The Unexpected Benefits of Learning Latin for Children

This makes for excellent reading!

https://www.somptingabbotts.com/blog/the-unexpected-benefits-of-learning-latin-for-children

P/T Classics courses at Madingly Hall

Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge

Madingley Hall, Madingley, Cambridge CB23 8AQ

We are now inviting applications for our 2017/18 programme of part-time Certificate and Diploma courses here at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education (ICE).

 All of our Certificates and Diplomas are taught part-time and lead to full University of Cambridge qualifications.

Teaching takes place at Madingley Hall, a 16th-century country house near Cambridge set in 8 acres of landscaped grounds.

 How to apply

 You can find out more about all our courses and apply online at:

www.ice.cam.ac.uk/courses/certificates-and-diplomas

 For Latin and Greek courses go here:

http://www.ice.cam.ac.uk/courses/search/subject/languages

The deadline for applications is 4 September 2017.

  Please don’t hesitate to contact me at enquiries@ice.cam.ac.uk if you have any questions.

 Please also make sure to follow us on social media for updates:

www.twitter.com/Cambridge_ICE/

www.facebook.com/CambridgeICE/

www.instagram.com/cambridge_ICE/

 Joshua Hatley

Communications and Marketing Assistant

Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge

Madingley Hall, Madingley, Cambridge CB23 8AQ

 E: joshua.hatley@ice.cam.ac.uk  |  W: www.ice.cam.ac.uk

 We are part of the University of Cambridge and provide part-time and short courses for adults.

Sign up for news about our courses and events: www.ice.cam.ac.uk/e-news

 Join us for a summer of cultural, culinary and educational events: www.ice.cam.ac.uk/SummerFestival

Advice on Learning Latin

How best to learn Latin? Well, quot homines tot sententiae and here is a forthright contribution from Sean Gabb, writer, lecturer and broadcaster. This is an abbreviated version, for the full text go to:

http://www.seangabb.co.uk/advice-learning-latin-2017-sean-gabb/

Advice on Learning Latin
by Sean Gabb
(5^th July 2017)

Aside from my various books – more of which will come out this month and next – I get most of my living nowadays from teaching Greek and Latin. I do this as a private tutor, and sometimes as an informal member of staff at various places of education. Because demand for my services in any one place is limited, there is no point in my becoming a formal member of staff. Instead, I go out to see students in their homes or in classrooms, or in university libraries, or I hold court in the kitchen of my own house. I do the teaching and then get on with other business.

I might like a formal university or school position. However, because most positions available seem to be in North or South-West London, and because I live in Deal, and have no present wish to move, I am content with present arrangements – even if I am always looking for more students. The arrangements suit me for three reasons.

First, I have been obsessed by the Ancient World since I was eight, and I enjoy teaching any subject connected with it. I particularly enjoy teaching its languages. I am, indeed, very good at teaching them. I have a talent for sitting down with a student, or a small group of students, and finding the right individual approach. Rather than speak at length on this, I refer you to the Testimonials page of my teaching website. These are a small selection of the grateful comments I receive. I have no doubt my students find me bumbling and pedantic, and my frequent digressions on philology and obscure points of history, and my tendency to climatic determinsism, may not always be relevant. Even so, I deliver the goods, and have the testimonials to prove it.

Second, I am not aware of any competition for my services. The number of those able to teach the classical languages falls every year. I believe there has been an increase in demand during the present century – that, or supply is now declining faster than demand. In either case, I am reasonably able to set my own terms of work. In an age of targets and micro-management, I am in a lucky position.

Third, and following from the above, any person or institution in want of my services has little choice but to do business with me. I am a free market libertarian and a bit of a High Tory. Either position would put me out of sorts with the current order of things. Taken together, they make me an object of suspicion and dislike within almost every institution I know. I get on well with many Conservatives. I get on surprisingly well with socialists who want to improve the lot of the working classes by nationalising the means of production. Not so with the vast middle ground of technocratic Blairites, or with the cultural Marxists.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

 

Where the classical languages are concerned, I am like a plumber. If your toilet is blocked, you do not ask the man you call out if he votes Conservative or Labour. You do not ask how he voted in the European Referendum. You do not grill him on the Divinity of Christ, for or against, and do not take against him if he likes Abba, or if he is about to change sex, or if he makes unkind jokes about “shirt-lifters.” All you want is your toilet to flush, and not too many footprints on the Azerbaijani rug you forgot to roll away before opening the door. Make the necessary changes, and I am the equivalent of a plumber. I do the job, and I do it well.

