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* [5]About
* [6]Translations of Non-Poetry
* [7]Essays & Ponderings
* [8]Poems Found in Translation
* [9]Voices of Earlier English

Latin as She is Spoke: How Classicists Tricked Themselves, and the Real Issue
with Mary Beard's Latin

Not long ago, Mary Beard graced us with [10]a bit of honorable
honesty in the Times Literary Supplement, in which she confessed to
what is a bit of an open secret among most classicists. She can't
sight-read a complex Latin text all that well. Most classicists can't.
This admission — from someone like Beard — is good to have out there.
What irritates me is that —again like most classicists — she treats
this as a self-evident fact to be just accepted rather than a problem
to be dealt with, as if nobody could hope to actually read Cicero with
ease. It always strikes me as bizarre and a bit embarrassing to see
classicists insisting that it is impossible to acquire fluid or fluent
command of Latin or Greek, that "we" can never do this. It's not just
that this assumption would be news to people like Galileo, Kepler or
Descartes. It's that people do actually acquire this kind of
competence. Today. Anyone who pokes around at, say, the Conventiculum
Bostoniense, will find proficient Latin-speakers as readily as Zeus
finds incestuous booty-calls.
Take Msgr. Daniel Gallagher who worked for a decade at the Vatican
Secretariat's Latin Office. Here's [11]him delivering a lecture about
the possibility of a manned mission to Mars in Latin. Here's Jorge
Tárrega [12]teaching one of Horace's most famous poems through the
medium of Latin. Here's [13]Justin Slocum Bailey talking about Aulus
Gellius in Latin. If you want something literary, [14]here's a lovely
poem by Cäcilie Koch (AKA Caecilia) inspired by the discovery of the
jaw-bone of a Neanderthal boy, and another [15]poem by Alanus
Divutius dedicated to the 9/11 victims. Here's [16]a Latin Wikipedia
article about special relativity. Here's a [17]scene from Jurassic Park
dubbed into Latin. Here's the [18]Quomodo Dicitur podcast in which
three people (not always the same people) have unscripted conversations
about various topics in Latin. I could keep spouting these links till
either I or you, dear reader, die of boredom. There are plenty of
people who read Latin as easily as any "modern" language that they have
acquired as adults. There are entire [19]internet forums written in
it.
There are even still people who write scholarly material in Latin —
very, very occasionally. The subject matter tends to be unlikely to be
of interest to anybody who can't read Latin well ([20]here's a good
example). One exception to this, which would be of interest to
linguists — particularly sociolinguists who deal with more unusual
forms of bilingualism — is Terence Tunberg's [21]brilliant and
informative monograph about the use and nature of spoken Latin in early
modern Europe. The whole thing is in Latin, and not the kind of
simplified user-friendly Latin found in textbooks. Here's a passage
from the first page:

Libri tam medio illo aevo quam litterarum et artium renascentium
aetate Latine scripti adhuc exstant permulti: quibus perlectis,
etiam nunc iudicare possumus quale quisque genus scribendi coluerit:
at non tam facile iudicare valemus quibus modis, quam crebro, quam
diligenter homines iam pridem emortui ex tempore et pro re nata
soliti sint Latine colloqui

There exist as yet a great many books written in Latin as much from
the Middle Ages as from the Renaissance. Having read them, we are
even now able to judge what kind of writing-type any given person
practiced. We are not as easily able to judge how, how often, or how
carefully people long dead were wont to converse in Latin
when speaking it spontaneously on an as-needed basis.

