Several months ago a friend of mine (James O’Donnell) referred in an email to a “trans-national Latin culture that flourished for a long time”, and I said this:

Actually, the full depth of it never dawned even on me till last summer, when I was translating Hobbes’ Latin autobiography. How strange to watch him constantly palpating everything in thought in two languages, so hugely unlike each other, and so different in historical point of view, English and Latin (not even to mention Greek; Hobbes’ Greek was first-rate). It gives his thoughts a kind of palpating, exploratory, stereoscopic quality — a kind of independence from language — which I can’t see how you could get in any other way. But what really drove this home to me was not even Hobbes; oddly, it was reading Aubrey’s notes and noticing that lazy Aubrey, too — the very paradigm of a normal man of his time — had had a good classical education and was constantly thinking in Latin.

As with all other knowledge, fluency in Latin is like a tree that only sometimes bears palpable, heavy fruit. It does so when the English writer has (a) genius or (b) love (for as Simone Weil said, attentive, subtle love is kin to genius). In students who lack either, it bears no ripe heavy fruit! Those are always the majority, in Latin as in everything else. But for Latin, as for other studies, the merely ‘interested’, whose motives are dubious, are needed, in order for the teaching posts and courses even to exist. Those people need the ‘quantized package’ (as you call it). All our difference in emphasis, perhaps, comes just from this: that I am a college teacher sensitive to the perishability of the formal courses, which I see under ever greater stress; and you a home-school teacher, who don’t think you need them.

Thank you very much for your thoughtful and precise thoughts about learning Latin. I suspect we are more in agreement than might at first appear.

Your ‘right reasons’ for learning Latin seem all real, very interesting, very worth pointing out; much less careful seems your polemic against what you think the wrong reasons. In particular, it is only half-true that English doesn’t ‘come from Latin’. Even if we leave out the Normans, in a certain way it does largely come from it.

I hadn’t envisioned my comments in terms of polemic: I was more hoping to redirect the expectations of those setting out to learn Latin in such a way that they could actually achieve some of those benefits we agree are inherent in the process. When I said that English didn’t come from Latin, though, I meant it in baldly linguistic terms. I was trying to point out the fact that English really is not a descendent of Latin in the same way Italian, Spanish, or French are. I have encountered a number of people who believe that it is, including a large number of students who enroll in my classes. It’s a misapprehension worth correcting. At its most basic level, English was and is a West Germanic language in its fundamental structures and in its core vocabulary. One can still frame many comprehensible and useful utterances using only words of Germanic origin and grammatical patterns that were already in place before the Norman Conquest. One cannot do the same thing relying on only Latinate vocabulary or structures.

Beyond that, the boundaries get murkier, and the distinction between syntax and style is a vexed one. You are of course absolutely right that many of the features of style, many of the more sophisticated syntactic structures, and many of the rhythms of modern English (especially early modern English) come from Latin, as well as the underlying patterns of thought that give rise to them. This is a large part of what I was driving at in the latter part of my posting. To tap into that, though, I think we need not only to have mastered elementary Latin, but to have read a certain range of Latin authors in their own language.

One might adduce the example of a stew: a braise of beef simmered for hours in red wine, stock, and seasonings acquires a flavor and texture that owes something to all its ingredients. Still, the beef, qua beef, is not from the vine or the stockpot: it’s from a steer. I was not talking about the flavor of the mixture: I was talking about the most basic ingredient.

To be first-rate in any language you need to have not merely a rote-learning of its correct usage, but sharp perceptions of its structure (’analytic’ knowledge of it, which is also called grammar) and of its history. All good Roman writers got this largely from fluency in Greek, a language kin to theirs, yet in some ways hugely different (so that the difference constantly plunged them in thought); and for centuries all good English writers got it from fluency in Latin, which is kin to English (& the actual origin of many things in it) yet hugely different.

