Classical Languages

A few weeks ago, I was standing in line at a funeral home, as one of the minor family mourners for the death of an aunt (died at nearly 90 after a period of decline and, recently, serious mental decline, so nothing particularly serious except in the sense that all mortality is serious). My aunt had taught French at the local high school (Port Dover) and several of her ex-colleagues, all long-retired, came through in the late afternoon.

One if them was an ex-Latin teacher who (it being a slow line) talked about, among other things, how one of her ex-students at maybe 50 had run across her in some public forum and said "Mrs. X., I can still recite all the Latin prepositions taking the ablative".

Instead of saying the obviously sane thing ("I don't think that's the actual reason we study classical languages, or even remotely close to it", or "Is that really why you taught Latin?"), I responded with "Ab, cum, de, ex, in, pro, sine, sub", as I had had the same list drummed into my head in learning about use of the ablative case, so I get no points for incisiveness.

But the question remains. Why do we study Latin, or Classical Greek? There used to be an institutional reason, and behind that an older political/cultural reason, and that's an interesting argument on its own, but I'm thinking of why one personally studies Latin or Greek.

(This is also not the question "why do we study classics"? There are lots of Classics In Translation courses out there, and studying the languages is really mandatory only if you want to specialize. This is narrowly: why study the languages?)

This was raised again by several pieces read recently about translation and the classics (the best being a print-only one by the English classicist Peter Green). Most classics are taught by doing translations (of the particular sort that is close enough to show that you got all of the words and constructions, but still English grammar rather than an interlinear gloss), but we don't really expect to spend the rest of our lives translating texts.

I've always assumed, casually, that the answer was simple: aside from linguistics and language structure being interesting in themselves, one always wants to read texts in the original if at all possible. My Italian is basic, but I'd still rather work through Dante, Tasso, Boiardo and Ariosto in the original than rely on a translation. Style counts in literature, and it's the first thing to be lost in translation.

But more recently I've become aware that with older texts especially there's a fundamental difference between approaching a text through a translation and via an annotated original text having to do with cruxes and ambiguities in the text on one side and histories of reception on the other.

By the Fifth Century CE it was already the case that parts of Virgil were comprehensible only because of a continuous process of transmission. Virgil was an archaizer and had had access to reference works no longer available even then, even in Rome itself. (That's how manuscript cultures go ...). Lots of words in Homer were understood because, existing nowhere outside of Homer, they were passed along in the active handing on of the texts, until they became notes in the margins of Aristarchus, and now live on in Liddell & Scott, or Autenrieth. Some classical and early mediaeval poems, even long poems, are more cruxes than plain text. And don't get a classicist started on trying to understand Thucydides.

And the wider the cultural gap, the less of a match there will be between the semantic field of an original and its translation. If I'm reading Alain-Fournier, it's at least reasonable to assume that a translation can capture meaning (but not style): modern English and French are pretty well brother and sister as far as structure and intellectual heritage are concerned. It's less likely of Montaigne, and less likely still of Chrétien de Troyes. As far as the Beowulf-poet, or Augustine, or Horace, or Aeschylus go, the gap gets progressively wider.

When the author of an annotation comes to a word or phrase which could be taken in several different ways, with associated histories of reading it in one way or the other, that results in a detailed annotation which enriches one's understanding of the text. Even words with a single meaning, or clear phrases which echo prior art, are enhanced by reference to use elsewhere. Decent dictionaries cover the breadth of use of words, and do not simply give basic meanings.

In other words, coming to a classic in the original with decent reference works is a fundamentally different thing from reading a translation. The original teaches about cultural variance as a thing in itself, and about complexity of meaning.

(By the way, this also means that simply using a translation as a crib is problematic; you want actual annotations for anything other than a quick skim.)

If I want to have any clear idea at all about what a classical author actually said, I have to address the text in the original. If I want to make a fair assessment, the same holds. And if I want to maximize my enjoyment of the text, the same holds.

Traditionally, the core of this history of reception was passed on by classics teachers, orally. It was only the core; there were comprehensive editions for those who wanted to go further. These days, Latin and Greek are taught out of textbooks which are not focussed around the classical canon. (Well, Latin, at least. The Cambridge Latin course, now dominating the field since the 1970s, is a prime example, although Latin for Canadian Schools, which I used, tended in that direction as well. My Greek introductory text, though, was clearly preparing its users for Xenophon.) You can still get there, even on your own, but it takes effort.

Classical languages - Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, et al. - are in that category in part because they are not used as spoken languages (with minor exceptions like the Hungarian aristocracy using Latin the way the Russians used French, or the Vatican) and are not taught as such. They frequently get sold by teachers as ways of becoming better at understanding and using English (half true at best). But they are our simplest and easiest gateways into coming into contact with ways of thought which are distant from ours, crystallized in works which are a pleasure to read (there's a reason they survived to be in the canon).