That £4m on Latin lessons should be spent on a modern foreign language

[newnortherner111]

www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/latin-state-schools-england-williamson-b1894202.html

Latest idea from the Education Secretary. Given that the Prime Minister has been in a Catholic church at least once, did he not tell Gavin Williamson that the Catholic Mass is usually in the local language now, and has been for over 50 years?

Encouraging learning Spanish for example would be much better and actually have a use in real life.

@VeryQuaintIrene

The literature is also boring AF

Did you get stuck with the Gallic Wars or something?!

@VeryQuaintIrene fuck knows, I revised before the exam then pressed my mental Delete button. Got an A, which just proves why there's so much that needs changing about the education system.

@KeflavikAirport

when you are reading cases and judgments at law school and counsel's advices, they are full of words and phrases in Latin

Again, one wonders how people manage to successfully become lawyers without ever having been near a Latin class

They have to stuff their briefs full of Latin phrases so they can justify charging ££££££££££££ for their esoteric wisdom and for pretending there's some subtle nuance that can't be expressed any other way. I like to piss them off by translating them into plain English.

translator high five @PartridgeFeather

when you are reading cases and judgments at law school and counsel's advices, they are full of words and phrases in Latin

Yes, but you don't have to learn Latin in order to learn terminology for a job! You can just... learn the terminology!

Hi @KeflavikAirport 🙂. (Had to google where that was, as well).

I loved Juvenal - especially his takedown of lawyers ...

Do the Latin phrases used by lawyers make sense as such, or is their legal meaning something specific and not necessarily a literal translation? I.e would a non lawyer who knew Latin necessarily correctly discern their legal meaning? Or is some of it truly jargon?

What prompts this question is mild amusement at the motto of the university of Cambridge and its literal and non literal translations.(I suppose the 'draughts' is a drink rather than wind or checkers but still quite funny)

Motto*
Latin: Hinc lucem et pocula sacra
Motto in English
Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge.

Yeah, Wiki's 'translations' are sometimes a bit odd!

Yes, but you don't have to learn Latin in order to learn terminology for a job! You can just... learn the terminology!

This. Most fields (and employers - goodness knows mine loves a bit of internal jargon!) have their own specialist vocabulary and you have to learn it. Sometimes it's even based on English, but that still doesn't necessarily help you.

@ErrolTheDragon

Do the Latin phrases used by lawyers make sense as such, or is their legal meaning something specific and not necessarily a literal translation? I.e would a non lawyer who knew Latin necessarily correctly discern their legal meaning? Or is some of it truly jargon?

What prompts this question is mild amusement at the motto of the university of Cambridge and its literal and non literal translations.(I suppose the 'draughts' is a drink rather than wind or checkers but still quite funny)

Motto*
Latin: Hinc lucem et pocula sacra
Motto in English
Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge.

I refer you to the "Romanes Eunt Domus" clip above. You have 5 noun forms (each with singular and plural, so 10 in all) for every noun. Each one telling you what that word is doing in the sentence.

There's also various flavours of idiom you can throw in.

It also helps to have an insight into the ancients mindset (which is where you learn they were absolutely no different to us) just to pick up the double-entendres they liked to smuggle in.

@ErrolTheDragon Translation is an art, not a mechanical exercise. The literal meaning of almost any foreign phrase sounds ridiculous unless you "transcreate", so put it into a form that sounds plausible and meaningful to the target audience. The mottos of many universities were chosen at a time when Latin was the lingua franca among "educated" people, in a similar way to English today.

Surely, 500 years on, it is time to update?

Translation is an art, not a mechanical exercise. The literal meaning of almost any foreign phrase sounds ridiculous unless you "transcreate", so put it into a form that sounds plausible and meaningful to the target audience

I've noticed a few slips in the subtitles for Inspector Montalbano where the translation - while correct - doesn't actually convey the sense of what was said.

Well, subtitles have massive constraints on character counts to match on-screen action so will often give you a gist translation rather than a full run-down of what has been said.

Those comments are true enough but not quite what I was driving at.
If a Roman read the phrase 'Habeas corpus', would he be likely to understand what it might mean in English law?

@ErrolTheDragon

Those comments are true enough but not quite what I was driving at. If a Roman read the phrase 'Habeas corpus', would he be likely to understand what it might mean in English law?

You need to remember that most "Romans" spoke Greek in the first instance. Latin was the lingua franca of it's day.

I knew Greek was common especially in the Hellenic eastern half, and increasingly as 'Rome' moved to Byzantium), but that's rather besides the point. Would someone who understood Latin deduce what that phrase represents in law?

Would someone who understood Latin deduce what that phrase represents in law?

I think you can. When I had a disabled child, I needed to empower myself, by studying the law of education, and later community care, the Mental Capacity Act, DOLS, continuing healthcare funding, the Human Rights Act, The Equality Act, etc and when I came across the term “Mandamus”, knowing what it meant literally, enabled me to work out what it meant in law.

