The entirety of my high school math probably helped me for less than one semester. The math of my colleagues who attended a math focused high school track helped them for maybe one more semester at most (Their drafting classes might have been more valuable). Yet my Latin and Greek, which I never studied anymore after high school, still occasionally comes in handy to prop up my vocabulary or read street signs in Athens.

The content of high school math is important only in the sense that it must interest the kids and might be vaguely useful later on. The real prize is systematic problem-solving skills and confidence.

Can you elaborate on this?

I have no idea how worthwhile that kind of instruction was; knowledge of anatomy hasn't featured in my career. I suspect it would have been very helpful if you decided to become a physician.

My view is biased, because I had some very good physics teachers in high school and an interest in the subject.

So here again, I doubt that a typical student at a typical school gets all that much out of the lectures.

Is there any interesting thought on how to incentivize quality in outcomes and content creation there? Where the usual pervasive failure doesn't get the disaster-triage-chain-of-care back-pressure of follow-on instruction? It's an issue I've been puzzling over.

Even first-tier college intro biology still struggles to leave students with a firm grip on even central dogma, something that can be taught down through middle-school. But at least improvement is incentivized when follow-on intro genetics is forced to remediate. In contrast, with mostly-terminal college intro astronomy, of the top ten-ish most used textbooks, most all have even the color of the Sun wrong, perpetuating the pervasive kindergarten misconception even into first-tier astronomy graduate school. A failure that's been long-term multi-decade stable, and seems unlikely to improve any year soon. And there's teaching order-of-magnitude size, a part of most-every science and engineering curriculum. But it's little used in subsequent instruction, so there's little selection pressure to teach it successfully. Leaving even first-tier medical school graduate students with little idea how big cells are. And even with narrow objectives and chain-of-care feedback, chemistry education content is described by chemistry education research using adjectives like "incoherent", and as leaving both students and teachers steeped in misconceptions. Science education content is pervasively very not wonderful, and would seemingly lose some of its very few quality constraints by not targeting follow-on instruction.

At the other extreme, in the context of pre-K science education, there's been a suggestion that students have a human right to make sense of their world. "Now", not a K-lifetime later in middle-school. We're very not set up for that. (Or even to do that in middle-school, or high-school, or undergrad, or ...). We are largely unable to even imagine what it might look like. Crafting content for it would seemingly require a massive collaborative effort from the science research community. But it's very not clear how to incentivize, or even to characterize it.

Which ties back to language learning. I talked with someone doing remote tutoring of French. For students with diverse objectives - the AP French exam, family culture, travel for tourism, and for work. And thus with diverse curriculums. Apparently the AP French exam tests for a particular type of conversational French, and is very hard. So even teaching to the test, it is a struggle to get good outcomes. So there's just not room for expanding scope, for other curricular objectives, for other aspects of what it can mean to learn French.

Which reminded me a lot of "physics" education, and physics education research. The pursuit of a worthwhile goal, and hard one. With even the rare excellence of best practices struggling for good outcomes. But also a narrow goal, with little room for scope expansion, with no room for much of the beautiful breadth of Physics. The old professorial lament, of "why would students be interested in majoring in physics, when they've never been shown any interesting physics?". (Or for a feel for reasonable values, etc). Which prompted me to wonder: Perhaps "making sense of the physical world" is fruitfully viewed as a goal distinct from normal "science" education? Rather than framing it as transformative improvement of science education?

If we take up a big hairy audacious goal like making sense of the physical world, in K or in college, or just a goal like a quality terminal self-contained "biology for poets", how do we avoid it being the usual dreck, but now without even the usual weak quality checks of high-stakes exams, of dependent follow-on instruction, and of pretending it's not largely a disaster? ... Thoughts? Thanks.

Over time, it's increasingly struck me as negligent (in most US localities) to teach anything besides Spanish. We've got a huge sub-population that faces all kinds of obstacles because the English-speakers can't communicate with them and we're fucking around with Latin?

My extended family on my dad's side speak Spanish and I took Latin in high school? I can't talk with 3 out of 4 of the guys working on my house!

