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The Vatican's Latinist (2017)

newcriterion.com

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Re: The Vatican's Latinist (2017)

#21

Post by bigstrat2003 »

spudlyo wrote: post #6

If you find this article fascinating, and are intrigued by the possibility of learning to speak a dead language like Latin, I'm here to tell you that it's probably a lot easier than you think. To start off, there is a textbook that I think really resonates with hackers. It's called "Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata" (The Latin Language Illustrated through itself) and it teaches Latin in a fun and mind-altering way. Th…

Alas, Latin is probably third on my list of other languages to learn (Spanish and Japanese, in that order). I doubt very much if I ever make it to #2, let alone #3. Life is too short, we don't get to do all the cool stuff one might want!

Re: The Vatican's Latinist (2017)

#22

Post by aprilthird2021 »

mmooss wrote: post #9
coolsunglasses wrote: post #4

Foster was basically the rallying point for people opposed to the grammarian methods of teaching languages that started in Classics but ended up taking over how foreign language is taught in most schools and contexts. Virtually everyone actually fluent in Latin today (reading, listening, or speaking) either learned directly from his a tutor using Ossa Latinitatis Sola or was downstream of that. Striking contrast with…

> Striking contrast with the most well known classicist in the UK being unable, by their own admission, to comfortably read Latin text basically at all. That's hard to believe. A friend was a Latin teacher; high school students read actual Roman Latin in their second year. I've heard that few can speak Latin 'correctly', because the skill is almost useless - you can't talk to Romans or almost anyone else; it's all wr…

I was a high school student studying Latin. Like almost all high school language students, we could not read fluently. It took a long time and potentially many trips to the dictionary

Re: The Vatican's Latinist (2017)

#23

Post by wisty »

mmooss wrote: post #9
coolsunglasses wrote: post #4

Foster was basically the rallying point for people opposed to the grammarian methods of teaching languages that started in Classics but ended up taking over how foreign language is taught in most schools and contexts. Virtually everyone actually fluent in Latin today (reading, listening, or speaking) either learned directly from his a tutor using Ossa Latinitatis Sola or was downstream of that. Striking contrast with…

> Striking contrast with the most well known classicist in the UK being unable, by their own admission, to comfortably read Latin text basically at all. That's hard to believe. A friend was a Latin teacher; high school students read actual Roman Latin in their second year. I've heard that few can speak Latin 'correctly', because the skill is almost useless - you can't talk to Romans or almost anyone else; it's all wr…

I think it's a bit out of context. I think they are referring to Mary Beard, who is a classicist / historian who said her Latin wasn't that good, but may have been exaggerating because she was IIRC arguing against gatekeeping in history (like saying physicists don't need advanced math, because Einstein wasn't the best at math compared to a few other top theoretical physicists).

Re: The Vatican's Latinist (2017)

#24

Post by pinkmuffinere »

mmooss wrote: post #17
akshayshah wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second-year high school students do read actual Roman texts, but they typically do so very slowly and laboriously - a day’s homework might be translating a single paragraph. I studied Latin from 7th grade through my early undergraduate years (1990s to early 00s), and that dynamic didn’t change as much as you might expect - the focus remains on deeply reading a few texts, rather than building the fluency required to q…

How could you not gain that fluency after years? Every human naturally learns languages; you don't need a Ph.D. at all.

>Foster was basically the rallying point for people opposed to the grammarian methods of teaching languages that started in Classics but ended up taking over how foreign language is taught in most schools and contexts

Humans naturally learn languages when they are immersed in the language. It sounds like Latin instruction was more focused on rules, and didn't provide that immersion before Foster. I can attest that many other foreign language classes also don't provide enough immersion to really learn the language, although being limited to ~10 hours a week makes that virtually impossible.

Re: The Vatican's Latinist (2017)

#25

Post by akshayshah »

mmooss wrote: post #17
akshayshah wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second-year high school students do read actual Roman texts, but they typically do so very slowly and laboriously - a day’s homework might be translating a single paragraph. I studied Latin from 7th grade through my early undergraduate years (1990s to early 00s), and that dynamic didn’t change as much as you might expect - the focus remains on deeply reading a few texts, rather than building the fluency required to q…

How could you not gain that fluency after years? Every human naturally learns languages; you don't need a Ph.D. at all.

It’s certainly possible to gain that fluency, as Reginaldus demonstrated. But it seemed to me that fluency reading unfamiliar texts simply wasn't the goal of my Latin education; instead, we were studying to know Catullus, Ovid, Horace, Cicero, and Vergil, with a small smattering of other Roman authors. It was an education in classics, not the Latin language. We just weren’t asked to extract information from large volumes of text, speak extemporaneously, or comprehend casual conversation.