I also realised the professionals, who assess children with SEN, deliberately wrote reports and talked to each other in jargon, so that parents couldn’t understand them. So for instance, they would put in a report

“Fred Bloggs has a standard score of 65 on receptive language, and 65 on expressive language….”

They could have put it more intuitively obvious as

“Fred Bloggs has a severe receptive and expressive language disorder, he is on the first percentile for both - ie if you took 100 children, he would be the worst one….”

But they didn’t want parents saying:

“Doesn’t a disorder mean Fred is not going to just grow out of it; and if his problems are that severe, do you think he should be in a language unit?

There was intense pressure already on language unit places, just for those children put forward by the speech therapists; never mind making it worse by alerting parents to the real extent of their child’s problems and them asking for a place!

I needed to understand the reports, how the test scores work, etc. I had to do A-level psychology to get the basic concepts and relearn all the statistics, but after that I could read at degree level text books for abnormal psychology, speech and language therapy, dyslexia, etc - because the vast majority of the jargon is based on Greek and Latin. I might never have come across the term “proto-imperative pointing” before, but I could work out what it meant literally.

Or, reading the report of DD’s MRI scan of her brain, when it started talking about the sulci; I knew it meant furrows in Latin - so it was obvious, what part of her brain, they were talking about. Likewise, I could read academic medical articles on her health problems, beyond the limits of my knowledge, because I could understand what the medical jargon meant literally underneath.

Although not the purpose of the thread I started, I have to agree that translation is an art, and one which has sometimes amused me for languages I understand reasonably well.

Interested in the responses I have read, certainly those who want Latin to be offered have an unexpected range of arguments in favour.

I think Latin is great, but it shouldn't be a priority over MFL. Government policy on language teaching has been appalling for a decade--they should never have made it optional. Anglophones in general are really appalling at foreign languages and resort to "but everyone speaks English" and "well, there's always going to be a native speaker who's bilingual, so there's no point in me speaking it imperfectly." (Exception: Canadians in French Immersion.)

I took both Spanish and Latin, and I do use my Spanish a lot more, but I live in the USA now. There are some schools here that offer a bilingual curriculum in primary and the children actually do come out speaking very well; the problem is that not all are supported to continue their learning after. You need to start teaching young and you need to push it. Many European students are studying literature in English at their equivalent of A-Level and we're still trying to teach ours the basics of the subjunctive and how to buy train tickets in Madrid.

Sorry OP if it went s bit off-topic. Anyway getting back to the original point, message to Gav (still in a job?!?) "Caput tuum in ano est"/your head is up your arse. Lots more where that came from, but possibly not the return on investment he was envisaging.

@PartridgeFeather

Sorry OP if it went s bit off-topic. Anyway getting back to the original point, message to Gav (still in a job?!?) "Caput tuum in ano est"/your head is up your arse. Lots more where that came from, but possibly not the return on investment he was envisaging.

caput tuum usque asinus tuus

surely ?

Many European students are studying literature in English at their equivalent of A-Level and we're still trying to teach ours the basics of the subjunctive and how to buy train tickets in Madrid.

I find that weird, having done French A level, where we studied the literature like Moliere, Camus, Racine, Gide, etc and it was assumed we knew the grammar by then; and Spanish to 1st year university standard!

However, having spent 20 years coming across children, who struggled with reading and writing in English (due to SEN); there needs to be more of a conversation about what children should be taking a MFL. Likewise, DH is quite bright, a graduate; but had no interest in MFL because he can't understand a language, with different sounds to ours (music is a horrible noise to him, so clearly some kind of auditory processing problem) and he made no effort whatsoever to learn any French, beyond bonjour! Forcing him to do O level, was a complete waste of everybody's time!

I agree with the German system of different types of secondary school - where one type is for children, say having done a broad national curriculum up to 14 (because we don't want to be accused of just producing factory fodder), to do a more technical, vocational curriculum, which includes basic finance, self care (to stop people turning up at A & E with minor conditions like sun burn, or acid reflux), child care and development, IT skills and then whatever else - which would be more useful in adult life.

No £4million should not be spent on Latin.

I find that weird, having done French A level, where we studied the literature like Moliere, Camus, Racine, Gide, etc and it was assumed we knew the grammar by then; and Spanish to 1st year university standard!

I was the first year of GCSE - in my first A-level French class, we did a past O-level paper - and some of the grammar, we hadn't done it, as it wasn't in the GCSE syllabus. I did have an advantage there, also doing Latin - I just needed to learn the French patterns, but I understood what the subjunctive was, as it was in the Latin GCSE syllabus.

I agree with the German system of different types of secondary school

Which works better than the old grammar school/secondary modern system, where we had a two tier system more than a parallel system. We're not very good st looking st other countries' examples for better ways of doing things, though.

The GCSEs have just been reformed. I don't teach MFL but I know it is considered much harder.