Besides, that we have a sizable population that either has not yet learned English or has chosen not to does not create an obligation in others to learn their language. Are you certain it's more important to enable a sub-community that has not embraced the dominant language of the country, rather than be able to experience the thoughts of the ancients in their own Latin? To extend your argument, I live in an area with a large Hmong population that has not fully embraced English; should the schools here abandon education in all languages but English and Hmong?

It'd have been better for me to spend all the time in French class in France instead (eg instead of an hour a day for 3 years, 11 weeks, hell even a month). I've picked up more on Spanish and French in 2 weeks in other countries than I did in 3 years in a classroom.

There's a full immersion school around me for spanish, that seems to work a lot better.

I'm not against more languages as an elective, I just didn't manage to say so

Or for speaking with sub-populations, Arabic would probably be the most useful here. US =/= California and the South

Teaching Latin makes many languages after Latin trivial: the case system and inflections on the verbs, adjectives, nouns reveal a common theme across many IndoEuropean languages. Russian would too, I believe, having had Russian after 4 years of hardcore Latin. Polish would do better than Russian in this regard, since Russian has simplifications of grammatical distinctions still present elsewhere.

Not faulting any language, as English and Swedish, for examples, simplify things more complex still in German.

I just think if only one language were to be taught, it would be strategic for it to represent more than one present-day set of simplifications of a richer grammatical past, one to which people might be exposed in other modern day languages.

(Spanish and Italian, for examples, collapse/simplify some of the structure present in their main common predecessor. )

Spoken English, with it's reliance on word order, lack of genders, relative lack of verb conjugations and noun declensions make it ridiculously easy to be understood in comparison to other languages. You won't be Shakespeare, but you will be able to communicate.

Written English, admittedly, is much harder (mostly because of the early standardization), but enough natives also have trouble spelling enough words that you can still be understood.

English is one of the easiest languages to speak badly, but one of the most difficult to speak well.

Also it has far more vowels than the average romance.

I agree, there are some, but is this in most of the US? That is what was claimed, without any backup. I do not think that English is harder than any other language, but it is always difficult to learn a new language. We agree there too.

It seems to me the argument is a bit backwards. If the poster cares about promotimg language skills for integration, why not address that instead of moralizing on people for not learning the right language?

I can workaround the bathroom issue; I can't workaround the other.

Maybe the solution is to teach said sub-population English?

That said, most schools have dropped Latin in favor of Spanish, French, or Italian for precisely the reason you state, especially in high school.

I spent years learning various languages at school, but moving to another country and being forced to read text (etc) in this new language day in, day out, taught me far more in the space of just a year or two.

True, but classroom is still necessary if you want to go beyond conversations in a more or les broken language. I often hear people complaining about school and arguing that you just need immersion in the culture. But looking at the grammar and the way the language works is invaluable to make sense of what you hear, truly understand it, and make progress beyond just repeating things you've heard already.

We need to stop teaching languages and start using them. Practically every child in Norway can speak English by the end of primary school but this is not because Norwegian teachers have some magic inaccessible to the rest of the world; it is because they are surrounded by English on the web, on television, film, computer games and they find it useful.

My three children were fluent in their second language (Norwegian) by the time they were four years old with no formal language instruction of any kind, we just sent them to the local kindergarten three days a week from the age of three once they were fluent in English. if memory serves Montaigne said that he learned Latin much the same way, his father hired a tutor who was instructed to speak only Latin.

That is how I came to learn French; I went to a Paris kindergarten aged 3. Apparently I hated it for 6 months, but after that I was pretty fluent.

When we returned to England, and I went to an English school, I was marked down by the French teacher for using the subjunctive before I had been taught it.

I also learned Latin. The Head Teacher was a Latin graduate and he ran a class after school, it was informal and fun and I feel that I picked it up quite quickly.

Mary Beard is a great scholar, and I don't want to be misunderstood as saying otherwise. There is more than just language proficiency to successful academic life, after all, and it is by no means the most important thing. For many reasons, knowing a language well is less valuable in academia than than knowing something else about the people who used the language, or having something worthwhile to say about texts written in it. The Czech writer Jan Kresadlo was at home enough in Homeric Greek that he was able to write a brilliantly hilarious Science Fiction Epic in it. But his facility with the language did not mean that he knew the first thing about Ancient Ionian land tenure practices.

