Latin for Beginners

Extract

I have been teaching School Certificate Latin for twenty years. The results might be worse. Most of the candidates pass; a good many get credits; a few get distinctions. But I feel with Mr. Frank Jones that much of the work is a waste of time, and that many of the boys could be better employed.

The wisest plea for learning Latin is that it teaches us to weigh the meaning of words. The merit of Latin is that on the whole it calls a spade a spade, and we cannot translate into it even a simple-looking phrase like ‘let us make sure of winning the peace’ without knowing what it means. This point has been made so often that it need not be laboured; and anyone who has read advanced Latin with a sixth form knows it to be sound. We all have been asked whether some phrase in the version, especially if we have written it ourselves, renders the English adequately, and the question is usually apt. And though the plea is not so often met, it is true, too, that translation into and from Latin makes us weigh the power of words. If a sixth-form master were to accept ‘undoubtedly forgivable, if the departed were acquainted with forgiveness’ as a rendering of ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere manes, his complaisance would be challenged at once. And when a boy, unaided by Dr. Mackail, produced ‘and now in majesty my ghost shall go beneath the earth’ for et nunc magna mei terras ibit imago, it was an achievement.