Is reading Latin impossible?

[Matthaeus]

Here's an article if anyone is interested.

https://www.latinitium.com/blog/tom-keeline-is-reading-latin-impossible?fbclid=IwAR0LmcAhqFKUZR9xS1o7m06Ez87tuJnAd5M2JXLPFhVPdHh6Y-SrNHsxQ3Y

 

[Bitmap]

I have to say that I feel quite tempted to read it ... but then again, I wonder: What kind of question is that??? So I'm not going to click it.

 

[Pacifica]

I haven't clicked the link, but the thread title just made me think a big "W-T-F?" I wondered if Matthaeus had lost his mind, though I suspected those mustn't be his own words, no way.

 

[Matthaeus]

Lol, no, it ain't mine. The thread title is actually the title of the article by an assistant professor of Classics at Washington University, St. Louis.

 

[Pacifica]

I skimmed the article.

Indeed, I understood the first Horace lines only after I looked up inuleus, saw that it was a variant of hinnuleus, and recalled what hinnuleus was.

Perhaps the most complicated Latin passages and/or those with uncommon words often can't be "read" in the sense of just going over them with your eyes and getting it at once, but what about the rest of Latin literature — that is, the biggest part of it? It seems like the author has picked a few particularly tricky passages and is trying to generalize that to all Latin... but then again, I only skimmed the article, so I could be missing his point.

 

[Bitmap]

Perhaps the most complicated Latin passages and/or those with uncommon words often can't be "read" in the sense of just going over them with your eyes and getting it at once

Well, with some complicated poems, I even have to look up words in my own mother tongue (some of those bastards use archaisms!) ... I'm not sure if that's proof that it's impossible for me to read German, but I haven't even skimmed the article. I still refuse to click such links.

 

[Pacifica]

Well, with some complicated poems, I even have to look up words in my own mother tongue

Well, I can't read French, either. Remember the Mallarmé poem, where I actually had to read an interpretation.

 

[Bitmap]

Maybe everything should just be read in English translation

 

[Pacifica]

But people sometimes need to look up words in English as well... Maybe it's simply impossible to read in any language!

 

[Iáson]

I had no idea what 'Sprachgefühl' meant in that article, for starters, or 'SLA'.

 

[Matthaeus]

maybe "a feel for the given language"?

 

[Bitmap]

Still refusing to read, but Sprachgefühl is indeed a feel for a language ... Pacifica has a very good Sprachgefühl for Ciceronian Latin, for example (when writing in Latin).

 

[Pacifica]

Pacifica has a very good Sprachgefühl for Ciceronian Latin, for example (when writing in Latin).

Do you really think so?

(According to the article, you can have a good Sprachgefühl only for your native language.)

 

[Bitmap]

Do you really think so?

As far as I can tell by my own Sprachgefühl, yes

(According to the article, you can have a good Sprachgefühl only for your native language.)

Ach, come on ... really? I'm this close to reading the article, but I'm afraid it'll just make me angry. I mean, it seems to be kind of fancy to throw weird German terms into your scientific articles for which there is no real translation (like Weltschmerz ... or, well, Sprachgefühl), in order to pretend to be smart, but if you don't understand what the terms mean, just don't do it. The whole point of the term is that it's something you can't actually have in your native language (because you just know that language. You don't need a feeling for it), but only in foreign languages. It most often (though not exclusively) applies to situations where you are actually not fully sure of how to write something in a foreign language or how to fully understand some kind of (unknown) construction in that language, but since you have a very good feel for it, you master that task intuitively. [It can also mean that you have a good feel for how a language flows, as in my example above ... though those two things are not really mutually exclusive, anyway]

 

[Pacifica]

Ach, come on ... really? I'm this close to reading the article, but I'm afraid it'll just make me angry. I mean, it seems to be kind of fancy to throw weird German terms into your scientific articles for which there is no real translation (like Weltschmerz ... or, well, Sprachgefühl), in order to pretend to be smart, but if you don't understand what the terms mean, just don't do it. The whole point of the term is that it's something you can't actually have in your native language (because you just know that language. You don't need a feeling for it), but only in foreign languages. It most often (though not exclusively) applies to situations where you are actually not fully sure of how to write something in a foreign language or how to fully understand some kind of (unknown) construction in that language, but since you have a very good feel for it, you master that task intuitively.

Oh, wow...

Here's what the article says about Sprachgefühl. While it doesn't say literally "you can have a good Sprachgefühl only for your native language", it definitely seems to imply it:

Nevertheless, reading later Latin has its own dangers: later authors were not native speakers of Latin, and they perforce lacked the Sprachgefühl needed to wield the language with native-speaker proficiency.

 

[Bitmap]

Nevertheless, reading later Latin has its own dangers: later authors were not native speakers of Latin, and they perforce lacked the Sprachgefühl needed to wield the language with native-speaker proficiency.

Not sure what means, either ... does he refer to people like Seneca, who was from Spain? He (or she) could just try reading the Latin version of his texts (rather than the English translations) for a change to find out that that claim is not true.

 

[Pacifica]

Seneca may have been from Spain, but Latin was his native language, no?

I think he refers to really late Latin, i.e. Latin from the time when it was no longer spoken as a native language.

He has a point here: there are reasons for no taking a text written by a non-native speaker as equally linguistically authoritative as a text written by a native speaker.

 

[Bitmap]

He has a point here: there are reasons for no taking a text written by a non-native speaker as equally linguistically authoritative as a text written by a native speaker.

He might, but what does that have to do with the question of whether reading Latin is impossible?

 

[Pacifica]

He might, but what does that have to do with the question of whether reading Latin is impossible?

I think he's saying that late Latin might be more "possible" to read but less authentic...

 

[Pacifica]

Someone might point out that you don’t have to limit your reading to classical Latin, and they might suggest that you read contemporary novellas and other Latin written by later authors. I agree! I think that reading Renaissance Latin in particular has done a lot for my abilities to read Roman authors. Much of later Latin won’t count as comprehensible input for most Latin learners, but it offers an almost immeasurably greater variety of topics and levels than ancient Latin alone. Such texts still aren’t likely to teach you inuleus, but they will help reinforce a lot of other vocabulary. And some medieval and Renaissance texts really do count as level-appropriate, compelling, comprehensible input; some of this Latin really can be “read” in the SLA sense of the term. Such has been my experience, at any rate.

Nevertheless, reading later Latin has its own dangers: later authors were not native speakers of Latin, and they perforce lacked the Sprachgefühl needed to wield the language with native-speaker proficiency.