[coolsunglasses]

Foster was basically the rallying point for people opposed to the grammarian methods of teaching languages that started in Classics but ended up taking over how foreign language is taught in most schools and contexts. Virtually everyone actually fluent in Latin today (reading, listening, or speaking) either learned directly from his a tutor using Ossa Latinitatis Sola or was downstream of that.

Striking contrast with the most well known classicist in the UK being unable, by their own admission, to comfortably read Latin text basically at all.

Abandoning the old ways has cost us a lot in almost every area of human endeavour. Especially in pedagogy.

[mmooss]

> Striking contrast with the most well known classicist in the UK being unable, by their own admission, to comfortably read Latin text basically at all.

That's hard to believe. A friend was a Latin teacher; high school students read actual Roman Latin in their second year.

I've heard that few can speak Latin 'correctly', because the skill is almost useless - you can't talk to Romans or almost anyone else; it's all written. (I don't know about the Catholic or other churches, but I do recall that 'church Latin' differs from classical Latin.)

[akshayshah]

Second-year high school students do read actual Roman texts, but they typically do so very slowly and laboriously - a day’s homework might be translating a single paragraph.

I studied Latin from 7th grade through my early undergraduate years (1990s to early 00s), and that dynamic didn’t change as much as you might expect - the focus remains on deeply reading a few texts, rather than building the fluency required to quickly read and understand new texts on unfamiliar subjects. The corpus of texts for standardized exams is also relatively small and well-known - I didn’t see a single unfamiliar passage on either AP Latin exam.

Perhaps some classics professors read Latin as fluently as the average Spanish literature professor reads a Madrid newspaper, but I certainly never met any outside Reginaldus’s orbit.

[philsnow]

> I've heard that few can speak Latin 'correctly', because the skill is almost useless - you can't talk to Romans or almost anyone else; it's all written.

Because Latin has died out as a spoken language, it doesn't really change over time like modern languages do. If you find a sentence written 2000 years ago and another elsewhere written 1500 years ago, it's likely they mean the exact same thing.

"Latin is a dead language" is actually a positive statement about the continued use of Latin, especially in the church; so much of the writing of the early church and the church fathers was in Latin, and we can know that we're interpreting it faithfully (or at least as faithfully as we have done for centuries) because the language is static.

[Roscius]

> I've heard that few can speak Latin 'correctly', because the skill is almost useless

Not useless at all - speaking Latin helps you to better appreciate both prose and poetry. Understanding the sound of the language helps you to appreciate the word play and nuance. Also as children we learn language mostly by listening and speaking, not by reading, so it makes sense to learn Latin in that way.

There's been significant research on reconstructing classical pronunciation. But Latin was spoken as a primary language for over a thousand years, so the pronunciation naturally changed over that time and there were of course regional dialects - some of which evolved into Romance languages.

In reading Latin, it doesn't have a lot of silent letters (it does have some), so it's quite easy to read aloud a Latin sentence once you understand the basic phonetics. In classical times poems like the Aeneid were recited aloud, so doing so today makes sense.

Fluency is a somewhat subjective concept, but the growth of the internet has spawned a growing community of Latin speakers internationally. (I speak Latin at roughly a B2 level and am constantly improving).

[wisty]

I think it's a bit out of context. I think they are referring to Mary Beard, who is a classicist / historian who said her Latin wasn't that good, but may have been exaggerating because she was IIRC arguing against gatekeeping in history (like saying physicists don't need advanced math, because Einstein wasn't the best at math compared to a few other top theoretical physicists).

[cafard]

I guess that one would have to know what "comfortably" means and what sort of texts. At the speed of English? Caesar or Tacitus?

The essayist Sydney Smith, himself an Anglican clergyman, said something teasing about "false quantities" in Roman Catholic services. I can tell you that the pronunciation varies in church Latin: c and g can be "softened" when followed by e or i; v is v, not w.

You don't hear a great deal of Latin in Catholic services these days: in the Tridentine rite the congregation doesn't get much to say. The Novus Ordo Latin Mass is awfully rare.

[coolsunglasses]

>That's hard to believe.

I understand why you'd feel that way but classics departments aren't what they used to be. It's pretty common for even elite universities these days to not require grad students to understand the languages of the cultures they purportedly study across the board, let alone for Latin.

https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignor...

[aprilthird2021]

I was a high school student studying Latin. Like almost all high school language students, we could not read fluently. It took a long time and potentially many trips to the dictionary

[lolinder]

They're referring to this story from a few years back:

Latin as She is Spoke: How Classicists Tricked Themselves Jan 2022 (171 points, 191 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30124101

[camcil]

It is fascinating that a language that still has study devoted around it has died right in front of our eyes.

[gattilorenz]

But among the dead languages it’s one if the liveliest

[globnomulous]

> Striking contrast with the most well known classicist in the UK being unable, by their own admission, to comfortably read Latin text basically at all.

Sorry, what? Who is this? Even the PhD students I knew in classics, the ones who were specializing in history or literature, were comfortable reading texts written during their time periods of interest.

[svat]

https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignor... — per this blog post (which takes https://www.the-tls.co.uk/regular-features/mary-beard-a-dons... as the starting point), most classicists “can't sight-read a complex Latin text all that well” [unlike medievalists and Renaissance scholars].