Speaking Latin
In one sense, the idea is as crazy as it sounds. The Latin tongue can no longer lay claim to a nation of indigenous speakers. It is antiquated, archaic, and out of touch. It no longer carries with it the air of scholarship, regality, and gravity that it once did. No longer is it the means by which the educated converse. Now, communicating in Latin bears the stigma of a fringe new method for teaching classical languages. Nevertheless, I am convinced that it is a useful. I don’t think a blog post is an appropriate medium for a full-length essay, so I will curtail my thoughts to more abbreviated rationales regardng the incorporation of it into a Latin classroom and some practical advice.
Also, before I begin, we have recently published a brief Latin dialogue which you can download for free by clicking the button below. We are working on even more of these, so stay posted.
Why You Should Consider Speaking Latin
We’ll start with why, I suppose. Why should you or anyone consider Latin as potential means of communication, both in general, but also more specifically in your classroom? The first and most obvious answer to that question is that forcing yourself to think from the other side of the veil – not the veil of death – but the veil that shrouds inchoate ideas, is clearly useful for someone who is interested in gaining a broader understanding of the languages to be learned. In other words, it is much more challenging to express ideas in Latin than to translate Latin into English. I assume that there is scientific evidence for the claim that there is significant linguistic value to be acquired by exercising those translating muscles in the other direction. I have been working with 8th-graders lately on purpose clauses with the conjunction ‘ut’. I like giving them sentences in English to put into Latin because it forces them to consider the entirety of a thought rather than the words themselves. Inevitably, when I put the sentence “Marcus climbs the tree in order that he might see the nest” on the board, despite the number of times we have practiced these kinds of sentences and all of my prefatory remarks, I am met with a barrage of questions like “how do you say ‘order’ and ‘might’ in Latin?” or “isn’t the word for ‘that’ ‘quod’?”. They are getting better at the process, but the goal of a sentence like this is manifold. It teaches them to recall vocabulary words in the other direction, that is from English into Latin, a process that I can only imagine helps smooth out the mental language channels for quicker recall, but it also teaches them to think about the sentence holistically and not as individual components. It involves a lot of critical thinking and may allow for a multiplicity of correct answers (a concept that will baffle students for a long time).
But if we take this idea and apply it to the entirety of a class session and force the kids to always speak and interact in the Latin tongue, that is to say, to always move from Latin first, we gain all of the benefits that an individual sentence affords us, but the instances that the exercise occurs are as numerous as the interactions that you or individual students have with each other. Additionally, if you and all of your students are speaking Latin in the classroom, the vocabulary that you want students to know is potentially constantly being heard, especially those high-frequency verbs like est, sunt, quod, quis, ubi, etc. When I first started teaching and was really in the dumps about the progress the class was making, nothing threw me more headlong into frustration than a student’s comment one day: “I thought ‘est’ meant ‘and’?” Those kinds of mistakes are practically unheard of in my classroom now because of how frequently the word ‘est’ and ‘et’ float in the ear.
Now, anyone who teaches a middle-school class and is reading this post and is convinced of the efficacy of communicating in Latin is likely wondering how in the world you coax such a frenzied, volatile, and off-kilter group of children to maintain an extended period of time in a language that they care nothing about. On top of that, how can one attain the ability to speak Latin with a level of clarity and accuracy that you can be sure your students can lean on as good Latin? I am not going to claim to have figured the method out perfectly, since any number of factors can completely ruin an otherwise well-devised plan. Nevertheless, I will present you with a couple of things that have worked for me personally. I will start with the latter of these two issues since it is likely the first hurdle to overcome for anyone looking to start implementing a system as I have described it. How do you learn to speak Latin?
Improving Your Fluency
I assume that for anyone trying it for the first time, the process will be quite slow and frankly inaccurate. Just like those kids I mentioned earlier, the temptation is always to work individual English words into Latin. Often the result of that process is a sentence that would hardly be discernable to a true Latin ear. That’s not to say that the trick of translating word-for-word in our head is always inaccurate, but the more effective method for acquiring this skill is really to gain a better understanding of Latin in general. (You now hopefully see the two-way street a little more clearly than before). To speak in Latin demands a knowledge and understanding of the language that simple Latin-to-vernacular translation will just never grant you. Erasmus, the great humanist scholar whose Latin was impeccable, says that the most effective and efficient way to truly learn Latin is assiduo lectio. But what to read? Though all classical sources are great, not all of them make use of a simple more colloquial tone that you hope to bring into your classroom. The plays of Terence, however, are one major exception, and they have been recommended through the ages as an excellent source for getting to grips with real down-to-earth Latin. When you first pick him up, however, it is not an easy read. As I mentioned in my last post, the vernacular of an ancient Roman was replete with cultural metaphors and slang that make it difficult to penetrate at times.