My English translation is a bit stilted, because I wanted to keep close
the structure of the Latin, and even so I had to shift some of the
information into a new clause ("when speaking it") and render an idiom
with another somewhat inapposite idiom (pro re nata -> "on an as-needed
basis"). A phrase like "quale quisque genus scribendi coluerit"
containing a hyperbaton-nested pronoun, can only be put into much more
long-winded English. "Practice" is a poor substitute for "colere" which
might more nearly be rendered as "cultivate" but is infinitely less
pretentious. I rather doubt that the thought would have been expressed
this way if Tunberg were writing in English. My point here is that,
though written by a native English speaker, this does not read like the
work of someone who writes Latin while thinking in, or mentally
translating from, English. This is comfortably written, idiomatic Latin
which could not be translated into un-stilted English without some
rephrasing and recasting of sentences. And Tunberg wrote this in the
year of our lord 2012 for an audience he expected to understand him.
Nonetheless, as Latin prose goes, this is a relatively straightforward
passage with no rhetorical flourishes or stylistic fireworks. Tunberg's
aim is purely communicative. He is not trying to entertain, and has no
need to impress. Compare that with the beginning of a speech by
Giovanni Rossi in Rome, about the poet Joseph Tusiani, which opens in
full-on Ciceroniatio.

Munus mihi, Theodorice optime, mandasti grave et aleae plenum, in
provinciam me tuam arcessens, qui lateres tracto, non carmina, et
siqua facundia est in me, quam alii laudant, ego scio quam sit
exigua, omnino sum expers poeseos, quin etiam — fateor enim aperte —
raro versibus neolatinis delectari soleo, in quibus nescioquid
fucatum mihi deprehendere videor.

My good Theodoricus, you have ordered me on a hard and risk-riddled
mission, summoning me into your bailiwick. I deal with bricks, not
poems. If there is in me any of the eloquence which others laud, I
know how paltry it is. I have nothing at all to do with poetry, and
— I openly admit it — I tend only rarely to find pleasure in
neolatin verse, in which I seem to apprehend something contrived.

Rossi draws freely on the Latin stylistic arsenal in his address, and
translating it into a less awkward English would require not just a
more thorough recasting, but also some sacrificing of nuance. As it is,
my crummy English version sacrifices both the elegance and nuance of
phrases like nescioquid fucatum. The term nescioquid here carries a
force not only of indefiniteness but also of triviality, and
fucatus (literally "painted" or perhaps "covered in make-up") is not
merely "contrived" but also "embellished" with overtones of falsity.
"In provinciam me tuam arcessens" has a strongly military overtone to
it, but provincia also has a more general semantic range of "sphere of
official duty" and jokes relying on this word's association with
military bureaucracy go back to Plautus. Rossi's familiarity with
things poetic is already apparent (the phrase plenus aleae may or may
not be meant to evoke its origin in Horace, as it is a stock phrase of
Neo-Latin). The trivialization of the speaker's knowledge of poetry
gives it a playful irony which becomes more apparent as Rossi's speech
goes on ("tamen tibi, quae est humanitas tua, lubenter morem geram,
Josephum autem amicum, virum laudatum, laudabo lubentius"). Humble
posturing of this kind is common in Latin literature, though not always
with this kind of self-awareness. Rossi expresses the modesty topos by
toying with a famous phrase of Cicero's in Pro Archia ("Si quid est in
me ingeni...quod sentio quam sit exiguum") and variations on that
phrasing are not uncommon in mock speeches in Renaissance literature.
The mock-aspect is heightened,by substituting facundia "fluency,
eloquence" for ingenium "natural ability" in a Ciceronian phrase
template.
The Latinity here shines in a high-end literary polish even as it
cracks a smile of genre-savvy humor and casual familiarity. The speaker
is not taking himself or his high-flown clausal structures too
seriously. Because Rossi himself was not unknown to his audience, even
personal biography comes into play. The statement that lateres tracto,
non carmina is an allusion to Rossi's professional background as an
architect.
There is a specifically Latinate aesthetic at work here. Its cultural
register is quite different from the passage I took from Tunberg's
book. Full understanding of the denotative content of a speech like
this requires a well-developed grasp of Latin idiom. Fully apprehending
its connotative dimensions requires a peculiar kind pragmatic awareness
which depends on a shared knowledge of the Latin canon. And this is
from a speech delivered in 2009. To an audience that understood what he
was saying in real time (about a Latin poet born just a year before the
birth of the first television station.)
Oh, and if you want to see high-end spoken Latin in action:
Here's [22]Wilfried Stroh talking in Latin about Lucretius.
Here's [23]Luigi Miraglia giving an interview in Latin in which he
discusses, among other things, how he was taught the language.
And here's Miraglia [24]giving a lecture in which he says a lot of
things I don't think are true.
This is what I mean when I say Latin is not a dead language, so much as
one that just happens to lack native speakers.
The thing of it is that classicists often act like they don't know
these people exist. Or if they do, they imagine them to be a small
congeries of exceptional souls. That may be true when it comes to
people who speak Latin as well and spontaneously as Miraglia does, or
who would be able capture ever nuance of a speech like Rossi's in real
time. (I am so very, very far from being either of these.) But
Tunberg's book is not aimed at a tiny audience of eccentric linguistic
necrophiles. It is aimed at Renaissance scholars who deal with Latin
texts a lot, and whom he expects not to have much difficulty
understanding the substance of his arguments expressed in the language.
It's not uncommon for renaissance scholars to develop a good reading
proficiency in Latin that allows them to deal with any text in the
language, albeit not without the help of a dictionary. The reason is a
practical one. Unlike classicists, scholars of Renaissance literature
often have to deal with texts precisely like the one that so frustrates
Mary Beard: texts that are not available in translation, let alone in
modern critical editions with regularized spelling complete with
footnotes that hold your hand.
Quoth Mary Beard:

And you are on your own: there's no crib here, like there is with
Tacitus

To which a medievalist or Renaissance specialist will respond "welcome
to my life." People whose scholarly work depends on dealing with
medieval or Renaissance Latin texts have to have a better command of
Latin than the kind Mary Beard describes. And if you're sitting there
thinking "but Medieval Latin is simpler than Classical Latin" realize
that I don't just mean reading the pared down language of the Res Gesta
Francorum or even Jerome's Bible. I mean reading Cicero's letters,
alongside Petrarch's Ciceronian response to them. I mean reading Virgil
alongside Walter of Châtillon. I am talking about the kind of reading
proficiency that allows one to skim hundreds of pages of text in order
to find material relevant to one's research. If Peter Godman couldn't
read new, unfamiliar and often abstruse Latin texts, he [25]could not
do the research he does. Medievalists and Renaissance scholars — even
those taught by painfully ineffective traditional methods — get
practice dealing with texts on their own way more than classicists as a
rule.
Quoth Mary Beard:

Why, I still wonder, are Latin and Greek so hard. I think it is
partly that most of us, even if we have done our turn in trying to
translate English into Latin, still learn ancient languages largely
passively. It is both the plus and the minus of Latin that we never
have to ask for a pizza, or the way to the swimming pool, in it.

