When I tell people in the outside world that I teach Latin, the question I am very often asked in return is “Do you speak Latin?” Most of those who ask this are probably more or less aware that Latin is not, in the twenty-first century, a spoken language. But that awareness is trumped by the instinctive link made between language and speech. It seems very strange to teach a language if one does not speak it.
I have a standard response to “Do you speak Latin?”. I answer that nobody speaks Latin, that it is a “dead language”, but that I can read it. If pressed, I may add that there are in fact small, scattered groups of enthusiasts who are trying to revive spoken Latin, that Latin is perhaps still spoken on occasion in the Vatican, and that, as for myself, if for some reason I had to speak Latin, rather than merely read it, I could manage.
The description of Latin as a “dead language” requires much qualification.
The above response generally exhausts the curiosity of enquirers. Yet, in truth, the description of Latin as a “dead language” requires much qualification. Latin has never been dead in the manner of, say, Akkadian or Hittite, its knowledge lost, so that modern scholars had to decipher and reconstruct it. On the contary, there is an unbroken continuity in the use of Latin from its birth about 2,800 years ago, in and around Rome, to the present day. Throughout that stretch of time, in Europe and beyond, there have been men and women able to read and write Latin, if not speak it. Were there sufficient documentation, I could trace a direct succession from those who taught me Latin this century, all the way back to the Latin teachers of Late Antiquity, and beyond that, down to the shadowy era of Latin’s emergence from the Indo-European sub-family of Italic languages.
In the case of languages—unlike with people and animals—deadness needs to be understood on a sliding scale. Some languages are more dead than others, and a language can be more or less dead at various points in its history. Thus Latin has, in one sense, been dead for a very long time, while it has also gone through various spurts of resurrection, and has recently entered more dire death throes than ever before in its history.
Latin has recently entered more dire death throes than ever before in its history.
The sense in which Latin is long dead relates to that “Do you speak Latin?” question. For about 1,400 years, Latin, as the language we know from texts and documents, has not been spoken in the way that, for instance, English or Japanese are spoken every day. The spoken form of Latin began mutating at the end of antiquity towards the “Romance” languages: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, etc. This was of course a slow process, happening differently, and at different times, in different places, and we lack the records to reconstruct the change in much detail. Still, it is clear that, between roughly AD 500 and AD 700, there gradually ceased to be a language learnt domestically from infancy that could be truly described as Latin, rather than as some form of proto-Romance.
However the disappearance of Latin from the domestic sphere did not mean that it was no longer a vigorously active language. On the contrary, Latin was to remain the main language of reading and writing in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. The early modern period saw an explosion of writing in modern languages, but, well into the eighteenth-century, Latin remained a common language for scholarly and scientific publication. Erasmus, Spinoza, Copernicus, Newton all wrote their great works in Latin, and Descartes and Hobbes, while masters of French and English prose, respectively, also wrote extensively in Latin. Not all of these medieval and early modern writers and readers of Latin were equally proficient in speaking the language, but there was enough Latin spoken in the West for it to be the chief language of university teaching into the eighteenth century.
For this whole period of Latin’s flourishing as a written language and language of the educated, it would clearly be nonsense to describe it as a “dead language”, and of course it was not then thought of as such. There were waves of concern about Latin’s decline from the norms of its early centuries, and subsequent attempts to reform how the language was used. But these were viewed as exertions to purify the language, not to bring it back from the dead.
The rise of universal education made the choice of Latin as the chief language of reading and writing impracticable.
However, by the second half of the eighteenth century, a new phase in Latin’s decline had begun. The Enlightenment philosophes, with their marked hostility to the Church, where Latin remained supreme, were the first major European intellectual movement to eschew Latin. And here, for once, the Romantics were in agreement with their Enlightenment rivals: Romantics tended to elevate national cultures and languages, and to see Latin as artificial and incapable of the authentic expression for which they yearned. At the same time, the rise of universal education made the choice of Latin as the chief language of reading and writing seem impracticable. It was hard enough to ensure that the children of every peasant and factory worker learnt to read and write at all, without further seeking to teach them to do so in Latin.
Today the portion of the literate who can read Latin is smaller than ever before. Speaking Latin is little more than a hobby, and the writing of Latin is almost reserved to the issuing of official Vatican documents, and to recondite areas of classical scholarship (prefaces to certain editions of classical texts; some publications of inscriptions). To be sure, those scattered enthusiasts seek to revive the writing and speaking of Latin, with Erasmian zeal. But Erasmus was a central and celebrated figure in the Europe of his day, whereas his contemporary imitators belong to an obscure sub-culture.
Latin is thus far more dead now than it has ever been before. One may face this with grief, joy or indifference, but there is no probability of its changing: further revivals of Latin into some sort of living language are surely not to be anticipated. A more pressing question is whether Latin is due to become still more dead, as a result of automated translation.
Latin today is learnt almost exclusively as a language for reading, so that the vast corpus of Latin material, from antiquity onwards, can be understood. Of this material, only the ancient portion, by far the smallest, has almost all been translated (with, even here, the enormous exception of inscriptions). So students and scholars have needed to learn Latin themselves to read much of the rest.
Do they still need this? Automatic translation is not perfect, but it can easily be seen as “good enough”, particularly when scholarship is viewed primarily as a form of production. If, with machine translation, students can get enough sense out of a Latin text to produce essays, and scholars to produce publications, do they really have to bother with whatever further precision and subtlety they may gain from actually learning the language?
Such precision and subtlety is meant to be essential to scholarship. But it is far easier to pay lip service to it, than to break one’s head against the rocks of Latin grammar, vocabulary and syntax. That trouble will hardly seem worth taking so long as it is seen primarily as trouble.
Too much work, over too long, has gone into understanding Latin for the knowledge of how to do so to disappear from the earth: it will at least remain latent in books. But if there is to be a further, and particularly sad, stage in the death of Latin, it will be the sundering of that millennial chain of learning and teaching how to read this language, the replacement of actual knowledge with reliance on its mechanized imitation.