The phrases and proverbs that I mentioned in the last post and which we have available on our downloadable resourcespage are helpful for getting you past some of those roadblocks. The phrases are also helpful for simply adding to your expressive repertoire that you can pull from when teaching in the classroom.
The plays of Terence are extremely Romanesque and touch on subject matters that were of Greek and Roman interest, but they also broach matters of fatherhood and friendship that make them worth the read beyond their linguistic purity. Erasmus recommended them for teaching boys correct Latin and for shaping their moral character.
Unfortunately, Terence died on a sea voyage before he could publish more than six plays, and their subjects are all basically the same. Moreover, their Greco-Roman timbre can be tedious at times, so where can we look to gain a more copious and wider array of vocabulary that is more fitted to our needs and interests? The answer is dialogues. Antiquity produced some dialogues, like Cicero’s on old age or all of Plato’s works, but their subject matter is loftier than what a student of Latin or Greek requires for learning solid Latin. I will therefore first recommend the Colloquia Familiaria of Erasmus, copies of which can be found online. The initial sections are especially helpful for teaching you the basics of greeting, valediction, and asking how people are. Erasmus was particularly fed up with the hum-drum scholastic Latin of his day that had slowly strayed away from the style and vocabulary of the golden age of Cicero. He was instrumental in reviving the persuasive rhetoric of antiquity, and his Latin can be relied on as if it were an ancient Roman’s. In my opinion, he writes as clearly and with as much Latinity as Terence and at times can be even more Ciceronian than Cicero, while also offering a much more copious library for us to choose from, much of which was made specifically with students in mind.
As great as Erasmus’ works are, however, only a couple of the dialogues take place in a school setting with a teacher. So if you are looking for dialogues that touch upon school-related matters, be informed, reader, that we have begun working on our own dialogues here for the purpose of teaching pure Latin style. Two of them are currently up and available as free downloads right now on our resources page. Give them a read, and tell us what you think. The hope is that they not only provide language instruction, but that they also demonstrate some ways in which a teacher might run his classroom and some potential interactions one may have with a student in Latin. They also hopefully address some particularly contemporary challenges in education.
Getting Students to Join In
Moving on to the second question, assuming you have acquired a level of competent communication skills yourself, how does one also convince a group of children to speak Latin? One simple way that I have been able to accomplish this in my own classroom is with games and prizes. Telling kids to speak Latin and then only enforcing the rule with repeated reminders is simply not going to work. Even if, say, this is an “official” classroom rule, threats of detention only work for so long, and you will inevitably lose the battle of wills on this one, since it is just way too convenient and normal for them to speak their native tongue. What I have done this year, with varying degrees of success, is divide the class into teams. Slips into English will result in the loss of a point for your entire team, a negative consequence to keep the more garrulous in line, while impressive sentences and recall of vocabulary words earn your team points. At the end of the week, the numbers are tallied for a small prize, like a starburst. You will be surprised how motivating a single piece of candy can be if you have never used it before. Older students, too, even if they aren’t overly interested in candy, are allured by the mere competition. The positive consequences of doing good and impressive things are much more powerful than the negative, and a well-ordered classroom could easily maintain an entire class period in Latin with enough practice. If you want to see an example of something like this, check out the dialogue we have on our resources page.
There are obviously going to be moments when students require English to help them. You can simply enforce a rule that they may speak in English, so long as they first ask for permission to do so in Latin. The movement to an entirely Latin-speaking classroom is not going to be a quick one, especially if you have never tried anything like it before, but I do believe that there are serious benefits to be had by even trying it for brief periods of time. Don’t feel like you have to drop English cold turkey, if you are convinced speaking Latin is a good idea, nor feel like it has to be done every single day. The variance in language may serve to keep things dynamic and interesting. Start piecemeal. Look for simple ways to start incorporating vocal elements into your classroom. Simply greet students with a ‘salve’ as they enter and a ‘vale’ as they go. Such a small step sounds insignificant, but the number of students that tell me they don’t know how to say hello in Latin is baffling.
I’m going to unceremoniously draw my post to a close now.
– Rogerius
Photo credit – Cesare Maccari, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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