Beard treats Latin as if it were any other "ancient language" which
"we" mostly learn passively. But as "ancient languages" go, Latin is
quite unusual in its active cultivation. Though the example
of [26]Sanskrit shows it is hardly unique, and there are those who use
and learn Ancient Greek actively too (see [27]here, [28]or here, [29]or
here, [30]or here or [31]here). This is fundamentally unlike the
situation with, say, Old English, Gothic, Old French or Middle English
(though Alice In Wonderland has been
translated [32]into [33]all [34]of [35]these, and [36]the occasional
nerd still writes poetry in Old English.) It's unlikely that, say,
[37]a relatively obscure linguistics concept could readily be discussed
in Old Irish or Ancient Egyptian.
Note also the word "still" here, as if the exclusively passive study of
Latin were an old tradition. It is actually a quite recent development.
The beginning of it is less than two centuries old at most. More
importantly, though, the idea of Latin as a specifically "ancient"
language — to be treated and learned as if it were dead — is very much
a 19th century conceit. This is the language in which [38]Newton,
[39]Copernicus, [40]Galileo and [41]Kepler did science. The language in
which [42]Gauss, [43]Fermat, and [44]Euler did math. The language in
which [45]Spinoza, [46]Descartes and [47]Francis Bacon did philosophy.
The language in which [48]Giovanni Pontano and [49]John Milton wrote
copious amounts of poetry. The language in which [50]Thomas More wrote
his "Utopia".
Renaissance humanists in particular were zealous advocates of a
pedagogy which aimed at making Latin their students’ "second mother
tongue" by constant conversational practice without burdening them with
useless amounts of grammatical analysis. Giovanni Pontano not only
wrote only in Latin, but apparently spoke only Latin to his wife
Adriana and his four children. He even wrote a series of [51]Latin
lullabies for his son Lucio. I rather doubt Pontano knew what an "agent
complement" or "partitive genitive" even was. In the 15th and 16th
centuries, it was common for schools to require that Latin be spoken
amongst students. Scholars have unearthed letters in which parents
wrote to their sons in boarding schools in Latin, often for the purpose
of providing good practice. There was once a tradition of Latin school
theater — a Protestant development which the Jesuits helped spread
throughout much of Western Europe — which served, in essence, as a
glorified language exercise. Most of the plays performed were new
creations, not recycled classics from antiquity (although many in the
Middle Ages and Renaissance did indeed study the comedies of Terence
and Plautus precisely in order to learn conversational style.) This
gave the players a chance to broaden their vocabulary and tighten their
grasp of the various stylistic registers of Latin. In fact, I'd bet
that a student who happens to pick up Jakob Bidermann's Canodoxus will
discover that such plays can still serve that function today. Latin in
the High Middle Ages and Renaissance was taught as what it is: a
completely normal language. It's important to realize how "modern" a
habit it is to treat Latin as a language to be learned passively
through grammatical gymnastics. This pedagogical habit developed not
long ago, and for rationally understandable reasons. It is not written
into nature. The fact that there aren't any Romans to chat with anymore
didn't stop people like Erasmus from using it as a conversational
language with other educated people. Even though there is little
practical need for spoken proficiency in Latin anymore, there is no
reason why learners of Latin today should be railroaded into the kind
of semi-literacy that academic classicists often acquire. There is no
reason why learners should be made to treat every Latin text as puzzle
to be deciphered into translation, rather than a specimen of normal
human communication to be understood as such.
Quoth Mary Beard:

But more to the point is that most of the classics we have to read
in Latin, or Greek, are so damn difficult. Making sense of
Thucydides or Tacitus is closer to making sense of James Joyce than
Charles Dickens . . . and after even 10 years at the language one is
hardly quite up to the task (and it was probably almost as baffling
for native speakers too).

This, to me, seems profoundly untrue, and by only mentioning
historians, Beard has fudged the issue a bit. History, as a Roman
genre, was prone to (a) some amount of archaism and (b) a tendency
toward syntactic innovation. Historians from Livy on, experimented with
the future participle, with the gerund and gerundive, with the
infinitive dependent on adjectives, with plain cases with compound
verbs. There's a strong tendency to deletion of assumed constituents
that would normally be made explicit. Tacitus' rhetorical habits can
indeed get a bit mystifying at times, especially when he himself seems
to be a bit sick of what he's writing about and to take delight in
overdoing the syntax. But Beard is I think massively overstating the
difficulty this would cause for native speakers. In [52]an earlier and
much more wrong-headed piece she even suggested that "asking a school
student to read Tacitus is a bit like asking an English learner to go
off and read Finnegan’s Wake." If you find Tacitus remotely comparable
to Finnegan's Wake in his difficulty, that says more about you than
about Tacitus. (If it's an innocent exaggeration, it's one that is so
out of proportion as to be uninformative.)
And Beard's broader implication that "the classics we have to read"
challenged the comprehension skills of native speakers in their own
time makes so little sense that I have trouble accepting that she
really believes this. Leave historians to the side for a moment and
consider any of the "classic" texts which we know were composed for
oral delivery or performance. Aristophanes' comedies may sometimes
deploy bizarre language, and are often deliberately silly, but we have
no reason to think that they were truly baffling for their original
audience. The comedies of Plautus and Terence cannot have posed a
serious comprehension challenge to their rather varied audiences when
first performed. Not only were most of the classics we read easily
understood by their target audience, but many of them were intelligible
when delivered orally at normal speed.
The aspects of the language that modern students often find
superfluously difficult when reading any ancient Latin author (such as
word order) posed no comprehension difficulty to those authors'
original audiences. We have a lot of ancient Latin of a non-literary
kind to compare Cicero or Tacitus with. Even the most subliterary
papyri taken via dictation — fascinating as they are in many ways —
contain a lot of the same features that modern learners often stumble
over. And the Cena Trimalchionis, which deliberately imitates the
ordinary (and subliterary) speech of uneducated freedmen, is by no
means especially easy for Anglophone learners.
To be sure, a lot of Romans whose knowledge of literary Latin fell
below the high standards of the rhetors were unable to compose coherent
complex prose like Cicero, or Tacitus a hundred years later. (We have
good evidence, for example, that even in Tacitus' day the inflected
passive didn't have a great deal of currency in most people's ordinary
speech, and letters taken from dictation tend to avoid using it in
anything but its most basic and predictable forms.) Learners of spoken
Latin as a second language during the empire could not necessarily
write elegant or even competent hexameters. (Sometimes their attempts
to do so were [53]comically inept and incomprehensible).
But the upper echelons of Roman society in the Late Republic and Early
Empire were a world in which speechmaking was important and ubiquitous,
in which different contexts will have required different styles of
composition and delivery, and where it is vanishingly unlikely that,
say, Cicero's speeches would have been completely intelligible when
delivered orally to their intended audience. However florid and
high-flown his speeches may be, however annoying it is for Latin
students to try and hunt for the verb heading his main clauses, they
were speeches meant for an educated audience that cannot have had great
difficulty understanding what he was saying in real time (except on
those occasions where he actually intended to be opaque). Point being:
it would be a poor public speaker indeed whose speeches were so
syntactically florid that nobody in the audience could understand him
without a sentence diagram.
Quoth Mary Beard:

"I have often said that more things survive (in both Greek and
Latin) of what the ancient Romans wrote than anyone could hope to
read in a lifetime."

This sounds like a huge overestimation to me. To be sure, a lot of it
probably isn't worth reading to most people, at least not for
enjoyment. Much of it is only of incidental "historical" interest, I
suspect. But the entirety of extant literature in Greek and Latin
through to, say, the Late Empire is probably enough to fill a single
small bookstore. It's a lot, sure. But a single person could probably
read all of it. Even if you added to that all the personal
correspondences unearthed in papyri and on wax tablets, and all the
inscriptional material I doubt that it is impossible for a human to
read all of it. I certainly wouldn't want to. I can't think of anyone
who would want to, really. How many grave inscriptions would they have
to read? How many tabulae in which a soldier in Britain sends for
underwear or something? Still, it would be doable. Once you push the
threshold of "ancient Romans" through into the very ass-end of Late
Antiquity, though, it is quite plainly impossible for a single human to
read it all.
In fact, "Ancient Latin" represents less than one percent of all that
has been written in the language. We pigeonhole this language as
"ancient" because 19th century ideas about what "real" Latin is have —
in a highly warped form — delimited the general sense of what Latin is,
and can be, how it can be learned, and how it can be read. Even in the
19th century, though, a lot of interesting work was produced in Latin.
Like [54]Giovanni Pascoli's poem about gladiators who escaped with
Spartacus.
Outside the rarified and often invisible academic discipline of
Neo-Latin studies, non-ancient Latin is constantly ignored into
invisibility despite its profusion. The result is intellectual
impoverishment. For example, students of baroque French literature tend
to be ignorant of Du Bellay's Latin poetry, which is every bit as
copious and accomplished as his French poetry. A full appreciation or
assessment of Du Bellay's accomplishment as a poet should — I think —
require consideration of his work in both languages. But, with a few
exceptions, people tend not to think so today. His Latin is — in an
important sense — "unreal" to French literary history.
As early as 1923, Thierry Sandre put it well:

"Il paraît qu'on ne lit plus le latin, depuis longtemps déjà. On ne
le lit plus surtout parce qu'on ne nous y intéresse plus. Qu'on nous
apporte une traduction d'un bon ouvrage que nous ne connaissions pas
: nous aurons envie d'en voir l'original. Mais, dira-t-on, y a-t-il
encore de bons ouvrages que nous ne connaissions pas ? Il y en a
malheureusement beaucoup, beaucoup trop ! La littérature latine du
Moyen-Age est considérable ; nous n'en savons pas grand'chose ; et
toute la littérature française du XVIe siècle est doublée d'une
littérature latine dont nous ne savons à peu près rien. Quel vaste
champ à explorer ! Que de découvertes à faire ! Plus d'un chapitre
de nos histoires littéraires y gagnerait une lumière utile. On
laisse presque toujours dans l'ombre les poésies latines de nos
poètes français."

