Dear Professor Scaife:
I am a professor in the Department of World Languages at Wenatchee Valley College, a technical college located in central Washington state, where I teach German as well as Spanish and Latin. Although my doctorate, from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is in Germanic Linguistics and my primary field of research has been the history of the syntax of the early Germanic dialects, I began my college career as a classicist, earning a BA in Classics at UCLA, an MA in Latin, and a CPhil degree (informally "ABD") in Classics, the latter both at UC Berkeley. Although I found Classics to be both a fascinating and an extremely important field, I was, as my studies progressed, increasingly disappointed by what I perceived as aridity and stagnation in the academic discipline of Classics. I spoke a number of languages and was very interested in language pedagogy, but found that Classics departments, not only at Berkeley but elsewhere, seemed unaware of the current state of knowledge in the field of language acquisition. In order to include as much active language learning as possible in my own Latin courses, I emphasized English-to-Latin translation and, in higher-level courses, original Latin composition. Eventually I began to specialize in teaching UC Berkeley's senior-year undergraduate course in Latin Composition. However, despite the fact that speaking the target language and using the target language to express one's personal concerns are crucial for deep-level language learning, any attempts I made to incorporate into my courses either spoken Latin or composition on modern topics were deemed unimportant or simply ignored. My occasional attempts to correspond in Latin with colleagues were met with mere toleration, a toleration which I increasingly felt was a defensive reaction due to the fact that their Latin was simply not very good. Finally, accepting the reality that Classics was a moribund field dedicated to outmoded philosophies, I changed my entire course of studies.
Then, almost exactly three years ago, I discovered through the Internet that people in Europe and even some in North America were beginning to use Latin actively. Apparently enrollments in Latin had so drastically decreased that Latin pedagogues had finally been forced to rethink their methods. I immediately became involved in the "Living Latin" movement and made the acquaintance of Professor Tunberg within about six months of my on-line discovery. Since then, I have participated in two of his summer Conventicula and intend to continue doing so with great frequency.
When I was first read Professor Tunberg's plan for The Institute for Latin Studies, it was immediately apparent to me that this sort of institute is exactly what is needed in order to revitalize the study of Latin. It was also apparent that Professor Tunberg was precisely the right person to be heading such a project. His general approach to the teaching of Latin is implicitly similar to the bipartite model that I myself, in approximately twenty-three years of language teaching, have found to be most effective: (a) a thorough introduction to grammar making frequent use of the students' native language for the purposes of clarification, followed by (b) immersive communicative learning in which time spent using the native language is seen to be essentially wasted. Furthermore, Professor Tunberg is unquestionably the most gifted Latin speaker I have ever known. His command of vocabulary, syntax, idiom, and semantic nuance is enormously impressive. Although I spend virtually all my free time working on improving my skills in speaking and writing Latin, upon entering into conversation with Professor Tunberg after a gap of many months I am always surprised by how very far ahead of me he is.
The conception of the Institute itself is monumental. I am of the opinion that our society at large is losing its contact with the roots of Western Civilization and, thus, with its own primary identity. Although the languor of Latin studies in the 70s and 80s may not have caused this state of affairs, the two phenomena certainly went in tandem. I sense, even in my own small local community, a recognition of the need for reviving Latin--an idea at which almost everyone might have scoffed just a decade or two ago. I see our vernacular languages as wonderful though short-lived flowers whose fragrance inevitably fades. I have seen studies that show that audiences really understand only about thirty percent of a given Shakespeare play. Eventually the Bard's great plays will eventually be nearly as difficult as Chaucer for the vast majority of speakers of "English." A person who learns Latin, however, can pick up Ovid or Erasmus or Newton and understand perfectly well what he is reading despite the centuries or even millennia of chronological separation. If Latin is retained as a language of literature and scholarly discourse, what we write today will not only be readily understood by colleagues abroad, it could also be readily understood by others, say, a millennium or more in the future.
This sort of revival of Latin as a living language is precisely what the Institute will be in a position to promote. By focussing on the M.A. program it will vividly and directly demonstrate to great numbers of future teachers and scholars at all levels of education and in a variety of academic fields that Latin is a real language, not just a set of ancient puzzles to be pondered over by pedants. Although the curriculum will give due weight to the ancient Latin classics, it will produce a number of teachers with the knowledge of how important the Latin language has been, even up to relatively recent times, in a wide range of human endeavors. These young new teachers could conceivably increasingly replace the Old Guard and reinvigorate not only classical studies but perhaps even the whole tenor of our intellectual life, contributing to a greater sense of cultural continuity and internationalism. (Although Latin is a European language, being no one's native tongue, it provides a surprisingly neutral linguistic environment in which no one feels innately at a disadvantage.)
I have examined the proposal for the Institute and find it especially admirable and commedable for (a) its extreme openness to various and interdisciplinary studies, (b) the equal weight it gives to different periods and types of Latin, (c) its balanced emphasis on all the four languages skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening and speaking), and (d) its distance-learning extension. Both the grand concept and the details of this project have been thoroughly thought out by individuals who clearly know from experience what is needed.
I highly recommend promotion of the Institute for Latin Studies. If you would like to discuss this further with me, please feel free to contact me by e-mail, phone, or snail-mail.
Sincerely, Stephen A. Berard ****************************** Stephen A. Berard, Ph.D. Professor Department of World Languages Wenatchee Valley College 1300 Fifth Street Wenatchee, WA 98801 USA 509-662-1651, ext. 2219 ******************************
Created on ... March 26, 2001