The best analogy I can give is this: imagine taking Spanish from grades 7-12, culminating in a full year reading and understanding selections of Don Quixote. The entire curriculum builds towards this capstone year, and other areas of inquiry get very short shrift. Nobody cares if you can live comfortably in a Spanish-speaking country or watch Spanish-language TV. Nobody cares about modern idiom, or any more recent works of literature, or technical writing. s/Don Quixote/Aeneid + a small corpus of Roman poems/g and you have the bulk of my Latin education.

This sounds negative - we weren’t fluent in Latin! But for a teenager, it was a wonderfully deep exploration of Rome’s greatest hits. I loved it.

Re: The Vatican's Latinist (2017)

#26

Post by gattilorenz »

camcil wrote: post #7
coolsunglasses wrote: post #4

Foster was basically the rallying point for people opposed to the grammarian methods of teaching languages that started in Classics but ended up taking over how foreign language is taught in most schools and contexts. Virtually everyone actually fluent in Latin today (reading, listening, or speaking) either learned directly from his a tutor using Ossa Latinitatis Sola or was downstream of that. Striking contrast with…

It is fascinating that a language that still has study devoted around it has died right in front of our eyes.

But among the dead languages it’s one if the liveliest

Re: The Vatican's Latinist (2017)

#27

Post by tannhaeuser »

mmooss wrote: post #17
akshayshah wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second-year high school students do read actual Roman texts, but they typically do so very slowly and laboriously - a day’s homework might be translating a single paragraph. I studied Latin from 7th grade through my early undergraduate years (1990s to early 00s), and that dynamic didn’t change as much as you might expect - the focus remains on deeply reading a few texts, rather than building the fluency required to q…

How could you not gain that fluency after years? Every human naturally learns languages; you don't need a Ph.D. at all.

It's because you only ever translate but never speak or synthesize latin exept in a few church circles where it is or was used as Lingua Franca (such as depicted in Conclave last year). I understand the original post to be about the profound difference this makes in acquiring a language intuitively.

Re: The Vatican's Latinist (2017)

#28

Post by schoen »

spudlyo wrote: post #13
schoen wrote: post #11

I've mentioned here that I got to study with him in his summer course the very last year it was held in Rome (when he got sick and ultimately came back to the U.S.). He was a really cool guy and teacher of some really cool students, many of whom are still teaching Latin with their own spins on it. This article was published in 2017, so it doesn't mention that Foster subsequently died in 2020.

He's quite a character! I found a great video[0] of him speaking for over an hour to a classroom filled with former students. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZLcWl_NCMY

Wow, it looks like there are also interviews recorded with him in his nursing home after his retirement!

https://www.youtube.com/@latintalk9556/videos

He had a lot more energy earlier in his life (of course), but you can still see a lot of his ideas and passion.

In the classroom in earlier decades he was sometimes a lot louder than this. :-)

Re: The Vatican's Latinist (2017)

#29

Post by School-Cotton »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #27
mmooss wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could you not gain that fluency after years? Every human naturally learns languages; you don't need a Ph.D. at all.

It's because you only ever translate but never speak or synthesize latin exept in a few church circles where it is or was used as Lingua Franca (such as depicted in Conclave last year). I understand the original post to be about the profound difference this makes in acquiring a language intuitively.

I'm skeptical how much speaking/synthesizing the language matters if you only care about reading.

I can read German moderately well (can get through newspaper articles pretty easily, and novels with some effort), but I have very little ability to synthesize it (it'd take me quite a lot of effort to construct a sentence in writing, and I can't really speak at all). But the lack of ability to produce the language doesn't seem to negatively impact my reading ability.

Re: The Vatican's Latinist (2017)

#30

Post by Symbiote »

akshayshah wrote: post #16
mmooss wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Striking contrast with the most well known classicist in the UK being unable, by their own admission, to comfortably read Latin text basically at all. That's hard to believe. A friend was a Latin teacher; high school students read actual Roman Latin in their second year. I've heard that few can speak Latin 'correctly', because the skill is almost useless - you can't talk to Romans or almost anyone else; it's all wr…

Second-year high school students do read actual Roman texts, but they typically do so very slowly and laboriously - a day’s homework might be translating a single paragraph. I studied Latin from 7th grade through my early undergraduate years (1990s to early 00s), and that dynamic didn’t change as much as you might expect - the focus remains on deeply reading a few texts, rather than building the fluency required to q…

The Latin teacher at my school and my French teacher would discuss private matters in Latin, confident that us 13 year olds wouldn't understand.

I've no proof, but my assumption is there are students of Latin casually speaking the language to show off at places like Cambridge University.

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