I turn now to the question of how, with or without my help, to learn the classical languages; and, if I choose to concentrate on Latin, what I have to say applies also to Greek. A few years ago, before I had my present experience of teaching in schools, I published a book on how to learn Greek or Latin or both. My advice then was to forget course books or books of simplified reading, and to go, a verse at a time, though a parallel text of The Acts of the Apostles. I still believe this is a good method of learning, and something like this approach was taken during Antiquity and until about the end of the sixteenth century. But it is not suited to all students. I am using it at the moment with someone who has A Level Latin and who wants to learn Greek. It seems to work. But it can be a slow and intensive grind, and I have come to a better opinion of the course books I used to reject.

For anyone who wants a good knowledge of Latin, there are two main difficulties – the second encountered somewhat after the first.

The first is that Latin has a lot of grammar, and this can be confusing. There are five declensions of nouns, each with five or six cases in both singular and plural. Indeed, the second declension has masculine and neuter forms, which are different, and the third declension has a variety of irregularities and different forms. Adjectives and participles also decline, and must agree with nouns in gender, case and number. There are four or five conjugations of regular verbs. Each regular verb has thirty-six parts in its indicative active, and thirty six in its indicative passive. Each of these voices has another twenty-four parts in its subjunctive mood. There are more irregular verbs than I have tried to count.

Many of these parts are identical. Dominae can mean “of the woman,” “to or for the woman,” or “women.” Am-emus means “we might love,” or “let us love.” Mon-emus means “We advise.” Reg-emus means “we shall rule.” Monu-erimus means both “we shall have advised” and “we might have advised.” You sort through these verbs by learning that amo is first conjugation, that moneo is second, and that rego is third. Confusion between future perfect indicative active and perfect subjunctive active is avoided by learning to recognise context.

The second main difficulty is that the Romans did not always like simple sentences. They had no fixed order of words, and they made all the use they could of participles; and they had a taste for periodic sentences, in which one main verb and subject are supported by a mass of complements and subordinate clauses.

Let me give an example of this in English, from Book II of Paradise Lost:

High on a Throne of Royal State, which far
Outshon the wealth of ORMUS and of IND,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showrs on her Kings BARBARIC Pearl & Gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit rais’d
To that bad eminence; and from despair
Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires
Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue
Vain Warr with Heav’n, and by success untaught
His proud imaginations thus displaid.

Milton can be a difficult writer for native speakers of English. But his effort to write English as if it were Latin was restrained by our lack of inflexion. The Roman authors had no restraint.

Take this, from the Book III of Lucretius:

E tenebris tantis tam clarum extollere lumen
qui primus potuisti inlustrans commoda vitae,
te sequor, o Graiae gentis decus, inque tuis nunc
ficta pedum pono pressis vestigia signis,
non ita certandi cupidus quam propter amorem
quod te imitari aveo; quid enim contendat hirundo
cycnis, aut quid nam tremulis facere artubus haedi
consimile in cursu possint et fortis equi vis?

You can look up every word of this in a dictionary, and still be no closer to knowing what it means. The meaning emerges from the grammatical relationship of the words to each other.

Now, there is a method for decoding periods. To show this, I will use the Milton.

1. Read to the full stop. Do not try to understand all that is happening. Instead, get the idea that Satan is doing well.
2. Read again, this time stopping at the first semi-colon. You probably have a clause that makes sense in its own right. The later clauses need the first for making sense. But the first usually stands alone.
3. Put a mental line through anything that looks like a subordinate clause. These are generally introduced by relative pronouns – “which,” “where,” and so forth.
4. Put a mental line though anything that looks like a parallel clause. These are generally introduced by conjunctions – “and,” “or,” and so forth.
5. Look at what is left, and look for the main verb. Here, it is “sat.”
6. Look for the subject. Here, it is “Satan.”
7. Look for adjectives and complements that go with the subject. Here, they are “High on a throne of royal state,” and “exalted,” and “by merit raised to that bad eminence.

We therefore have the main idea of the first clause that Satan is sitting high on a throne of royal state, and has been raised by merit to that bad eminence. The subordinate clauses should now make sense. The throne far outshines the wealth or Hormuz and of India – why these places are chosen for comparison may need a commentary to be explained. Or it outshines those other places in the East, where the barbarian kings have pearls and gold poured over them. In Latin, you would know at once whether “barbaric” is an adjective of “kings” or of “pearl and gold.” In English, your guess may be as good as mine.

But I describe a difficulty and a solution not relevant for beginners. The first difficulty is the most important – how to determine the grammatical parts. There are two solutions. The first is to memorise the declensions and conjugations. This is not as hard as it sounds. You go ahead and memorise them. Many years ago, I had to learn Slovak. I had the advantage of living there, and of having an urgent need to learn the language. I mostly learnt it by using it. But I began by memorising all the paradigms of verbs and all the declensions. This took one afternoon. The hardest part of the job was rewriting the declensions I found in my grammar, so they followed the order you find in Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer – nominative-accusative-genitive-dative-locative-instrumental. Bearing in mind I was able within three weeks to chair meetings in Slovak, it was a good use of one afternoon.

