So You Really Want to Learn Latin

"The Latin argument in the last couple of years has become very, very furious — as often happens with arguments about slightly obscure subjects. There’s a whole school of thought that because Latin is difficult to teach, you should therefore give up and teach a dumbed-down version. I’m afraid I’ll have to mention it: the Cambridge Latin Course would never be in my top five in a million years. It wouldn’t be in my top 5 million. It’s extremely patronizing. I see you’ve brought it along tonight, Katie, shamefully. For those who don’t know it, the Cambridge Latin Course spoon-feeds children, patronizes them, it expects them not to learn all these things—like conjugations and declensions—so they’re forever feeling in the dark, because they haven’t learned the basics. It’s like playing football without knowing the rules. I’m all for Latin being taught in a jolly, funny way. There is something very funny about Latin. Listeners who’ve seen the Life of Brian will remember the extremely funny scene with John Cleese and Graham Chapman and the badly spelt graffiti. You can be funny, but you can teach the rigorous stuff at the same time. That’s what the Nick Oulton book does. It has lots of jolly bits of history, nice pictures done in an easy-going way, but all the proper rules are there: the declensions, the conjugations, properly taught, in the right order. I, like you, teach Latin and tutor children of 9 or 10. You can do it by being an amusing, good teacher. But I’m afraid the brutal truth is that learning stuff is quite boring. People don’t expect, when you’re teaching maths and learning long division — no one’s suggesting that that should be fun. It’s something we think our children should know. It’s quite boring, but it’s extremely useful. It’s the same with Latin. Only Latin and Greek were treated in this way — I think because of the associations with elitism and public school. They were given different treatment. Somehow it was shameful that these subjects were difficult to learn, and so they had to be dumbed down. I think that’s a non-sequitur. I disagree with the premise of your question. I’m afraid I don’t think it should be entertaining to learn, necessarily. I didn’t find it particularly entertaining learning 100 words of vocab every night when I was 10 or 11. It’s not fun. Education shouldn’t always be fun. It’s about things that are useful or things that later on bring incredible pleasure by knowing them. There are only 2 or 3. But I feel it strongly. The really unfair thing is that if you’ve been to expensive private schools in Britain like you or I have, that expectation of difficulty is completely expected. Parents bloody love it. They don’t want their children to have a particularly enjoyable time, they want them to know stuff. It’s extremely patronizing—largely in the state sector, although it’s fed into the private sector as well—this idea that because it’s difficult and boring, therefore your children shouldn’t do it, even though it’s extremely useful and wonderful for the mind. I just fundamentally disagree with the idea that the learning of it should necessarily be pleasurable. Yes. Over the last century you’ve had these two paths. You can either have the old-fashioned serious books of the 19th century, the 1920s, 30s which are a little dull and dry. Then there are ones like the Cambridge Latin Course , which fall over themselves to be nice and easygoing and therefore useless. Oulton is in the middle. It has all the hard stuff—and, as you say, it’s very heavy on grammar—but his examples are a little lighter and more pleasurable than the 19th century ones. So it squares the circle. Yes, if you’re either an adult or a child, from those two books between them—it’ll take quite a long time, most children being taught properly at school will have years and years of this—you could learn Latin. I think there are three Oulton books, and there are some answer books as well. You could learn Latin from those books plus Kennedy’s Latin Primer. No. It’s funny, I was asked the other day by a middle-aged person, ‘What’s a good book for English grammar?’ I replied that I’d never been taught English grammar, I did Latin and Greek. You could’ve been taught English grammar. There’s nothing particularly magic about Latin grammar, but just because, for historic reasons, it was taught in a rigorous way, you then learned what a noun, or a verb was — and you naturally thought for yourself about the differences. There is a famous cliché that you should learn Latin because it teaches you English grammar— the implication being because they’re very similar. Actually, as you said, it’s because they’re so incredibly different. There is no English equivalent of the ablative absolute. You could have been taught some other form of grammar rigorously—you could be taught Spanish grammar rigorously—it’s just that on the whole British schools don’t. There was a story the other day that at Brighton College, a very good private school, the English teachers got in trouble because they didn’t know their grammar. So the headmaster got in the Latin teachers to teach them English grammar. It’s not a magic quality of Latin, it’s because of the old-fashioned qualities of Latin teaching at its best, that grammar was taught. It is, and there’s an incredible pleasure in that. An example I give in my book is the Latin word ‘candidus,’ the adjective meaning white, pure, unvarnished. That’s where we get the word candidate from — and I don’t know when was the last time you heard the word political candidate and white, pure, unvarnished in the same sentence? They don’t go together. The reason why that word is what it is is that if you were standing for an election in Rome, you would sprinkle yourself with chalk dust — to be the prominent person in the market place. So you would be the candidus, the candid one, the white, pure, unvarnished one and ultimately the candidate. But, actually, if you went purely on your Latin, you couldn’t say that candidus has a direct connection with a candidate. But isn’t that incredibly pleasurable, to think about the journey?"