But, that said, I think I agree with a couple of the authors points: She is brave to admit her lack of fluency and may have overstated how hard it is to learn.

Also worth reading is this, linked from the original blog: there's a conversation amongst latinists/classicists and they don't all agree with this polemic:

https://www.metafilter.com/181221/Lingua-pulcherrima

All of this could be thought of as progressive or left wing but not in a way which anyone should object to! The only reasonable criticism of her I’ve seen is the discussion around the “ordinary British family in Roman times”, which was obviously wrong but made an underlying point which was valid, i.e. the lack of a modern idea of race in Roman civilization.

I think she has also objected to some aspects of gender self-id which would apparently make her right wing in a US context.

I posted one snippet and a link. I stated why I posted the snippet. It is to set context: the blog author is aware of this abuse problem and wants to draw a contradistinction between their view and the abuse. I agree with them, and I too wish to draw a contradistinction between my view and the abuse. Also, the link is relevant here. Not every latinist agrees with the statement of the problem, there is an debate amongst latinists about the complexity of the language and nuance in the meaning of unfamiliar texts. It bears thinking about. I found it interesting, which is why I posted. I'm sorry you think my comment is pointless.

Although in hypothesis, it is tenable to argue the complaints about Prof. Beard are simply misunderstood, and in fact its legitimate debate about her thesis and lines of reasoning, I think its not solely down to this, and I don't think the problem is mischaracterised. That's informed by having read popular history works by Prof. Beard, and also read about her problems being a public TV figure.

My command of the language was that bad that I had to do certification at university studying the language again for three semesters.

He, having read and written Latin professionally for many years was from another realm. He once explained that the foreword of editions of primary medieval sources were done in Latin by everyone doing the editions as then these forewords would not have to be translated as everybody studying medieval sources would by trade be fluent in Latin.

As an adult, I find what I learned extremely useful, again and again. I moved to Portugal a bit over two years ago without a jot of Portuguese or Spanish to my name - just some rusty French, similarly imprinted by my Victorian schooling - however I rapidly realised that I could get away with speaking Latin with a Portuguese sound and be understood, as I pieced in the actual modern language, palimpsest-like, over the Latin. It allowed me to go from non-speaker to amply conversational in under a year, and knowing the underlying grammar and much of the vocabulary has similarly unlocked Spanish and Italian for me. I’ve even found that Mirandese, a dialect that native Portuguese speakers find quite impenetrable, has been no more of a challenge than Portuguese - less so, in fact, as it largely comprises vulgate Latin. The cognates in all of the Romance languages are profligate, and having Latin as a root from which to grow the various trunks has, I feel, given me insight into Latin as she was spoke, as it were, as hearing the incidences in common words between all provides a bridge to what the commonality in sound is, and how Latin may have actually sounded.

It’s also a delight to be able to walk around Roman ruins and museums and rattle off translations of inscriptions and writings, but I digress.

I hope that the teaching of Latin has improved since my day (80’s/90’s), as it’s an incredible tool to have in one’s arsenal, but to say I was unenthused by their pedagogical approach would be an understatement.

However, I don't think this is particular to Latin. In fact, Latin was the only grammatical teaching that I had at school. Vocabulary and phrases were considered more important than grammar, for all modern languages including English.

When taking lessons as an adult, my French teacher told me to forget everything I'd learnt; I needed to go back and learn the structure and conjugations and grammar like native French speakers do at school. That was where I found Latin had a benefit. If I had actually been taught properly at school, however, I don't think I would have found it so beneficial. It would simply have been another, less practical language.

Almost the same. I only did Latin for two years but found the the grammar concepts I learned in Latin were much richer than I got in five years of French.

Me too. Perhaps that's why I value my Latin training (which I flunked). Maybe it's learning grammar that is desirable, not learning Latin per se (pardon the Latin).

They say learning Latin makes it easier to learn other (European?) languages. Perhaps it's learning grammar that is really what helps.

In university I had a great teacher. She was able to show (with colored pens) the way Latin declinations are being constructed. I only had to understand the pattern and could re-/deconstruct from there. Same with sentence structure were she taught us how to parse sentences and think of them in terms of math formulas with lots of brackets and how to ensure that ever open bracket is being closed again and how to find the main sentence first and start from there.