But most students do not like memorising. Anyone can do it, but hardly anyone will do it. So the second solution is to  read the grammatical tables, and to be aware of what they say and of any duplications and other ambiguities they show.

Do not, by the way, trouble me or any other teacher with questions that start with the adverb “why.” If you are a beginner, it is enough to be told that something is so. Fero means “I carry.” Tuli means “I have carried.” Latum means “carried.” Learn that, or learn to be aware of it. Do not ask for reasons. If you have progressed any distance, you will know the answers for yourself. The grammar of Classical Latin is a snapshot of the language taken during the first century before Christ. It is somewhere between the extreme complexity of its Indo-European ancestor and the simplicity of its Italian daughter. Had the snapshot been taken before the First Punic War, Classical Latin would have had locative and instrumental cases, and perhaps a definite article. Taken after the death of Commodus, it would not have genitive or dative cases, though it might have the embryo of a restored definite article. Taken when it was, the snapshot shows a weakening of the inflected forms prior to their collapse.

For the rest, every language has irregularities. A counterpart in English of fero-tuli-latum is “I go,” “I went,” “I have gone.” At some time in the distant past, two verbs have been jammed together in different tenses. Children learn the messy result without thinking about it. Intelligent foreigners learn it without asking questions. As said, by the time it is worth asking why, the answer suggests itself.

But I digress. You do not memorise the grammar. Instead, you learn where to find it, and you refer to the tables as often as it takes for them to soak into your mind.

How to get those tables to soak in? When in Slovakia, I was immersed in the language. I learnt much without noticing. With the classical languages, the best alternative is what is called extensive reading. You do not begin by attacking Lucretius. You find a book of easy readings. My current favourite is John Taylor’s Latin Stories. I discovered this when I taught my first GCSE class. It is a clever book. The stories are actually interesting – mostly retellings of Greek myths or episodes from ancient history. The difficulty of each passage is carefully-graded. Every few pages, new grammar is introduced, and this is then drilled into the student. Most sentences are short. Every so often, there is a longer and more complex sentence that gives students an opportunity to practise a simplified version of the parsing rules I give above.

The purpose of this book, and of others like it, is not for each chapter to be read and then left alone. The purpose is for a comparative beginner to decode each sentence, and get the meaning of a passage – and then to read it again, and again, and again. You learn vocabulary not by memorising lists of words, but by fixing the meaning of a word within particular known sentences. Once you no longer need to look up every fifth word in a passage, you are able to appreciate overall matters of style and construction. This is the equivalent of immersion.

A further point is that you do not know Latin if every time you see navis, the word “ship” comes into your mind. You are beginning to know Latin when you see navis and you imagine a ship. You get here by reading and rereading texts where all the work of decoding has been already done.

When you do eventually turn to the classics, you will feel as if you have been lifted from a heated swimming pool and thrown into the Channel. You can read every page of Latin Stories ten or twenty times. Even so, Lucretius will not be an easy read. But, you will be aware of what needs to be done. You strip out the secondary parts of a sentence and hunt for the main verb in what remains. You never entirely stop doing this. But it does grow less frequent with practice. You can say that you know Latin when you are able to read a passage of Cicero or Vergil with as much conscious attention to grammar as an educated native speaker of English pays to the grammar of John Milton.

Oh – and what I say about extensive reading is not confined to learners. If you read Book VI of the Aeneid, you do not throw it aside like a read Sunday newspaper. You read it again, even if not perhaps at once. Any difficulties you may have noticed on first reading will have been settled. So you read it again as you might listen to a favourite piece of music. Doubtless, other difficulties will arise. But you settle those as well. The classics are classics because they repay continued attention. I have read Gibbon three times so far. When I was much younger, I may have read each of Macaulay’s Essays a dozen times. When I was a boy, I read The Ancient Mariner so often, I can still recite it from memory. It is the same with A Shropshire Lad and the first two books of Paradise Lost. You may call that a sign of autism. If so, I can think of less pleasurable disorders.

Or, if you have enough of the Roman classics, there is another millennium of good literature. I like dipping at random into Paul the Deacon, and Liutprand of Cremona, and the Gesta Francorum. I have not read much Erasmus, but he is on my list of authors to download from Google Books. If you want to call yourself a Latinist, you should aim to read five thousand words a week.

