To: Prof. Ross Scaife, Univ. of Kentucky From: Rob Ulery, Wake Forest University Date: Feb. 19, 2001
Permit me to offer a few words in hopeful commendation of UK's newly-developed Institute for Latin Studies, whose progress I have been enthusiastically watching from a distance ever since its first announcements appeared. It seems to me that it offers a distinctive approach to both the practical problems of Latin literacy in our day and the realization of some of our idealistic dreams about our profession.
I have been actively experimenting with using Latin to read and interpret Latin for about five years, roughly since I became interested in and involved with summer sessions at UK, where spoken Latin is practiced by groups of Latin students and teachers. For an even longer period, I and others have regularly used reading aloud as a part of the classroom practice to ensure correct pronunciation and physical involvement of each student. I use spoken Latin especially in the Intermediate course 153, where students are making the transition from elementary grammar and syntax to the reading of original Latin. Ideally, it should be used from the beginning, as it was in the ancient and medieval classroom, and continued to the advanced levels. There are methods which use this approach, notably Oerberg's Lingua Latina. Most colleges and universities, however, use textbooks which are in the traditional format, where everything is intended to be translated, and all grammar is explained in English. This may be an advantage in my classroom, since the students have the English-based explanation as a backup for what is done in Latin in class; but it may also be a crutch that prevents them from entering into the spirit of the method. Certainly most of the textbooks we have are from the "reading by translating" school of thought.
At any rate, the idea is to replace translation of the Latin reading into English (and any grammatical analysis required) by a series of questions and answers in Latin. Basic question formulas allow the choice of the relevant question formula for the particular problem presented by a word or phrase or clause or sentence. Even if the answer is perfectly obvious, and even if the student may not know the precise meaning of one or more words in the group, the simple repetition of the questions and answers leads eventually to comprehension. And it is comprehension either in the thought of the language itself, or in a simultaneous mental English; the important thing is to keep the English from being written down, memorized or otherwise fixed. Even if progress through the text is slow, the fact that Latin remains the medium of communication means that progress is constantly being made toward Latin fluency.
Once basic comprehension of the grammatical and syntactical details of the sentence or passage is established, questions may be addressed to larger matters of thought. Or one may move to paraphrasing complex Latin into simpler Latin; this is especially useful in reading poetry, where the prose paraphrase in simpler Latin throws into high relief the poetic vocabulary and devices. This in turn can lead (at the highest level, to which I have not yet attained with my students) to free composition in Latin about the passage read. The program for the courses in the Institute clearly aim at this advanced standard. Complaints are occasionally made about "conversational" Latin being used to water down the challenging work of learning to read Latin. So I stress that very little of this is taken up with ordinary conversation: "Hello, how are you? what shall we do today?" Rather, my goal is to read and interpret what we read using Latin as much as possible rather than English.
I have been inspired and encouraged in these endeavors from the beginning by the Tunbergs, and thus I was delighted to see the method incorporated in a very practical way in the design of composition courses at UK and in the Institute for Latin Studies. Those of us who have given our hearts to this concept know how much our own fluency in the Latin language has been improved, and how much we learn from remaining in the language as we read texts. I can think of no sounder basis for learning with the students who choose UK for their graduate training, and I am confident that it is the most efficient way to use the limited time available for graduate studies to reach the student's goals.
I wish also to commend the Institute for restoring the full range of literature in Latin to the curriculum. I have worked in Neo-Latin texts for years in my research on the Latin commentaries on Tacitus and Sallust in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It is a fascinating field, whose neglect on this side of the Atlantic is deplorable. I hope that the Institute may help our profession to raise its sights and take in the full vista of Latin literature to its farthest horizons.
VOX HUMANA Robert (Rob) Ulery Wake Forest University (336) 758-5873 Box 7343, Winston-Salem, NC 27109, USA ulery@wfu.edu
Created on ... March 26, 2001