4 hours a week of intensive schooling and about 20 - 30 hours of homework (next to my regular course work).

A few years after school I took to reading Medieval Latin and found it quite easy. Not so much because the Latin itself bears the traces of Romance, but because I wanted to read Latin. As it happens my Spanish is now decent and Greek is coming along.

This fascinates me for two reasons.

In my high school, which drew from every corner of the city of Boston, taught Latin (a required subject) as a living language and most students were as reasonably fluent as you would expect high schoolers could be. You’d encounter it in other subjects, not just Latin class. For many students Greek too. What’s the point otherwise?

I am somewhat surprised to hear that actual classicists might not be fluent — again, what’s the point? Didn’t they choose their domain because they loved the language or material? Computer scientists who are poor programmers are not uncommon but then they know their mathematics, the language of their trade (academic computer engineers tend to be better programmers).

But my son observed that many of the faculty and grad students of his university’s German department similarly were mostly not strong German speakers. While I noticed that in the 80s the political science profs who taught geopolitics all appeared to be fluent in Russian (though tbh how could I know?)

Of the people I schooled with who are now classicists, they almost universally studied Classical Studies. The linguists, only one, as far as I know, is now a classicist.

I think the explanation is straightforward. The language teaching is, or was, practically designed to make you despise the topic. Classical Studies involved field trips, videos in the classroom, archaeological surveys - and was positively engaging.

Therefore, people who studied the languages, usually at the behest of their parents, ran from the classical world as fast as they could. The ones who dropped the languages and did classical studies instead, found themselves engaged by the subject matter and went on to be classicists.

Fun fact: during 2021 she earned quite more with her Latin teaching business than me as a full time software engineer. Not bad!

Not that I am doubting what you're saying, but I find that fact surprising. I see on her channel info that she has 363,157 views in total. Does youtube pays really that well that with 300k views you can make more than as a software engineer? Or do I misunderstand what you're saying?

Thanks for pointing that out

Greeks and Classicists

The Greeks: pay homage to beauty; develop the body; are articulate; are religious transfigurers of ordinary things; are listeners and observers; are prone to symbolism; possess freedom as men; have a pure outlook on the world; are intellectual pessimists

The Classicists: are windbags and dilettantes; are repulsive-looking creatures; stutter; are filthy pedants; are hair-splitters and screech owls; are incapable of symbolism; are passionate slaves of the state; are Christians in disguise; are Philistines

It's probably unreasonable to expect the average classicist to possess the linguistic skills of the people whose legacy have survived over two millennia.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/20162817

Nietzsche would have been the best reddit shitposter.

You can have a successful career writing books and papers on musicology without needing to know how to play or write music.

To me it feels analogous to an academic who writes on history of math without being able to prove or understand theorems.

You're suggesting that in order to study the history of something, you also need to be a practitioner of it? So for example, a professor of military history needs to have combat experience? An art history teacher needs to be an artist?

I don't know if the parent is suggesting it, but I surely am. You can do it without being a practitioner, but worse (everything else, like your knowledge of the subject or writing skills, being equal).

Practitioner doesn't mean "illegal practictioner".

Arson investigators' training (and even practice) includes setting up controlled fires to study how arsonists works or how a specific arson case played out...

Does anyone seriously has to put this lame "so to be a professor/investigator of X, one must do X?" (illegal or impossible) question, when the answer is not only obvious ("no, but they should be aquainted with X to the best possible and legal degree") but has been clarified again and again in this thread?

Your quoted sentence does not imply or suggest this.

An art history teacher would be well served having tried her hands at using the historical techniques a few times to get a feel for them. But no need for her to be a brilliant artist.

Lecturing on music without being able to play music is also suspicious.

I would feel very fake if I were one of those people.

You would only be able to use second hand sources where someone with real ability has predigested the original works for you.

For example, if you want to write the work of a mathematician but cant read or understand the writings of the mathematician, then I would be uncomfortable with that.

In that they should be able to read the ancient languages of the culture they study, for one.

Nobody said anything about "firsthand knowledge" in the sense of "having lived in the time of the ancients".

