Latin is easier to native Americans than to Spaniards

[yong321]

Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, p.406, 1976

"The Franciscans and Augustinians ... discovered that the natives [i.e. native Americans] took to Latin more easily than Spaniards."

The passage is about the 16th- and 17th-century Christian proselytizing activity in the Americas. You can read more text surrounding it at
https://books.google.com/books?id=e4XMZ ... aniards%22

Anyway, I wonder if we can think of an explanation. None of any native American languages is anywhere close to Latin or any descendant of Proto-Indo-European. Why is Latin easier to native Americans than to Spaniards?

[aokoye]

I honestly would be shocked if that was actually the case for a lot of reasons. The main reason I can think of that it would be the case is sheer fear by the Native Americans were taught Latin with the idea of, "well if we don't do this they will at best beat us and at worse kill us."

[nooj]

Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, p.406, 1976

"The Franciscans and Augustinians ... discovered that the natives [i.e. native Americans] took to Latin more easily than Spaniards."

The passage is about the 16th- and 17th-century Christian proselytizing activity in the Americas. You can read more text surrounding it at
https://books.google.com/books?id=e4XMZ ... aniards%22

Anyway, I wonder if we can think of an explanation. None of any native American languages is anywhere close to Latin or any descendant of Proto-Indo-European. Why is Latin easier to native Americans than to Spaniards?

It's true that there was a thriving American Latinist community and great Latinists came out of the immediate post-Conquest generation, but the author is a historian, not a linguist, and I would take anything he or the Spanish priests said at the time (who weren't linguists either, although the closest thing to it at the time) with a large grain of salt.

[Whodathunkitz]

Possibly... Native Americans were already accomplished polyglots?

Those of you who are... Is learning a new language from a different language family easier after you already know a variety? Has the polyglot got the abilities, tips and tricks to allow them to learn faster?

Were Native Americans polyglots? Did they use a multitude of languages regularly for trade etc.

Were / are Native American languages from different language groups? Did that help?

Spanish speakers could be polyglots in just romance languages if the principal reasons are trade and practicality eg ships Captain..

I'm guessing that a Finnish person who is a polyglot in nearby and trade languages would find it useful (depending on which century) to know Sami, Swedish, German, polish, Russian, Lithuanian plus English and more nowadays. So more variety of language families.

[Cainntear]

It may simply be that they were better capable of handling the case system. That's a lot of what dominated in the ideas of good and bad Latin back then.

[yong321]

> sheer fear by the Native Americans were taught Latin

The book doesn't seem to indicate any such fear. The conquistadors brought about fear. But not the priests.

> I would take anything he or the Spanish priests said at the time ... with a large grain of salt

Indeed. I wish we could find one other source that claims the same (native Americans learn latin more easily than Spaniards).

> Were Native Americans polyglots? Did they use a multitude of languages regularly for trade etc.

Not likely. I read W. W. Newcomb Jr.'s "The Indians of Texas" from cover to cover. At least the native Americans in Texas tried to not trade or have any contact between different tribes or bands. (Those in other regions of the Americas were probably about the same.) There was no or little evidence that they spoke a language other than their mother tongue.

> Were / are Native American languages from different language groups? Did that help?

According to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenou ... e_Americas
just in North America, indigenous languages are in as many as 29 language families. (Indo-European is a language family. So imagine the great difference between individual native American languages and between any one of them and Indo-European or its descendant.) I suppose knowing a very different language than Latin is supposed to cause more difficulty in learning Latin, not less. Don't you think?

> It may simply be that they were better capable of handling the case system. That's a lot of what dominated in the ideas of good and bad Latin back then.

That may be true! I know that many native American languages are extremely difficult (so in WWII, the US army could use it to send messages without being deciphered). But I don't know if they are mostly due to complicated case systems.

[David1917]

Could be novelty factor. I imagine a Spaniard learning latin in the 16th or 17th century was probably not very motivated to try to "speak" a literary language, and felt that s/he could get by with a passive, global understanding of the reading, especially if there already existed Spanish translations of the bible. I wonder if the "bad Latin" entailed a lot of code-switching with Spanish.

For the natives, it was a brand new language and a brand new ideology. Nothing comparable for code-switching, no other way to access the material or communicate. Using myself as an example, I "take" to Chinese better than, say, Italian, because with the latter any time I learn a new word I think "oh, of course" and then sort of forget it. With Chinese I labor away at vocabulary since there's no other way, especially in written form.

[Theodisce]

It may have been be just a way of imagining the Other and/or of encouraging the Spaniard public (either in Americas or in Spain) to put more effort into their Latin studies, lest those new Christians from the New World outdo them. Without consulting the first hand sources we can only speculate, but I would be generally cautious with taking such statements at face value.

[ASEAN]

I clicked the link and read excerpts of the book. It is not clear, but I think the quoted passage, "the natives took to Latin more easily than Spaniards", refers to those being educated for the priesthood. Mentioned in the very next sentence is the College of Santiago Tlatelolco which was established to educated indigenous boys, in what is now Mexico, for the priesthood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colegio_d ... Tlatelolco The native boys at the colegio would have most likely been a self-selected group unlike many Europeans who found themselves in the priesthood solely because they were the youngest son and denied an inheritance or other means of support. (The College of Santiago Tlatelolco was established in 1536, but by 1555 natives, mestizos (mixed native and European), and blacks were banned from the priesthood.)

However, when speaking about the general population, an earlier passage in the book does say that, "The Indians learned singing and especially plain-chant more easily than anything else, and they rapidly took to a wide variety of instruments ...". If the Indians were singing and chanting in Latin, that would have made the language much easier to learn. I am not Catholic. I attended public school in the US, where we have separation of church and state, and didn't realize until later that I had sung religious songs in choir. Decades later, I can still sing most of Ave Maria.

Today in the US we have a large immigrant population of indigenous people from Mexico and Central America, many of whom do not speak Spanish. It has been difficult for hospitals to provide translators. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-sho ... or-mixteco When the non-Spanish speaking indigenous Latin American children start school in the United States, they are placed in bilingual education classes taught in Spanish and English, so they grow up speaking three languages poorly.

[aokoye]

When the non-Spanish speaking indigenous Latin American children start school in the United States, they are placed in bilingual education classes taught in Spanish and English, so they grow up speaking three languages poorly.

Just responding to say that not all (or most - most likely) children from Latin America, Spanish speaking or not, end up in bilingual education classes. They do frequently end up in English as a Second language classes, but I don't think that bilingual classrooms in most of the US have been the norm and where they have been it's been subtractive bilingual classrooms (with some notable exceptions like historically NYC). Additionally how well or not well they do in terms of learning English has a lot to do with their socioeconomic status and how old they were when they came to the US. This is true of other immigrant groups as well though.

There's a lot of information on this specific subject in the second part of the book New immigrants in the United States: readings for second language educators.