[This installment of “In My Humble Opinion,” a series dedicated
to video essays by writers, artists, and thinkers on diverse topics of interest
to them, aired on PBS NewsHour on 31 December 2018 (rebroadcast from 9
April). I’m posting it on Rick On
Theater because it struck a personal note
with me.
[Frankie
Thomas is the author of ”The Showrunner,” a story which received special mention in the 2013
Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her writing has also appeared in The Toast, The
Hairpin, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. She is currently studying fiction at the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.]
What’s the use of learning a language that’s
not spoken in conversation nor used in business transactions, and which most
people consider “dead”? Writer Frankie Thomas shares her humble opinion on why
it’s time to learn Latin.
William Brangham:
There are many benefits of
learning a foreign language. It opens up work and travel opportunities, and
studies have shown that it might even slow the onset of dementia.
But what about a
language that is rarely spoken in conversation, never used in business, and one
that most people consider dead?
Writer Frankie
Thomas shares her Humble Opinion on why it’s time to learn Latin.
Frankie Thomas: If you can possibly get away with it, you
should study Latin. OK, hear me out.
Yes, any modern
language offers more practical benefits than Latin, but Latin offers more fun.
It has all the pleasures of puzzle, a time capsule and a secret code. You say
dead language; I say ghost hunting.
My favorite thing
about Latin is that all of its native speakers are dead. You will never have to
talk to them. This makes Latin the perfect subject for introverts. There’s no
pressure to become conversationally fluent, and no Latin teacher will ever
force you to turn to your classmate and have an awkward scripted conversation
about your winter break.
Unlike beginner’s
Spanish or French, which teach you to say, “I would like a salad,” and “Where
is the library?” beginner Latin teaches you to talk like a supervillain.
“Wheelock’s Latin,”
the standard beginner textbook at the college level, teaches you how to say the
following sentences, “You are all to blame, and, tomorrow, you will pay the
ultimate price,” and “Our army is great, and because of the number of our
arrows, you shall not see the sky,” and, “Human life is punishment.”
How can you not love
a language that immerses you in this epic world of war and gods and gladiators,
where every sentence is fraught with portents, and someone is usually about to
get murdered?
My middle school
textbook had a passage about a barber. Pretty tame, right? A barber who
accidentally cuts his customers’ throat. To this day, we all remember how to
say “Much blood flows.”
By the standards of
middle school entertainment, it beat “Dawson’s Creek.”
That barber, by the
way, was a real guy. He lived in Pompeii, as did all the characters in that
textbook.
Here are some other
vocab words it taught us, volcano, to erupt, ashes, to be in despair. Did I mention
that all native Latin speakers are dead? Not only that, but many of them died
horribly, buried alive in volcanic ash, which is why we know so much about them
today.
To study Latin is to
engage with the dead. True, you can’t talk to them directly. And thank the gods
for that, because what would we talk about? Winter break?
But they have a way
of getting into your head with their beautiful, useless words. No one speaks
Latin anymore. No one needs Latin anymore, and yet here we are, here I am,
watching my favorite sitcom, mentally translating the dialogue, and remembering
that nothing is permanent, not emperors, not gods, not even me.
So that’s how
studying Latin will change your life. You might never get a chance to use what
you have learned, but it will live in your memory forever.
And, in that sense —
here’s the secret of Latin — it’s not really a dead language at all.
[I studied Latin in middle
school. All 8th-graders at my school
took Latin, and then I went to summer school to take Latin I before going away
to high school. (Okay, I was a geek, but
it led to other academic pursuits—which is sort of the point.) Latin was my first foreign language and, as
Frankie Thomas says, I immediately found it fun, dead or not.
[Despite what Ms. Thomas
says, however, we did have people who “conversed” in Latin. Or tried to.
The high school had a Latin Club and though I have no idea what they did
at their meetings or at other times—I changed schools before high school so I was
never a member—I do know what the club members did on one evening of the
year. The high school Latin Club had a
Roman Banquet—and we 8th-grade Latin students served as “slaves” at the
feast. It was a big role play and we served
the high-schoolers their meals and “wine” as they reclined on benches decorated
to look like chaises. We wore little
tunics and kibitzed as the “patrician” diners tried to hold conversations in
Latin and give us orders in the ancient tongue as well. Slaves or not, it was a hoot—and considered a
great honor.