But if you insist, sure, a historian that have actually lived at the time, would have a far better understanding of it (all other things being equal, like writing ability and so on). I'd take Thucylides over any modern historian of the Peloponesian war, for example.

All other things being equal first hand practical knowledge is then an edge, so not required but a benefit.

A psychologist, who learned everything about psychology, without ever having actually practised it, is equally skilled as someone with experience. He isn't.

And the comparison does not work even in context of original topic. The article from Beard linked from this blogpost (or blog post itself).

I can't read Greek but I've always heard that it's quite a bit harder than Latin, a language that I found to be preposterously convoluted. (I hated it and didn't get any farther than Caesar.) These languages are hard. I remember reading somewhere that a distinguished English-speaking Hellenist who'd been a professor for decades reported that after all that time he was able to read ancient Greek about as fluently as he read French. That's crazy.

But IMO it isn't "academic specialization". That just hides the nasty fact that it's publications and successful grant applications that determine a career, the latter being so politicized, that you can get away with bold, unproven statements if you know the right people.

But when she has to read complex text she never seen before, it is different and harder. And that she remembers other classicists saying the same. Then some musings about passive vs active learning of language and such.

Having something memorized is something entirely different then either of these.

So most academics are required so spend a non-trivial amount of time learning a foreign language to very high proficiency, to the point of being able to read, write and deliver specialist papers in it.

The trend in modern social studies to emphasize "historical specificity", or an impossibility of fully embodying living some other context, might provide some cover to those that don't learn the language fluency, but this point didn't come up in the original reply or your comment.

If we want people to learn ancient languages fluidly, I think the right model is not even Academia, but, say the Europeans subsidizing rural quasi-traditional farmers for cultural reasons. Or "historically informed practice" in old music. It's not scientific study of the past, but an art or cultural practice in its own right.

A good question to ask is how well the Romans could speak 500 years prior Greek. (Older forms of their own language was already covered.) That was also an cultural practice of reverence.

Reading comprehension is also the thing that degrades the least in my experience (as long as there's an alphabet; bets are off with languages with Chinese and Japanese Kanji). I can recognize the subjunctif in French, but if I had to use it/conjugate it, I'd just stare blankly at you.

I actually found ancient Greek (most from Herodotos' time as that was my exam subject) actually much easier than Latin, but that might have more to do with my interest in everything around the language like the stories, culture and lifestyle. So maybe it's just a personal preference. If you ignore the different letterings sometimes used it's not even that bad. Fortunately all textbooks are in the Ionic writing scheme (and sometimes adapted to suit students more) so no sudden digamma's or other dialects.

Latin probably feels different to a speaker of a flexive Slavic language, who is used to words being declined and word sequence in a sentence being rather relaxed all the time, than to someone who is used that words do not change and a fixed word order in sentences.

As far as I know there is no one-dimensional metric that would let you say any language is uniformly easier than another.

This is a lot like the modern jousters teasing medievalists. It's simply not the relevant skill.

A difference is, this person seemed pretty knowledgable (for an amateur? Not that I could properly judge) so it was much more enjoyable read than most of these sorts of things.

Really? Just wow.

However, practically everybody can at least read the characters of Latin.

I find this interesting to contrast to academics studying Ancient Chinese. Evemn native Chinese speakers require lots of training before they can even begin decoding the scripts and characters, let alone things like the poetic forms.

Now THAT'S a difficult language to do research in.

But yes, merely recognizing the character doesn't mean one has much of a leg up decoding it.

Your mileage may vary.

https://hanziyuan.net/#%E8%99%8E

Granted, that one starts out as non-artificial as it's possible to be. But compare https://hanziyuan.net/#%E7%94%B2 , where the original character is 十 and it develops through 田 and various intermediate forms into the modern form 甲. You don't get more abstract than 甲.

I recently studied ancient Greek extensively in the Boston area. I was well aware of the living language community--people that speak and write Greek/Latin as they learn it and not just read it--and even joined some seminars, but these are all not for credit and are usually run by non-accredited institutions. Since I was in a masters program, I needed the credits for my language work. And I realized, it is nigh impossible to learn Greek as a living language in an academic settings. It's a real pity. Ancient languages are largely taught to pass the advanced language exams like the comps. If you want to learn it as a living language you have to step outside the academic mainstream.

