Centuries-old manuals on how to learn Latin

[tommus]

Here is a 23 minute audio from CBC.ca radio on how the ancient world learned Latin.

"Translations of ancient Latin give unique insights into Roman culture"

"A classics scholar is the first to investigate centuries-old manuals on how to learn Latin, what she reveals about life in the ancient world may surprise you."

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/encore-translations-of-ancient-latin-give-unique-insights-into-roman-culture-1.3705367

[Stefan]

Thanks. Pretty interesting although it's a lot of focus on the culture. I took some notes about the language learning part for anyone who doesn't want to listen through the whole interview.

They had dialogs and phrasebooks (people memorised phrases).

> Dialogs and phrases that teach you about the language and culture.
—— Bilingual texts because you didn't know where a word began and ended.
> Lots of positive court scenes because mostly lawyers studied latin.
> One mentioned example is a dinner scene with orders to slaves.

They play a dialog where a wife (probably) yells at the husband for drinking.
They play a phrase section with insults (because people needed them).

The dialogs were short little chunks written to be engaging (fun) and I'm not sure if I should be depressed or happy. 2000 years later and the language learning is almost identical with methods such as Assimil. Is it because the method is amazing or is it just because we didn't manage to develop it more?

[Elexi]

I have Eleanor Dickey's book Learning Latin the Ancient Way - it gives even greater detail than her interview. As Stefan said - learning Latin the ancient way was pretty much the same modern language learning - phrases, dialogues, grammar exercises.

Professor Dickey's academic articles are pretty much essential for anyone interested in spoken Latin and Greek and she has made many of them available for free on her website.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Here is a very brief except from one of the dialogues, which Dickey and the ancients called colloquia:

8c    sicubi mihi noti   If acquaintances met me anywhere,
     occurrerunt,
     salutvi eos;     I greeted them;

This comes from page 15 of her book, in the section named Colloquia.

Here I give the Amazon reference, because their page includes their "Look Inside" feature for the book. https://tinyurl.com/jqbjqoq

Note: the hard spaces idea comes from here: https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtop ... &t=1795015

[MorkTheFiddle]

I have Eleanor Dickey's book Learning Latin the Ancient Way - it gives even greater detail than her interview. As Stefan said - learning Latin the ancient way was pretty much the same modern language learning - phrases, dialogues, grammar exercises.

Have you done any work with Dickey's book? You've done a ton of work in this area, and I was wondering what you think of it as a learning tool for Latin.

[William Camden]

Some things about language learning in 2017 AD were probably just as valid in 2017 BC, even if it was, say, an Egyptian-speaking merchant trying to learn some Elamite.

[reineke]

Latin lessons - old school

[Daristani]

I think some of the people here might enjoy reading the following recent discussion of this book, as well as the whole question of different approaches to learning Latin:

https://eidolon.pub/what-is-the-best-wa ... .6kk14k475

[MorkTheFiddle]

I think some of the people here might enjoy reading the following recent discussion of this book, as well as the whole question of different approaches to learning Latin:

https://eidolon.pub/what-is-the-best-wa ... .6kk14k475

Latin was taught to me in an academic setting using neither the ancient method reported on by Dickey nor the method advocated by Foster. At that time, Wheelock was unheard of or perhaps just getting started. Were I to choose one of these methods, it would be the one reported on by Dickey. It is not clear from the discussion whether either makes any use of oral materials, which surely should be part of any method.

All that aside, and perhaps not germane to the OP, to me the most interesting part of the discussion occurred when Dickey said, "The first reading sheet in his book is from Horace, an author so hard that I don’t think I’m up to reading him after 35 years of studying and teaching Latin." Is that generally true, do you suppose, and if it is true, then is learning Latin really worth the effort? Just wondering.

[DaveBee]

Prof Dickey has a new book coming out in April 2018 Learn Latin from the Romans: A Complete Introductory Course Using Textbooks from the Roman Empire (ISBN: 9781316506196)

EDIT
Quote below from Ms Dickey's page on the University of Reading's website:

In a continuing quest to make the Latin and Greek languages themselves as widely available as possible, I have also written an elementary Latin textbook using the Colloquia (Learn Latin from the Romans, Cambridge University Press 2018) and a Greek prose composition textbook (An Introduction to the Composition and Analysis of Greek Prose, Cambridge University Press 2016 -- this for once, has absolutely nothing to do with the colloquia). When I was an undergraduate no-one wanted to teach me to write Greek, which made me desperately sad; I hope that this book will allow anyone who finds themselves in a similarly sad position to teach themselves.

My main current research project is a study of the influence of Latin on Greek during the Roman empire, particularly Latin loanwords that were integrated into Greek to the extent of being used by Greek speakers who did not speak Latin; I am trying to understand what types of words the Greeks borrowed as well as when, why, and how those borrowings occurred and what they tell us about Greek and Roman culture at the time when the borrowing occurred.