The Birmingham age-herald., 1920-08-17
MEN, WOMEN
 AND THINGS


 pronunciation of Latin has varied in our colleges met with appreciation in some quarters and in others was received with pitying smile. ~
 | I admitted that I was in favor of Latin and Greek being taught in our colleges and universities and I go further and agree with Goethe, who said: "A >1llan
 who is ignorant of foreign languages is elso ignorant of his own languageP
 This may be an over r-ststement, but there is a basis of fact in it.
 | But it is not of the living languages
 which now wish to write, but of Lat in. one of the dead languages which first appears-fn literature as the written. as we'll as the spoken language, centu- | riee before the birth of Christ; but which ceased to be a spoken language
 5s0 A. D.; but which remained the or
 gan of general literature until the early part of the seventeenth century, | twelve centuries after the dissolution
 of the Roman empire.
 |
 fLatium, the conquering armies of Rome
 carried a knowledge of the Roman or Latin tongue to the utmost boundarles of the known world and the Latin lan- guage either took the place of the native language of every conquered nation or
 else became engrafted- upon it; and this | is why it's presence is discernible in all ] (which are the immediate offspring or ,the Latin, as the Italian, Spanish Portu- guese and French; both Norman ana Prvencal are called Romance lan- guages.
 1 NJ. Littre says:s-"Latin alters, without tdoubt toward the end of the empire ana after the arrival of the barbarians, ana the style of Gregory of Tours is very far removed from the purity of Livy; but after all, it is Latin and not one Of the neo-Latin languages. Then all at once it disappears and we see arising, as Tiff from under the ground, the various jidiems to which it has given birth. IL I dies suddenly without transformation, so | that these secondary languages cannot be considered as the metamorphosis or expansion of it. We have no right 10 say that Latin is continued in new ian- ruages: it died without developing it. self. but died leaving children and heirs {, Not only was this true. but Latin can hardly be said to have possessed any dl- alects, or, if it, had they have scarcely ,left. any traces. It was. of course, orig l inally the speech of small nation, the Latins; but the aggrandizement of Rome where it was spoken from the beginning l of the city, caused it to be spread over western Europe and to some extent to-
 ward the east, but the varieties so pro nounced it can scarcely be ranked as dialects It is, however, clear that in many respects the language of the popu- lace differed from the literary Latin which has come down to use in books. l
 The romance languages descended from the language of the common people, the soldiers and traders, who settled Tn the provinces This is proved by the fact that many common words in the TO- nance languages are derived, not rom their equivalents in classical Latin dne unrest Latinity is generally held to be that of the first century B. C., repre- sented by writers like Cicero, Caesar, Sallust and Livy in prose; Lucretius,
 tatullus. Virgil, Horace and Ovid Tn poetry), but either from words used Tn slightly different or special senses in l classical Latin, or from words not to be 1 found at all in the best writers. Any one familiar with Latin and Frencn can detect this in certain words in the iatter' |
 l Ii may be of interest to note here that while the Romance languages cover fair ly the area of the western empire Of Rome: in the eastern empire, Latin failed to displace Greek. From Britain, the Anglo Saxon invasion expelled the Latin speech. if it had taken root there, as the Saracenic invasions expelled it from Arr ca. Apart from this, some form of Ro- man speech still marks the ancient h.n- it's of Roman rule. These languages are the Italian, French Provencal, Span fish, Walachian and Rhaetop Romaa'c. For the study of any one or tneHls stuu s.il more for the comparison Of aav two or more, a knowledge es Latin ls l understandable. I found that may studies
 in Latin greatly facilitated me In the l staCy of tCth French anf sE.pish.
 !
 It is curious to read in Sir T. BroWne's Christian Morals: Ut is an unjust way or compute to magnify weak head TOT some Latin abilities and to undervalue solid judgment because he knows not the geneaology of Hector But John Colet. dean of St. Paurs founded ot. Paurs school in the year 15l0. Tor free education of children of all nations anu countries. they were to be instructed in good and clean Latin iitera- l ture' to the exclusion of all which ne terms .barbary and corruption and Latin adulterate and such as he says may |rather be called blotterature than litera- ture., Evidently the dean was down on dog-Latin.
 If was in the middle ages that Latin | received enormous accessions from the Greek. Teutonic and Oriental tongues,/as well. as pointed out above. from the Ro- nance tongues the vernacular represen- itatives of ancient Latin, such accesslons heinz fully accommodated to the Latin.
 ar merely provided with Latin termlna- tions. or received unchanged. These ladulterations were known as Low Latin' lsometimes Barharous Latin. especially with reference to foreign elements. l ] suppose it was this last variety to which I Dean Colet made reference under the name of .Barbary."