Edit: clarify the credit thing.

Your tone makes it sound like there is some conspiracy to keep ancient Greek out of curricula. In fact, the reason is that there is virtually zero demand. The "academic mainstream" are the student body that has no interest in it. I too took ancient Greek. There were 6 people in my program. It was closed two years after I completed it.

However, I do think there could be more interest if learning Greek/Latin would not feel like such an immense grind, going at it more as a living language style would help a bit (it still hard, though).

By contrast, I got top marks in a French exam a year early; and top marks in German after just a year of lessons. The difference is that the modern languages were taught mainly conversationally (i.e. not based on a grammar book, but "as she is spoke"). I wish I had learned Latin that way. It would have been a lot less painful, and I'd have spent much less time in Latin classes.

Roman Catholics have been using Latin continuously since it was a Lingua Franca. No doubt many of them are pretty fluent.

Clerical Latin is a dialect; I don't know much about it, but I know it's different from (for example) legal Latin, or vulgate Latin. But I assume that at least some practitioners of clerical Latin are fluent, and I also assume that there is a pronunciation tradition in the Catholic Church that runs back to Lingua Franca days.

It was pointed out to me in some other HN thread that Latin is not a "dead language" - it experiences the same kinds of drifts and changes in grammar, semantics and so on as modern languages. I accept that. The same can't be said of Sanskrit, I think.

Not to denigrate the efforts of folks who study and practice “the act of language acquisition”, I’ve just been surprised and delighted to watch my now 2 year old daughter learn to speak, which has made me think about how different her experience of “learning a language” is from all of my poor attempts at learning foreign languages.

One simply cannot read most Japanese content online without understanding at least a few hundred kanji. It's like if you wanted to learn the English language but had no understanding of the alphabet (ignoring kana for the sake of the analogy). You've got to bootstrap with some rote memorization first, then go start learning new kanji / grammar in context.

Lucky, this doesn't take much time at all, and one can memorize the first few hundred kanji and vocab meanings / readings with a spaced repetition tool.

And in parallel, there are resources one can start with knowing only the kana / furigana, such as these graded readers: https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/free-books-en/

There are textbooks that follow a CI approach, e.g. Eleanor Jorden's. John Defrancis's textbooks are similar but for Chinese. If you look at the reviews the main complaint people have is that they are not learning kanji from the start, despite Jorden explaining exactly why she's not doing that.

Maybe CI is not the best way to learn languages like Chinese and Japanese, but the approach most learners take is definitely not CI.

If I had to guess, most of the recent discussion has started again in the Japanese language learning community, as Japanese is a notoriously difficult language to acquire for anglophones.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnUc_W3xE1w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG9kpqTRmU&t=681s

Learning Latin with Harry Potter latinus.

http://indwellinglanguage.com/reading-latin-extensively/

https://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html

Author’s reasons are fascinating.

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/27433

It wasn't finished last time I played it though. Amusing project none the less.

You know whats cheaper than taking a college course on spanish? traveling down to Colombia with a small book on Spanish grammer and a duolingo membership while living here for 3 months.

I wouldn't say I'm fluent but I have picked up enough to navigate the city, ask for directions, flirt with the locals and make a few friends. And isn't connecting with people why we ultimatly want to learn a new language?

[0] https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/latol

Greek has more forms as well, having a dual number (in addition to singular and plural, a middle voice in addition to active and passive, the aorist tense...

Now, I never studied Latin, only Greek, so I have a very basic understanding of the terms as I learned them from Greek, but I've always felt like Latin was way more regular and consistent. It's a much "younger" language, too, at least compared to Attic and Homeric Greek. But, I really don't know Latin well, so I'm not in a good position to compare...

Ha!

> Academics don't bicker... there is no hierarchy or pecking order there

Ha ha!

> In general, they all respect each other's work

Now I know that you're trolling. Poe's law almost got me...

Those are just the people we remember today; many more were fairly fluent, but we haven't heard of them.

In other words it is a rhetorically poor argument.

on edit: changed set up to set of.

As I said in another comment, I can talk the language of schemes. It does not make that langauge any more “alive” as a tongue than Latin.

(Not sure why you are downvoted so much.)

