people who hate Latin

[yellow.wallpaper]

On 7/1/2015 at 0:06 PM, unræd said:

Yeah, I often get uncomfortable--as is clear from my posts here--with the language of "utility" in relation to education, but while I'd passionately make the case that everyone's life would be better with Virgil (or the poet of your choice), that's an argument that few people who don't already buy into the idea of the humanistic project think has merit, unfortunately.

 

Just to put on my pedantic hat since I'm an Anglo-Saxonist, and the number of times I tell people I study Old English and they say "you mean like Chaucer?" (or even worse, Shakespeare) makes me want to hit things: Old English is actually really, really different from modern English, and is further from Chaucer's language (Middle English) than ours is from his--and certainly much further from Modern English than Cervantes' Spanish is from Modern Spanish. (I agree with Heliogabalus that Early Modern English is a better comparison.) Just for shits and giggles, here's an example of pretty bog standard late Old English prose (Wulfstan, writing around the turn of the millennium):

 

"And riht is, þæt ænige wæpnmen on mynecena beodderne ne etan ne ne drincan ne læwede men on muneca, buton hit mid urum hlaforde sy oððon ells hwylc, þe maran godes ege habbe, þæt hit for his næweste þe betere beo for gode and for worulde, and hyra regol huru ne sy a þe awyrdra."

 

To be sure, there's a lot of similarity there to the modern language in both vocabulary and syntax, but I think an English speaker today would have a much harder time with that than a modern Spanish speaker would have with Cervantes. It's another detour, but I'm also really interested in the Latin to Modern Spanish and Old English to Modern English comparisons. My gut would be to say that our language is closer to Old English than Spanish is to Latin, but I suppose it depends a lot on what criteria we use for closeness!

The average modern English speaker would have trouble understanding Shakespeare, which is quite unfortunate.

In terms of Latin to Modern Spanish, I do think they are both vastly different. Sure, there are many cognates, but Latin grammar is way more complex than Spanish grammar (the same applies to other Romance languages such as French, Italian, and Portuguese, which I also have studied). While I don't know Old English very well, I do think it is more similar to Modern Standard German (probably more similar to Old High German, actually, because of its inflectional system) than Modern English. 

 

Ancient Languages are so important. I have learned a lot more about English (and other modern languages) through the study of Classical Latin, Ancient Greek, and Old Icelandic. We do need to value them so so much...specially to avoid having young, eager freshmen tell me "So Shakespeare is like Old English, right?"