(It seems we no longer read Latin, and have not done so for some
time. Above all, we no longer read it because nobody gets us
interested in it. Show us a translation of a great work we don't
know, and we will want to see the original. You may well ask, are
there still great works in Latin that we do not know? Unfortunately
a great many, too many. The latin literature of the Middle Ages is
considerable, and we know little of it. The whole of 16th century
French literature is coupled with a Latin literature we know
virtually nothing about. What a vast field to explore, what
discoveries to be made! More than one chapter of literary history
would benefit from the light it might shed. We almost always leave
the Latin poetry of our French poets in the shadows.)

Another case in point is the study of Orientalism. Modern scholars of
European Orientalism almost never know Latin, despite its omnipresence
in the scholarly firmament of Europe from the Middle Ages through to
the end of the 18th century. It is a pity, as Latinate Orientalism was
a bit of a different animal than what was produced in vernaculars. Sir
William Jones, for example, wrote so much more about Persian and Arabic
literature in Latin than he ever bothered to say in English. Most of
his Latin writing — influential in its day — remains untranslated and
thus almost never read today. A thorough reading of [55]Jones' "Poeseos
Asiaticae Commentariorum Libri Sex" and a consideration of the variety
of people influenced by it, including Goethe and Friedrich Engels,
offers a dimension to European literary Orientalism that is often
simply invisible to modern literary historians and theorists.
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 [56]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.
Still, one needn't strive to achieve a knowledge of Latin comparable to
that of Giovanni Pontano or John Owen or Luigi Miraglia in order to
have the kind of comfortable reading ability that allows one to
understand unfamiliar texts of considerable complexity. It is
completely doable. Language learning is never effortless, but a lot of
the difficulty classicists in particular face in acquiring a working
reading knowledge of Greek and Latin is completely avoidable. To bring
that burden down to its more natural weight, though, a lot of things
will have to change. It can't happen on a large scale in the absence of
teachers who both know the languages much better than most classicists
do and are trained in second language pedagogy.
Nor can it happen if learners are simply told that high reading
proficiency is an unattainable, or even unreasonable goal. Mary Beard's
confession is admirably honest, but it should not be taken completely
at face value. Though her experience is a very common one, it is
possible to do better. Latin and Greek are normal human languages.
Teachers and learners will do themselves and each other a capital favor
by treating them as such.
If anyone reading this is interested in learning to read Latin as a
normal language, then I strongly recommend Hans Ørberg's [57]Lingua
Latina Per Se Illustrata series. It's perfect for either self-study or
classroom use, and I've seen it do wonders to help struggling learners.
Above all else, it helps you learn to think about Latin in Latin. It's
the only Latin textbook I know of that actually helps you avoid
transverbalization (the habit of mentally translating everything you
read.)
Posted by [58]A.Z. Foreman
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21 comments:

1. [64]chiaraadezati[65]March 28, 2019 at 1:25 PM
yes!
Reply[66]Delete
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2. [67]mOOm[68]March 28, 2019 at 9:05 PM
Well I find in classical Hebrew some things are much harder to read
than others.... Poetry is usually harder than prose and some texts
have a lot of obscure words (at least for me). History and legal
texts are relatively easy to read, parts of the prophets are hard.
Reply[69]Delete
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1. [70]Matt[71]December 8, 2021 at 4:47 AM
This is because Hebrew poetry (the prophets wrote largely in
poetry) intentionally uses archaic language--as in, archaic
even to the one writing it. There is also a paucity of ancient
Hebrew works written on interesting topics (_please_ enlighten
me if I'm wrong), which makes true acquisition even harder
than Greek or Latin. It sounds like you are much farther ahead
than most students of classical Hebrew though.
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3. [73]AGC Beta Tester[74]March 29, 2019 at 1:39 AM
Latin and Greek are normal human languages, of course. Like
English, German or Spanish. And that's precisely why I don't think
Beard's analogy argument about the differences between Joyce and
Dickens can be dismissed at once. Doesn't a German speaker as a
second language, even a competent one, encounter sometimes
insurmountable difficulties in confronting Goethe? And a Spanish
learner who can read the daily press without problems can approach
Cela, Rulfo or García Márquez just as well?
Reply[75]Delete
Replies
1. [76]A.Z. Foreman[77]September 18, 2019 at 9:53 PM
Modern speakers of German as either a second or first language
may sometimes find passages in Goethe that are a bit odd to
say the least. The question there is whether this is due to
changes in how literary language is used between Goethe's time
and now, or something else. (A phrase like "keine Ferne macht
dich schwierig" sounds rather odd and would never be written
today). But I really doubt that competent Anglophone
German-scholars need to take the extreme measure of consulting
English translations just to figure out what the hell Goethe
is saying.
There are texts that even native speakers can find perplexing,
particularly experimental poetry. Marina Tsvetaeva or Nicanor
Parra come to mind. Even Dante's language is occasionally so
thoroughly scrambled that Italian Dante scholars are still
unsure of quite how to parse the syntax in a line like
"farotti ben di me volere scemo".
But Cicero's and Pliny's letters are not literary exercises
meant to strain language to somewhere close to its breaking
point. Texts exist in varying languages of difficulty, of
course, and the rhetorical floridity of a Cicero poses a much
greater challenge to learners than St. Jerome's Bible.
Phaedrus' versified fables are certainly easier to follow than
Virgil's Georgics. I'd even go so far as to say that, in the
mid-to-late Empire at least, we have evidence that the high
literary language was a struggle for native Latin speakers of
low educational attainment. There are plenty of 3rd and 4th
century authors who mention the need to use "barbarisms" of
one or another sort to be understood by the "vulgus".
The point I am making, though, is that most of the "classics"
that make their way onto a syllabus would not have been
perplexing to their original intended audiences. It seems to
me vanishingly unlikely that Roman senators would have found
Cicero's speeches at all hard to understand, let alone
"baffling". The bafflement that modern readers often
experience in the absence of a translation is — I think —
generally because they simply don't know the language, and its
idioms, well enough.
I think classicists since the mid 20th century have sometimes
been too willing to blame the text rather than themselves for
comprehension difficulties.
[78]Delete
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4. [79]zirur[80]March 30, 2019 at 8:06 PM
Hello, I don´t know nothing about latin. I ask you for greek.
Sometimes I think how could greeks make/form the participles and
the absolute genitives (just for giving one example) in the
rutinary life? did greeks can speak this almost mathematic and too
dificult greek? idk, or example all the morphological changes with
contract verbs and so on, did they really thought all of those
things?
I wonder if you on the other hand can tell us some methods to get
familiar with ancient greek as a speak languague -I´m really
interested in speak it, and also and more than this in read almost
fluently Plato or Thucydides. Thanks a lot
Reply[81]Delete
Replies
1. [82]A.Z. Foreman[83]March 30, 2019 at 10:36 PM
We do have a lot of specimens of Ancient Greek that appear to
be more or less in colloquial everyday language, such as Attic
comedy, and yes the same morphological complexity I think
you're talking about is present there.
There hasn't been as much use of spoken Greek in teaching as
there has with Latin. But you might be interested in the Polis
Institute in Jerusalem which, though it focuses on Koiné Greek
rather than Ancient Attic, teaches ancient Greek via active
use in its program. See the link below
https://www.polisjerusalem.org/polis-method
[84]Delete
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5. [85]The Loser[86]June 1, 2019 at 11:16 PM
Thank you for this wonderful reply to Mary Beard. It should be