Compare mathematics (or even programming): from first hand experience I can tell you that they are interesting topics, but also that most teachers that most people have are awful.

In any case, Latin is just one language amongst many. It's fine, if you don't like it. There's plenty more you can learn, if you want to.

I agree with the other commenter that woefully, Latin is a dead language. The author lists examples of modern usage of Latin in the article that, imo, are few and far between. They almost always resort to neologisms and English back ports on the spot, or reuse some Latin vocabulary that hopefully makes sense. In the manned mission to Mars video by Paideia the author linked, the speaker rather handwavily refers to the rovers Opportunity and Curiosity as instrumenta, while his slides uses carri (wagons). I don’t think there is any consensus on what rovers should be called. Articles on the Latin Wikipedia (that the author also links to) painstakingly avoids this issue by de-Anglicizing official NASA monikers (so Curiosity is Laboratorium Scientificum Martianum, or just vehiculum).

I’m not saying the way modern Latin creates new vocabulary is bad--most non-English languages have gone through a similar process. I am lamenting the absolute lack of consistency or consensus, because the corpus is so small and because Latin speakers rarely actually communicate in Latin about such matters for practical ends. The Maritian mission lecture can uncharitably be said to be a mediocre high school presentation on the subject, with the novelty of it being in Latin (and again, I like Latin as a language a lot. I almost went on a Paideia trip before their scandal cropped up). And yes, novelty is the biggest factor here--why are all the numbers in Roman numerals? Cultures around the world have adopted to Arabic numerals despite all having indigenous systems.

I am aware that the Latinitas Foundation publises a Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis, and you can see a small portion of it on the Vatican website: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/institutions_connected/la.... The problem is that it simply has lemma in Italian and Latin explanations to them, which is not exactly helpful (or sometimes correct). “Jet” is explained as aërināvis celérrima (the fastest airship) and “jumbo” as capacíssima aërināvis (the largest airship; wouldn’t it be prudent to think it might refer to things other than a plane?). Also I am under the impression that planes are more often referred to as aeroplanum, because loaning from English gets more traction (like computatrum vs ordinatrum). It’s ironic that in the information age, when dialects in living languages are increasingly homogenized, Latin is so fragmented—-again, probably because people don’t actually communicate in it. Remind me how Latin got replaced by the veraculars?

This is becoming a huge rant, but as someone who has experience teaching myself language to fairly high levels, an excess of engaging learning materials is crucial for achiving proficiency. Imagine learning English and you get to choose from the huge and diverse corpus of Shakespeare, Milton, Samuel Richardson, Shelly and Dickens. Not that any of those is not a great work, but to achieve listening and speaking skills, you obviously need other materials: news, pop culture, entertainment, instruction manuals, random people’s posts online–the equivalents to which Latin cannot provide. If you are trained to read and analyze only the classics, you will be able to do that--maybe you can't listen or speak or sight read, but what did you really expect.

That said, I do not regret not having been part of a “living” kind of Latin language course. Language instruction in the US is atrocious, and I learned nothing from 3 years of French courses despite good grades. Grammar-translation might not be ideal (I didn’t do it for long either), but at least it has rigor.

Never met a Latin teacher who could hold a conversation, although one said he had been to a convention where they dressed up in Roman gear and greeted each other in Latin "SALVETE".

I was studying Latin for 4.5 years in secondary education, my summary is it isn't as useful and as logical a language as many claim: there are plenty of tables to memorize, many exceptions to remember, and then advanced texts leave important words implicit (e.g. main verbs). As someone passionate about language and languages, I was initially excited, but quickly disappointed and bored by Latin grammar books and textbooks that taught it. The typically historic texts are mostly war-related (Caesar, De bello gallico).

In contrast, Spanish grammar is lean, beautiful and simple. The exceptions are fewer, and somehow one doesn't even need to study much to pick up the essentials for daily communication, one tends to pick it up intuitively (after four years of Latin, I still couldn't "Vamos a la playa" in Latin, but I could say "Vamono" in Spanish after two years - "let's go!", emulating the slang of the Canary Islands where the -s ending is often dropped, to sound more native-like).