[We also never learned the
kind of villain-speak Ms. Thomas describes.
The most memorable line in our Latin textbook was “Cuba est insula”—‘Cuba is an island.’ (This was just after the Castro revolution,
but the textbooks were a few years older, I guess.)
[Seriously, though, I found
that my study of Latin had several immediate benefits. The first one I recognized, while it was
happening, was that my active English vocabulary began to expand. When we learned a new Latin word, we made a
vocabulary card with the word’s principle inflections—singular and plural forms
for nouns; masculine, feminine, and neuter forms for adjectives; principal
parts for verbs—and a list of cognate English words derived from the Latin
word. We added to that list as we discovered
new cognates, so I kept learning new English words all year long, and some of
them worked their way into my 8th-grade vocabulary. I might have done so anyway, but I developed
a larger-than-average working vocabulary.
One of my college roommates used to call me his “walking dictionary.”
[In the era when I was going
to middle school (back in the middle of the last century, in case you’re
wondering), schools still taught English grammar. I don’t remember having particular difficulties
with this subject, but I do remember suddenly understanding some of the origins
of the grammar rules we were learning because they, like those new words I was
picking up, were derived from Latin grammar (which was a lot more regular and codified
than English grammar). All of a sudden ,
things that I had just been taking as given seemed to have a logic to them
because they had an origin, a source.
(Later, I would also see why English grammar had so many
exceptions. I decided that the Latin
grammar system that was being applied to English was being forced on a Germanic
language—I learned that in high school and saw it confirmed when I started to
learn German while living in Germany as a teenager—and just didn’t quite fit. There were bits left over—so . . . exceptions.)
[Finally, when I shifted from
Latin to modern languages—French and German because I was going to live in
Germany and go to high school in Switzerland, and later Russian because . . .
well, it interested me—I not only recognized the close relationship between French
and Latin, but the structures of both languages was analogous to that of the Latin
I’d been studying for several years by this time (because of that summer course
in Latin I, I was taking Latin III by then).
I started taking French the last year I was in school in the States (I
began learning German with a tutor my Dad hired the summer my brother and I
joined my parents in Europe; see my ROT post “An
American Teen In Germany,” 9 and 12 March 2013) and I saw my classmates
struggling with the concepts of verbs, nouns, and adjectives that inflected and
nouns with gender while all that made perfect sense to me.
[I can’t swear that studying
Latin had an effect on my skill in French and German, but I ended up becoming
pretty fluent in both languages. I have
no doubt that living in communities where the languages were spoken—a small German
city where my dad was first stationed as a Foreign Service Officer, Geneva and
a small town nearby when I was at school—was a major factor in my eventual
fluency, especially picking up the accents, but I suspect that having studied
Latin before starting to learn both other languages helped jump-start my
fluency.
[Oh, and that English grammar
studying Latin in 8th grade helped me understand? I found that it stuck with me well enough
that when I needed it decades later to help me teach writing to college students,
it largely came right back to me. And
what I needed to refresh was only lying dormant, waiting for a quick
reminder. Learning Latin had grounded me
well in the fundamentals of language and, though I can no longer translate a
passage of Latin, it still pays off even 58 years later. So, Ms. Thomas, I did—and do—use what I learned
back when I was barely a teenager.
Otherwise, I couldn’t agree with you more!
[And the fun I said I had in that
middle school introduction to Latin?
During breaks in that summer-school Latin class, my friend and classmate
Jim (who’d later go on to edit the Harvard Crimson
and become a respected journalist, newspaper editor and publisher, and TV news
show host, as well as a member of President George W. Bush’s administration)
would put our heads together and compose Latin translations of advertising slogans,
proverbs and maxims, song titles and lyrics, and everyday expressions. Why?
Because we were 14 and it was summer and we were in a class with high-schoolers. And we enjoyed being silly.]
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