published in the TLS as well. I found you through the Metafilter
website - if you want to see their discussion about your blog post,
you'll find it here:
https://www.metafilter.com/181221/Lingua-pulcherrima
Reply[87]Delete
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6. [88]fetişh porn[89]March 31, 2020 at 5:03 AM
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7. [92]William tracy[93]June 25, 2020 at 3:16 AM
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Reply[94]Delete
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8. [95]Joaquín Ocaña Bretones[96]April 5, 2021 at 9:09 AM
Marvellous! I love it. I would like to comment lots of things
regarding this publication. I´d love to check all the interested
references you share here. First of all, regarding the lecture of
Mr Miraglia, could you name some of these things you don´t agree
with? Thanks in advance!
Reply[97]Delete
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9. [98]Ian Brett Cooper[99]June 20, 2021 at 3:17 PM
I'm by no means competent in Latin, but I do know enough to tell
the difference between classical Latin and ecclesiastical Latin
pronunciation, and Mary Beard's spoken Latin makes me doubt she has
ever studied the language at all.
Reply[100]Delete
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10. [101]Cambrinus[102]July 21, 2021 at 12:42 AM
As a former student of Professor Beard, I can assure you that she
has studied the language to a point that you would be unlikely to
comprehend.
Reply[103]Delete
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11. [104]Cambrinus[105]July 21, 2021 at 12:44 AM
Now, A.Z.: is 'Finnegan's Wake' a genuine citation from Professor
Beard or your little joke?
Reply[106]Delete
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12. [107]Cambrinus[108]July 21, 2021 at 12:47 AM
I could not agree more with the essay above. Professor Beard seems
to underestimate the linguistic ability and scholarship of a great
many of her peers. It is true that intelligent Sixth-Formers (16-18
years old) usually have some difficulty with Cicero and Tacitus,
but this can largely be ascribed to the relatively small attention
and time given to Latin even in the best British schools.
Reply[109]Delete
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13. [110]SRT[111]July 27, 2021 at 7:19 AM
I had a wonderful Classics teacher at school, Hilary Goy, whose aim
seemed to be to make us read really copious amounts of any set
author. I find that a new author leaves me floundering for a bit,
but that once I have mastered the vocanbulary and usage of a
particular person I can read them at sight.
Reply[112]Delete
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14. [113]Luma Beard Growth Kit[114]September 17, 2021 at 10:12 PM
This comment has been removed by the author.
Reply[115]Delete
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15. [116]Robert[117]September 19, 2021 at 10:55 AM
Choose the best ideas from the best [118]youtube channel ideas
without showing your face
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16. [120]Luma Beard Growth Kit[121]October 8, 2021 at 1:26 AM
This comment has been removed by the author.
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17. [123]RobertFromAustralia[124]October 16, 2021 at 4:17 AM
Honestly, as a very bad Latinist and Joyce fan I find a page of In
Catillinam more comprehensible than a page of Finnegans Wake. Not
least because its opening sentences start on the first page.
Honestly, 'Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? '
is ridiculously straight forward compared to any 'sentence' in FW.
Reply[125]Delete
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18. [126]Cambrinus[127]December 8, 2021 at 10:29 AM
Robert, it's the very first sentence of In Catilinam I; so it's got
to be powerful and hard-hitting. The sentence structure thereafter
gets more complex.
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"What matters most in life isn't how much money you have. It's about
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— A.Z. Foreman
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adapting to the weakness of the oppressed one confirms in that weakness
the prerequisite for domination, and develops in oneself the degree of
coarseness, insensibility and brutality, needed to exercise it."
(Herablassung und sich nicht besser Dünken sind das Gleiche. Durch die
Anpassung an die Schwäche der Unterdrückten bestätigt man in solcher
Schwäche die Voraussetzung der Herrschaft und entwickelt selber das Maß
an Grobheit, Dumpfheit und Gewalttätigkeit, dessen man zur Ausübung der
Herrschaft bedarf.)
— Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
A half truth is worse than a whole lie
(אַ האַלבער אמת איז ערגער פון אַ גאַנצן ליגן)
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And no one exists alone;
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We must love one another or die.
— W.H. Auden
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A.Z. Foreman is a translator and poet who has been obsessed with
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Recommended Reading

[136]Les Érudits Maudits: Education and Class, by John Emerson
[137]F0rensic Translation, by Benjamin Paloff
[138]The Traditional Canon vs. Multiculturalism in the Literary
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