I suppose at some point we might differ on who qualifies as a good Roman writer: I would certainly agree with you that a majority of the writers of the classical period had their style and their sensibilities refined by Greek; still, if we are able to believe the scant surviving sources, Cato the Elder was regarded as a better-than-average orator in his prime, but only learned Greek late in his life. Most Western mediaeval authors had no access to Greek, and I still consider some of them great writers as well. Augustine and Bede qualify as rather good stylists, I would argue. Similarly, I really do believe that there have been competent — even great — English stylists who have not come to it by way of Latin or Greek. None of that need diminish the importance and power of a good Latin education — it merely suggests that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem, and that however great the utility of a given tool may be, it does not ipso facto guarantee that the job cannot be done in any other way.

John Locke had a polemic similar to yours (in his first Essay about Education). He denied that either Latin or even grammar was needed for good English. He imagined that there existed a correct English ‘usage’, quite independent of Latin, that Latinless ladies could learn ‘by rote’ impeccably. He failed to discern that this very ‘usage’ was a thing shaped by many generations of writers, and most influential speakers, absolutely every one of whom knew Latin, and understood English in that light.

Ah, you cut me to the quick. To be identified with Locke, of all people…

It may well have been the case in Locke’s day that everyone who had a reasonable claim to being educated had come to it by way of Latin. I suspect that was not absolute, however. (It’s possible to make the same claim today, but to do so seems unduly dogmatic: we risk defining the set we want to measure by the measurement we intend to use.) I’m not sure there is such a thing as a complete education, or a complete mastery of any language — just as I am not sure that there is only one way to arrive at a superior level of competence in English. The English usage and grammar to which we are heir is a monumental edifice, and too big for any one person to control in its entirety.

Most of our students and their parents would probably subscribe to the notion that there really is a standard of correct English usage “out there”, but that that is formally defined by a regularized grammar. To me that seems at least somewhat questionable in itself, or at least naive, though in practical terms I support it and enforce a fairly strict standard of grammar and style in writing assignments. I appreciate what you’re saying about the dynamism that goes into the make up of a language, however: as a mediaeval Latinist myself, I have spent a certain amount of time reflecting on the ways in which the solecism of one generation becomes normative for the next. Viewed in that light, of course, language becomes dauntingly huge, which is probably correct, and amorphous to boot. Surely in our speech there are threads that, could we but trace them, find their way back to the first articulate utterances on the planet. We cannot hope to trace them all, or to distinguish them from one another, but the whole deserves a certain amount of respect — even awe — all the same. This may look like an admission of defeat, and I suppose in some respects is. At the same time, it seems worth going down trying to assimilate it as best we can. It is the chief repository of human experience in our world.

Haec ubi dicta, I think you may be over-hasty in linking my position with Locke’s and then attacking mine by exploding his. I think there is a kernel of truth to his claim, but in general I would argue that it is a reductive and trivial truth. It takes no account of that vast common pool of language heritage. There I think we are in complete agreement, and always have been.

I’m still in favor of Latin, therefore, and I would say without hesitation that it’s the most reliable way I know for people to learn grammar in English. There are really two reasons for that.

One is that the best way of learning anything is by comparison. Here the advantage of Latin is not specifically that it’s Latin, but that it’s not English. This aspect of its utility probably increases in direct proportion as it differs from English. It is more useful than French or Spanish or German precisely because it differs more from English. (I suspect there is a maximum feasible extension for this principle, too — it seems likely (even leaving the historical influence of Latin on English aside) that it’s more useful in improving one’s English than, say, Hebrew or Xhosa or Vietnamese, because they differ so greatly that there are fewer points of reflection. In other words, stretching is good, but it’s possible to go beyond the breaking point. But that’s probably a discussion for a different day.)

The other is that Latin is not only a language that has been used widely and well, but that it’s been analyzed with remarkable precision for two thousand years and more. That is a benefit that no other language, with the possible exception of Greek, can boast at the same level. (It may also be true of Mandarin Chinese: I don’t know. I can’t think of another that might qualify.)