Why anyone should put so much effort into learning one or two dead languages is a question I do not propose to discuss. I have discussed it at length elsewhere. All I will say is that, if you are ignorant of at least Latin, you are deaf to some of the finest products of the human mind; you are missing a whole dimension in English literature; you are imperfectly aware of where we stand in the progress of our civilisation. You are at best a mannered barbarian. You probably do not know the grammar and the potential of your own language.

So come and be my student. Or send someone else. No one was ever hurt by knowing the meaning of silent enim leges inter arma. It certainly pays my bills in what would otherwise be a mildly hostile world.

What is the best way to learn Latin?

Seen on EIDOLON

“MF: Eleanor, your new book is a revelation! It shows that ancient Greeks learned Latin the way we learn modern languages. They memorized made-up dialogues — dialogues that illustrate stereotypical Roman culture — and only then went back and analyzed each word for its grammatical function. By contrast, a reader opening Reginald’s book might be surprised that he insists on total philological mastery. It seems completely different, but it obviously works, too. Do you see Reginald’s method as a total break from “the ancient way” (as your title aptly puts it)? Or do you see continuities?”

So begins a conversation between Michael Fontaine, Associate Professor of Classics at Cornell University. Eleanor Dickey, authoress of  “Learning Latin the Ancient Way: Latin Textbooks from the Ancient World”  and Daniel Gallagher , Reginald Foster’s longtime student and successor in the Office of Latin Letters at the Vatican.

Read the whole conversation here…...

The objective of Reginald Foster’s book – “Ossa Latinitatis Sola “is to get people into immediate contact with and understanding of genuine Latin authors, and for these encounters to grow into a love and use of the entire language in all its literary types and periods of time and authors of the past 2,300 years.”

You can hear him putting this into practice:

Listen to him teaching in his own inimitable style here…..

GCSE Latin – a Revision Handbook

Iraklis Lampadariou has produced a revision handbook for GCSE Latin students. He writes:

“A revision handbook  for Year 11 students who wish to have a GCSE qualification in Latin Language can be downloaded  for free at www.saitabooks.eu/2017/02/ebook.213.html

This handbook is aimed at being a simple but efficient synopsis of all the grammar and syntax points that are required for the GCSE in Latin Language. It is designed for students in Year 11, but also for people who want to taste what Latin is all about. It might, however, be suitable as a resource for teachers who wish to teach their students following the way that it helped me to learn this highly inflected language; by using tables, diagrams and notes, all in nice memorable ‘boxes’.

Please be so kind to share your feedback with me. Thank you very much.”

Iraklis Lampadariou

website – problems resolved

ARLT is now back online at its usual address:

www.arlt.co.uk

For details of our March 4th Refresher Day, visit

http://www.arlt.co.uk/refresher.html

 

 

website problems – update

The ARLT website is now located here:

http://www.classicalresourcecentre.com/arlt/index.html

This is likely to be a long-term, temporary home and not all pages and/or files will be immediately available. If you have an interest or need for any specific item, please contact the webmaster

website problems

The ARLT website is currently experiencing problems and cannot be accessed. The Server wham-e.com is down and we can only wait until it is back up again. Further information, when available.

Full details of our Refresher Day for teachers, to be held at Solihull School on Saturday 4th March,  will be available here and, deo volente, on the website shortly.

The people who are bringing Latin to life

Ann Patty, writing in the Wall Street Journal celebrates the Paideia Institute’s annual “Living Latin in NYC” convention—two days of lectures, classes and conversations, all in Latin.

“classicists and grammar fans are speaking a language often called dead”

“Latin isn’t a dead language, it’s undead—it’s a zombie language. And this is the zombie apocalypse!”

“We’ve made it cool to speak Latin,” Dr. Pedicone (the 34-year-old classicist who co-founded the institute) said. “We’re proving that interest in the classical humanities is alive and well.”

Read the full article here:

http://www.wsj.com/article_email/the-people-who-are-bringing-latin-to-life-1466786605-lMyQjAxMTE2MjIxNTUyNzU1Wj

 

Rouse writes to a former pupil

Amongst the memorabilia celebrating the 400th anniversary of the Perse School is a letter written by WHD Rouse in 1945 to a former pupil, Leslie Missen. The letter begins unpromisingly with the words:

“This is going to be a long letter, and dull.”

But continues confidently with

“But I think you will read it, because I know you.”

Rouse’s affection for his school and his pupils shines through

“You are one of my sons – all the OPs are my sons – and you will listen to pa because you ought. I am now rising 83, and I can’t last long: but I do hope to leave something good behind me. I will tell you later the kindly things. You saw the Perse School from the inside – and I want to show it to you from the inside.”

Read on here:

http://www.perse.org.uk/voicesblog/education-is-happinessif-the-life-is-there/