Ironically, of course, Spanish is a Romance language and therefore derived from Latin. In linguistics, there is an observation that over time, languages simplify and drop cases, conjugations and endings indicating other grammatical systems generally. For instance, English once had a "dual" in addition to singular and plural, which was only used for things with cardinality two (e.g. two apples, a pair of shoes), but this was eventually shed [1,2].

It is important to know more than one language well enough to have conversations and read books, as this totally broadens one's perspective. This is because categorial divisions are done differently in each language and the world is organized differently - along different grammatical dimensions - and the leads to an increased ability to take alternative viewpoints. Learning a second language opens your mind and makes accessible another vast body of books you can read and people you can communicate with. It's vital that this is taught you people in schools, and it's importal to do that well, as later people have insufficient time and focus, and older humans learn much more slowly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_number)

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327510106_The_Loss_...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...

She says it's pronounced "oh-MEE-cron". I took one term of ancient greek, and was taught to recite the greek alphabet; we were told it's pronounced "oh-MY-cron". I'm fairly sure that schoolboys have been taught to pronounce it that way since forever. It's beyond me why the BBC Pronunciation Unit decided it's pronounced "OMMY-cron".

I also wonder how Beard came by her knowledge of how the ancient greeks pronounced the letters of their alphabet.

What is even your point? Nobody really knows just how it was actually pronounced, so we rely on standardized reconstructions. But that’s not really related to being able to read it.

Also, omicron and the Greek letters have become English words, and their pronunciation as English words doesn’t necessarily correspond to the (reconstructed) Greek pronunciation, these are different things.

1 Yes I’m aware that the accents originally denoted a melodic accent rather than a stress accent, I did take four full-time semesters of Greek, but something tells me that’s not the reason your teacher taught you that way.

I imagine that ancient pronunciation can sometimes be induced from things like poetry.

> something tells me that’s not the reason your teacher taught you that way.

I imagine he taught it to me that way because that's how he learned it. I don't know how far down the turtles go, but this was at a school that has traditionally emphasized classics; all the teachers pronounced it that way, including those teaching science and maths. The BBC variant jars, because I have never heard it pronounced their way until this damned virus cropped up.

Yes, and from Modern Greek, contemporary loan words etc. It's a whole science. Erasmus was an important scholar here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_Ancient_Greek...

But that's not related to being able to understand a written text.

And again, the name of the letter omikron is an English word, so it's a different question really. Sort of like we pronounce the letter "CHI" with a k-sound and rhyming with "high", even though we know very well that the consonant Greek CHI was pronounced more like ch in Loch Ness, or Spanish J.

So even people who say oMYcron don't think that's how it was pronounced in Greek.

I agree; and I also agree with the earlier commenter that the "ai" diphthong is an English thing (I don't know if it's restricted to British English, or whether it's also currency in the USA). It might even be a thing that's bound to English private schools; but note that English state schools have rarely taught classics.

This is why the BBC Pronunciation Unit's version jars; it sounds to my ear uneducated. Incidentally, Boris Johnson pronounces it the BBC way; he studied Greek at the same kind of school, and then at Oxford, and must have learned to pronounce it ohMYcron, as in MYcroscope.

I only did a term of Greek; I don't remember being taught anything about accents.

It can also be induced from loanwords into contemporary languages, and you can find ancient works on language which explained how things are to be properly pronounced, including the pitch accent.

Sure anyone can explain how to say it today, and even that changes between mainland and the islands.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galician-Portuguese_lyric

But then why isn't the latter pronounced "oh-MEG-er"?

That is a fallacy.

A live language is one passed from “mother” to child. It is always a “first” language.

The fact that Newton, Leibnitz etc used it did not make it a true “live” language.

This is something latinists have to learn to bear with. Latin is dead and is only academic. Nothing wrong with that or with using it.

But trying to comvince people that it is “flourishing” is like trying to defend, say, Cathegory Theory because it is a “flourishing language”: no, it is not. It is a convenient means of ACADEMIC (scientific even) information transfer.

Latin's mostly been kept alive thanks to the catholic church. The church operates on a different timescale than most organizations, and the audience of their documents and decrees aren't just people of the present.

When your organization is thousands of years old, it's very useful to stick to one language, so that you can read what your predecessor wrote 500 or 1000 years ago.