Just for the record: I specifically said that one could be taught grammar in English, and I still think it’s theoretically possible. That’s a hypothetical claim, though. I am not convinced that it’s being done or that it ever has been done. It’s not something that happens anywhere today that I’m aware of. This is sometimes taken as a mark of the benightedness of our times, but I’m not sure that it’s really been vastly different in the past either: I have searched in vain for a really good grammar of English that would function on the level of Allen and Greenough or Smyth (to say nothing of something like Leumann-Hofmann-Szantyr), and have come up with nothing. Even Curme’s two-volume grammar of English says shockingly little about the syntax of the subjunctive, for example; current school texts such as Warriner’s barely begin the discussion, and they’re frightfully vague. It’s small wonder that the subjunctive, which is as good an example of a tool of thought of the kind you’re suggesting, is in such a lamentable decline.

It seems to me that today hardly anyone even notices this massive historical fact. It is important to grasp that these were not only the Shakespeares and Miltons and Caxtons but every country parson, doctor, lawyer, judge, even merchant, and so on. The entire middle and upper class knew Latin, almost as well as the entire Roman upper class knew Greek.

This shaping of English by Latin was enormously complex, and took many centuries. If you take any text of, say, 1570 (almost any random thing in Hakluyt, for example) you see a strange jumble: dense subtle Latinate syntax combined, often, with an astonishing clumsiness, rawness, and protean freedom both in grammar and spelling. If any text of, say, 1670, you have hugely smoother, modern English — modern spelling, grammar, word order; a rather rapid, huge regularization (not to say, petrifaction) had occurred. But every bit of this shaping (both the earlier and the later) was done by people who knew Latin.

While I am somewhat skeptical of the absolute terms in which you couch it, I suspect we are very substantially in agreement. Let us grant that skeptics could probably come up with at least some exceptions to the rule (parsons, judges, and doctors would of course have known Latin; I suspect there were some merchants who did not), and then dismiss it as a fairly trivial set. Ben Johnson’s comment about Shakespeare’s having small Latin and less Greek probably tells us less about Shakespeare himself than about Jonson; it at least suggests that deficiency in these areas was a known phenomenon, and that one’s learning was routinely measured in precisely those terms. In the main, therefore, your point here is well taken. I have over the last few years been particularly impressed by the truth of exactly this point, especially in reading works from the English Renaissance. Even in the (affectedly popular) sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney, I have been struck repeatedly by the extent to which appreciation depends on at least some grasp of the Latinate mindset beneath his language. (I fleetingly considered producing a kind of Latinist-looks-at-Sidney edition of the Astrophil and Stella, but I probably don’t have sufficient credibility in English academe to make that project particularly worthwhile.)

I really do think, however, that I address what you’re talking about in the latter part of my posting, when I discuss the primary benefit of learning Latin being the opportunity of reading Latin authors in Latin, and grappling with the patterns of thought that they represent. I think, moreover, that your examples back me up. What we see in Hakluyt, Milton, Sidney, or Pope is not the product of the grammar curriculum in and of itself: it’s the product of deep immersion in the writings of great Latin authors who deployed those categories of grammar and thought in their actual expression. They were saying something that these later stylists were drinking in not merely for the fact that it admirably exemplified various Latin constructions, or even entirely because of its style, but because they wanted to know what it said. The phrases of Vergil and Cicero that come to mind for me come from reading them in context — not from having studied them as exemplary snippets. Even the clerks and the tradesmen of your example — anyone who had the benefit of a grammar-school education — were encountering more than grammatical instruction. They were reading the authors themselves.

I do quite agree with you that we too far often raise false expectations and that they are harmful. All your remarks about this are excellent. But I don’t think it ‘jingoistic boosterism’ to say that Latin can, even now, help anyone’s English far more than can any other language; and I think it ought to be said.

