Understanding Language: A Guide for Beginning Students of Greek and Latin

1. Learning a Foreign Language: The Bad News and the Good News

3 1 Learning a Foreign Language The Bad News and the Good News The Bad News: Languages Are Not Codes Early in Thomas Hardy’s last novel, Jude the Obscure, published in 1896, the title character catches a glimpse of the great university city Christminster (which, in Hardy’s fictional world, corresponds to Oxford) and is consumed by the desire to become a scholar. Upon discovering that he will have to learn Greek and Latin to do so, Jude orders some textbooks for the classical languages and prepares to decipher them. Hardy tells the reader: Ever since his first ecstasy or vision of Christminster and its possibilities , Jude had meditated much and curiously on the probable sort of process that was involved in turning the expressions of one language into those of another. He concluded that a grammar of the required tongue would contain, primarily, a rule, prescription, or clue of the nature of a secret cipher, which, once known, would enable him by merely applying it, to change at will all words of his own speech into those of the foreign one.1 When the packet of textbooks arrives and Jude eagerly opens the Latin grammar that is on top, he is devastated. Hardy writes, “He learnt for the first time that there was no law of transmutation , as in his innocence he supposed (there was, in some degree , but the grammarian did not recognize it), but that every 1. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, Bantam Classic Edition (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 32. 4 Part 1: Getting Started word in both Latin and Greek was to be individually committed to memory at the cost of years of plodding.”2 At this point, Jude throws the book down in despair and sulks for some time. Hardy continues: “What brains they must have in Christminster and the great schools, he presently thought, to learn words one by one up to tens of thousands! There were no brains in his head equal to this business; and as the little sun-rays continued to stream in through his hat at him, he wished he had never seen a book, that he might never see another, and that he had never been born.”3 Thus begins Jude’s brief, unhappy relationship to the halls of academia. While most people who start the study of Greek and Latin are not quite as naïve as Jude was, many of us have very little idea of what awaits us as we embark on the journey toward learning one or both of the classical languages. Thus, finding out what is involved in studying Greek and Latin may be nearly as crushing a blow for many of us as it was for poor Jude. In fact, the bad news is that Jude did not know the half of it, because simply learning words one by one is only the beginning of the difficulties that await the student of Greek or Latin. The greater problem is coming to grips with the hundreds of different forms that a single Greek or Latin verb can take and the dozen or so forms each noun can take. One must learn how to recognize each of these forms and how the forms are used to indicate relations between words. This is considerably more daunting than simply learning, for example, that “human being” in Latin is homo, that in Greek “human being” is ἄνθρωπος [anthrōpos], and that there is no code enabling one to produce these two words from the English word “man” or the phrase “human being.” Let us think a bit more about Jude’s humorous idea that languages were like codes or ciphers. Behind that supposition lay another belief—not articulated or even considered, but still present—that there cannot really be more than one way to express ideas. The way Jude was used to expressing himself—that is, the way people express themselves in English—was the only way he had ever experienced, and thus it was the only way of 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 33. Learning a Foreign Language 5 expressing ideas he could conceive of. So when he tried to imagine what another language might entail, the only thing he could come up with was something like a code, a sort of trick in which one letter stands for another, or symbols stand for the letters of the alphabet. Again, most of us are not...