Articles From The Classical Teacher

The Greatest Single Defect of My Own Latin Education
by Dorothy Sayers

Part III: Suggestions for teaching Latin-beginning age and pronuncation
    ... In the time that remains to me, I will rather sort over my own experience and see what it offers in the way of  constructive suggestions for the teaching of Latin.  I must repeat that I do not know what you are actually doing about this.  It will be for you to say whether your practice agrees anywhere with my theory, and, where it does not, whether and why you consider my suggestions impracticable or undesirable.

     To begin, then, at the beginning: I am convinced that the age at which I began was the right one.  An acquaintance of mine whose boy is just starting life at a grammar school tells me that the boys there do not begin Latin till they are eleven.  I am sure that this is  too late.  In acquiring the Accidence, everything depends upon getting declensions and conjugations firmly fixed in the memory during the years when the mere learning of anything by rote is a delight rather than a burden.  The jingle of "mensa, mensa, mensam' or "amo, amas, amat" belongs properly to the same mental age as "eeny, meeny, miney, mo", or "This is the house that Jack built".  By the time that the reasoning and arguing faculty is awake, the capacity for assembling sounds by aural memory is weakening, and by the age of puberty it is practically lost.  One can, of course, learn by heart at all ages if one earnestly puts one's mind to it-in the sense that one can memorize a thing ad hoc, as an actor memorizes a part.  But the thing learnt at a later age does not abide graven upon the very foundations of memory like the thing learnt in childhood.  And the more rational one becomes, the more tedious and difficult it is to learn strings of sounds which are not logically associated.

Abstract nouns in -io call
Feminina one and all;
Masculine will only be
Things that you can touch or see,
As curculio, vespertilio,
Pugio, scipio, and papilio,
With the nouns that number show
Such as ternio, senio.

     The first four lines of that mnemonic make sense, and so do the last two; if I had not known them from the cradle, I could learn them tomorrow.  But the fifth and sixth lines are different.  If I had to learn them fresh today, I should have forgotten them by tomorrow, because they make no connected sense.  But I remember them now, although I have not the faintest recollection of what any one of the words means, except papilio.  I could not possibly forget them, any more than I could forget hic, haec, hoc.  And it is all nonsense to pretend that small children hate and are bored by learning things by heart.  They like it.  They have a passion for it.  If they are given no outlet for this passion in school, they will devote themselves to memorizing number-plates or cricket averages.  The love of memorizing for memorizing's sake is the hallmark of the sub-rational intellect, and it is simply silly not to take advantage of it while the going's good.

     What is, I am sure, a strain and vexation to the young mind is to be compelled to reason before the time; just as it is a strain and vexation to have to memorize after the best time for that kind of thing is past.  It is (as Wordsworth rightly pointed out) extremely unwise to keep bothering a young child with "Why, Edward, tell me why?" Wait till Edward asks "Why?" before burdening his mind with reasons.  And meanwhile let him chant "mensa, mensa, mensam" at the top of his voice.  His grown-ups will get tired of it before he does.  But do not on any account waste those precious years when declension and conjugation can be learned without difficulty and without boredom.

     Now, as to the vexed question of pronunciation.  I will say here and now that I have never discovered, nor can I see, any reasonable use or excuse for the "waynee, weedee, weekee" convention.  It is not merely that I have a profound sympathy with one of my friends who says he just cannot believe that Caesar was the kind of man to talk in that kind of way.  Caesar may, indeed, have done so, but what then?  We do not, except experimentally at the Mermaid Theatre, or in a Third Programme broadcast by Neville Coghill, insist on pronouncing the English of Shakespeare and Chaucer as Shakespeare and Chaucer pronounced it.

     Antiquarian research is useful and enlightening; but for the general use and enjoyment of literature we adopt other standards.  And if we have succeeded (which is not certain) in discovering the pronunciation used in the Augustan age, it is probably that that pronunciation did not endure very long-no pronunciation does.  It had certainly gone by the time that the Romance languages began to issue out of the Latin matrix.  And the "New", or Antiquarian pronunciation, has serious disadvantages.  It is the remotest of all from the modern English pronunciation, whether of common words or of proper nouns, and therefore to us the least helpful for derivations and for feeling the continuity of linguistic development.  You cannot sing it.  And it does not link us with our fellow Latinists on the Continent, who all tend to assimilate the Latin to the vernacular in the traditional way.  Indeed, I think the only person I have heard casually using the Antiquarian Latin was a young American whom I once encountered at lunch; and even he, if I had replied with the ecclesiastical pronunciation, would probably have understood me.

     The really important thing, however, is that there should be, at any rate during the period of schooling, a uniform usage.  If one rejects the Antiquarian school of thought, there remain two other possibilities for English students.  There is the "Old" or "Protestant" usage.  This probably began to be used in this country during the fifteenth century, perhaps partly as an anti-Papist and anti-foreign measure; but chiefly in order to keep the pronunciation of Latin in line with that of the vernacular, which was also changing rapidly at about that period.  This harnessing of the Latin to the vernacular is traditional in every country, and has very much to be said for it. It enables the child to learn Latin with rapidity and ease, just because it does not require him to load his tongue and memory with a new set of vowel-and-consonant associations.  It assists him greatly to discover for himself the derivations and history of his own native words.  It makes no confusing discrepancies between the pronunciation of proper names and their derivations-between, for instance, Keekero and Ciceronian, Kysar and Caesarism; and it makes for a decent uniformity in the pronunciation of Latin names that have been anglicized.

     ... The "Old" pronunciation had, however, two very grave drawbacks.  It did not pay attention to the intrinsic quantity of vowels.  One was brought up to decline bos, bovis, which made it peculiarly hard to remember that the "o" of bos is in fact long, and the "o" of bovis short when it came to actually scanning them.  This also greatly increased the difficulty of appreciating the music and pattern of quantitative verse, let alone, I should imagine, of writing it.  If the English people had nobody but themselves to consider, I should feel strongly inclined to advocate a return to the "Old" pronunciation, but with a readjustment of the conventional vowel-sounds to coincide with their quantitative values, pronouncing mater, but pater, locus, manus, mihi (instead of mihi) and so on, with all consonant and vowel sounds as in English (e.g. the soft "c" and "g" before "i" and "e", and the "j" and "v" as "j" and "v").  The only awkwardness that I can see would arise with first and second declension dative and ablative plurals: mensis would give a false quantity-mensees would introduce a foreign vowel sound, and mensice might need some getting used to.  I am quite sure that for the average child, for whom it is important not to spend too much time and trouble (not to mention tears) upon the rudiments, this would be by far the quickest, easiest, and most generally helpful pronunciation to adopt.

    Unfortunately, there would still remain the other very serious drawback, arising out of the fact that the modern English values of a, e, i and u have developed in a direction which isolates them completely from the values given to those vowels on the continent.  The more closely we follow the tradition of assimilating the Latin to the vernacular, the less possible does it become to restore the use of Latin as a lingua franca.  If it appeared in any way possible so to restore it, then I think it might be better to plump from the start for the ecclesiastical pronunciation, which can be understood in every country where Latin Mass is sung, even by those who do not attend Mass.  The ecclesiastical Latin is beautiful, singable, and cosmopolitan; neither does it demand from English Catholics a divided allegiance. Moreover, although equally with the "Antiquarian" usage, it disguises the connection between the modern English speech and its Latin roots, yet it links us up with our own history; for it is to all intents and purposes the Latin spoken by our own countrymen up to the time of the great vowel-shift.