I definitely agree: I would say so too (and I do). My use of ‘jingoistic boosterism’ may have been insufficiently circumscribed. I meant it to characterize those who will enthusiastically embrace any argument that leads to the conclusion they favor, irrespective of its intrinsic validity. Heaven knows we see that kind of thing on all sides in the political arena today. I didn’t mean to suggest that it was jingoistic to argue that learning Latin can aid one’s mastery of English. That much is indisputably true. I do mean to say that it’s naive to clamor for something without knowing what it is or what it entails, if only because it tends to lead one to believe that one has got hold of the thing itself when one has merely acquired the trappings. It’s like those people who buy expensive running shoes and fancy sweats on the assumption that their mere possession will confer the health benefits of regular daily exercise. Cuculus non facit monachum. Some (certainly not all) proponents of classical education seem all too credulously to assume that the beneficial secondary consequences of a year or two studying Latin will rain down upon them, causing SAT scores to soar and job opportunities to sprout like so much grain in the field, when they have completed no more than an elementary course, but have never really engaged the language or its literature on their own terms. There are some benefits from spending even a month with Wheelock, but the real benefits of a classical education only begin there. Those benefits are largely the outgrowth of opening their minds to what Latin authors have to say, as much as (or more than) a discrete harvest of grammatical facts that can be packaged up and kept quietly in reserve. It’s not in asserting ownership of those grammatical categories, but in using them, both in reading and in writing, that the transformation takes place. The larger glibly-advertised benefits of learning Latin — glib not because the claims are false, but because many of those making them don’t really understand what they’re claiming — don’t come from a pass through Wheelock, but from wrestling with the words and phrasings of Vergil and Cicero, Sallust and Tacitus, Ovid and Horace.

We live in a quick-fix culture that likes to achieve things in quantized packages, and then move on to something else with perceived short-term gains. We want ten percent returns on our investments by the end of the quarter. The study of Latin is remarkably resistent to that kind of approach. Yes, you’ll start learning some things about English right away. Getting the difference between the nominative and accusative clearly in mind may forever break you of saying, “Aunt Myrtle came to visit Tom and I.” I fervently hope so. But its real and enduring benefits come from long immersion, and just the kind of remolding of one’s thought as you suggest. Just as there is no such thing as a good five-minute braise of beef, there is no instant classical education. It’s going to take a while. One of the reasons that the authors you mention, from Caxton through Milton and beyond, achieved so much more based on their Latin than did (for example) the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century schoolboys who also routinely had Latin folded into their curricula, is precisely that they were not generally learning Latin just to be learning the structures of a language in the abstract. Is there a benefit to doing that? Certainly there is. But in Milton one detects not just the cadences of the grammar-book, but the reflection of an accurate and extensive encounter with Latin authors.

To be first-rate in any language you need to have not merely a rote-learning of its correct usage, but sharp perceptions of its structure (’analytic’ knowledge of it, which is also called grammar) and of its history. All good Roman writers got this largely from fluency in Greek, a language kin to theirs, yet in some ways hugely different (so that the difference constantly plunged them in thought); and for centuries all good English writers got it from fluency in Latin, which is kin to English (& the actual origin of many things in it) yet hugely different.

John Locke had a polemic similar to yours (in his first Essay about Education). He denied that either Latin or even grammar was needed for good English. He imagined that there existed a correct English ‘usage’, quite independent of Latin, that Latinless ladies could learn ‘by rote’ impeccably. He failed to discern that this very ‘usage’ was a thing shaped by many generations of writers, and most influential speakers, absolutely every one of whom knew Latin, and understood English in that light.

It seems to me that today hardly anyone even notices this massive historical fact. It is important to grasp that these were not only the Shakespeares and Miltons and Caxtons but every country parson, doctor, lawyer, judge, even merchant, and so on. The entire middle and upper class knew Latin, almost as well as the entire Roman upper class knew Greek.

This shaping of English by Latin was enormously complex, and took many centuries. If you take any text of, say, 1570 (almost any random thing in Hakluyt, for example) you see a strange jumble: dense subtle Latinate syntax combined, often, with an astonishing clumsiness, rawness, and protean freedom both in grammar and spelling. If any text of, say, 1670, you have hugely smoother, modern English — modern spelling, grammar, word order; a rather rapid, huge regularization (not to say, petrifaction) had occurred. But every bit of this shaping (both the earlier and the later) was done by people who knew Latin.

I do quite agree with you that we too far often raise false expectations and that they are harmful. All your remarks about this are excellent. But I don’t think it ‘jingoistic boosterism’ to say that Latin can, even now, help anyone’s English far more than can any other language; and I think it ought to be said.