Almost all resources for teaching and learning Latin focus on ‘Classical Latin’, a term typically referring to texts written between the first century BC and the first century AD, though the delineation of these boundaries is somewhat arbitrary, having far more to do with which authors are most venerated than with any kind of linguistic …
Editor’s Note: While surreptitiously rooting around in the Vatican Archives, an employee of one of those organizations that opposes spoken Latin and the principles of the natural approach (which we mention here), discovered a forgotten quaestio of none other than Thomas Aquinas, defending the use of conversational Latin contra the Grammar-Translation Method’s dogmatic adherents. Fearing …
The Romance languages: We love to learn them. Even as other languages rise in global significance, French, Spanish, and Italian remain among the most popular foreign tongues for English speakers to acquire. For many of us, the Romance languages conjure up the best of Europe. We think of Venetian canals and the Eiffel Tower, idyllic …
What Are the Romance Languages? (And Are They Actually “Romantic”?) Read More »
In an exquisite passage about language learning, C. S. Lewis recounts his early forays into Ionic Greek, taught by the legendary William Kirkpatrick (a.k.a. “The Great Knock”). Lewis narrates what it was like to “cross the Rubicon” from incomprehension to fluency: We opened our books at Iliad, Book I. Without a word of introduction Knock …
No, Latin is not dead. It’s not that your teachers deliberately lied to you – they simply repeated a widely circulated claim they’d also heard somewhere. Today, the idea that Latin is dead is considered common knowledge. But it’s not accurate. To understand why, we need to quickly review the history of Latin and ask …
People often say that Latin is a dead language. So why bother learning it? But what does it mean for a language to be dead, exactly? Languages aren’t organisms, and they don’t die like them, either. They don’t have a pulse we can check. So how do we know when a language has actually died? …
You have probably heard someone call Latin a “dead language.” There was a time, however, when Latin was very much alive and young. While students who learn Latin today appreciate its eloquence and beauty, Latin’s early form was rough and immature. This is the story of the first 500 years of Latin’s life. Latium and the Founding …
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