Learning to Speak Latin
On the joys of a dead language
We really do speak it, at least a good part of the time: Salvēte omnēs! we say at the start of each class; then: Quōmodo vōs habētis? Not that there’s a lot of chit-chat; mostly we talk about the week’s reading, taking it a paragraph at a time, our teacher asking us questions (in Latin) so that we (in Latin) can practice the grammar we’ve learned. Our textbook is Hans Ørberg’s Lingua Latīna per sē illūstrāta, which I take it is the go-to for courses adopting the “Living Latin” or “natural language” approach. It’s a novel of sorts, telling the story of a Roman family, including some adventures the classical literature mostly leaves out, of children and the enslaved; each chapter consists almost entirely of narrative, usually not very inspired, with vocabulary (everything’s in Latin, it really is immersive) along the margins, grammar tucked in back. This book comes in for a lot of ridicule online, some of it warranted; what’s the point of taking a Latin class just to read some mid-20th century Danish guy’s dumb story? Definitely it wears its cultural politics on its sleeve; maybe the least classical thing about it is its stolid 1950s heteronormativity, too unimaginative to be kitsch.
