I don’t think I’ve mentioned this yet, but I’ve been auditing a beginning Latin class for the past three weeks, and I think I’ll keep it up for a while longer. It’s kind of fun, and — to the extent that there’s no math involved — it’s kind of relaxing. But my homework cracks me up. All of the vocabulary has to do with typical Roman topics (after all, that’s what the texts are about I suppose), so the sentences we have to translate go something like this:
Nautis consilia reginae monstrare debebimus. Regina enim servis insularum arma dare optat. Nautae vela dare debebunt.
“We will have to show the queen’s advice to the sailors. For in fact the queen wants to give weapons to the slaves of the island. The sailors should set sail.”
and:
Feminam ab oppido ad agrum vocabimus; sapientiam enim et consilium de ira reginae agricolis monstrare poterit.
“We will call the woman from the town to the field; for indeed she will be able to show us wisdom and advice concerning the wrath of the queen.”
I guess these exercises will help me read Latin texts at some point, but they’re not going to help me much with everyday phrases…not that I have anyone to trade everyday phrases with =)
I read this and it recalled something I read earlier tonight.
It’s a piece called “Man and Language” from “The Scope of Hermenutical Reflection by a Hans-Georg Gadamer who owes a lot of his philosophy to Wittgenstein.
Anyway, he’s talking about Grammar as a thing that gets buried by usagein speech “self-forgetfulness that belongs to language…all those factores which linguistic science makes thematic — are not at all conscious to living speaking.”
So grammar is buried in language and we don’t think about it (an interesting if not wholly believable claim.) He goes on to talk a little about how grammar [especially in a foreign language is taught:
“In learning foreign languages there is a very fine experience of this phenomenon which each of us has had, namely, the paradigm sentences used in text books and language courses. Their task is to make one aware in an abstract way of a specific linguistic phenomenon. In earlier times, when the task of acquisition involved in the learning of the grammar and syntax of a language was still acknowledged, these were sentences of an exalted senselessness that declared something or other about Caesar or Uncle Carl. The modern tendency to communicate a great deal of interesting information about the foreign country by means of such paradigm sentences has the unintended side effect of obscuring their exemplary function precisely to the extent that the content of what is said attracts attention.”
So really, they’re not teaching you everyday phrases as you might expect, they’re teaching you a whole framework in which to form phrases which is probably more useful in Latin where Grammar is the “Primum movens” so to speak…
Anyway, I thought you post here on those sentences was an interesting connection to that idea. Almost 4 years as an English Major has taught me nothing if not drawing ideas together. I thought it was at least sort of related and interesting. Hope everything is going well.
PDF of the chapter if you happen to be interested:
http://faculty.msmary.edu/flynn/Man%20and%20Language.pdf
Phew, finally had time to read that article – neat stuff. But I don’t think he’s saying that my “sentences of exalted senselessness” are more useful in learning a language than are the sentences with interesting content…they should be less useful. He’s saying that grammar is inherently buried in language. When we speak a language that we have always known, one that introduced us to the world, in fact, and to the shared concepts of our verbal communities, there’s no need to examine the strict rules of syntax and grammar by which we communicate. We just know them, and if, collectively, a change is made (‘who’ is exchanged for ‘whom,’ for example), well then the language changes. The changes are only noticed, though, when we attempt to analyze the language in terms of grammar rules, which can never truly be accomplished since we can never fully separate ourselves from the language we think in in order to think about it!
So for a living language, learning interesting things about the culture and diving into everyday language is often a better way to learn the grammar rules…the trick is just to not consciously memorize the forms. I don’t know about you, but I was never taught grammar until Ms. Schulz tried to foist some on us for the English AP – but I’m pretty good at knowing what’s grammatical and what’s not in a sentence. If you read enough, you learn to recognize what sounds right and what sounds wrong without needing to explicitly state the rules. I mean, how did any of us learn English to begin with? By listening to everything around us and eventually organizing it all into a coherent system of concepts with which to approach the world. (It’s fascinating to me how much of literary theory comes back to child psychology).
Maybe Latin is different, since it’s not changing anymore the same way modern languages are. I don’t know. Maybe once a language is “dead” like that it’s ok for linguists to pick over its bones. Maybe the separation is large enough because no one truly thinks in Latin anymore. But then, think how much we don’t know about Latin because of that separation – no one’s even sure how to pronounce it correctly. We would know more if it were still a native language somewhere, but then of course it would be more difficult to study grammatically. I guess you can’t have it both ways. Hm.