Aesop's Fables... in Latin!
Ning Diary: Dec. 29 - the ghost of authentic Latin
I'm a frequent participant at the LatinTeach listserve, and because it is conducted as an email list, without any immediately accessible archives, it has an odd sort of amnesiac character, where the same discussions happen over and over again at periodic intervals. One of the discussions that rears up and repeats quite often is the discussion about what Latin texts to teach, given the limited amount of time available and the variable range of student interest, ability, etc. Sometimes these discussions become quite acrimonious, and something that always sets me on edge is when there is reference to "authentic" Latin. A surprisingly large number of people use this phrase, and they use it in a way that is obfuscating at best.
What does the phrase "authentic" Latin mean? Logically, it seems like it would refer to grammatically correct Latin - in which case, people should probably just say "grammatically correct" Latin. And on that we could all agree: I doubt anybody would ever advocate asking students to read grammatically incorrect Latin!
Unfortunately, though, when people use the phrase "authentic" Latin they have in mind something quite different - they mean Latin produced by classical Roman authors. Perhaps they might more specifically mean Latin produced by native speakers, which ends up amounting to much the same thing: although there was widespread use of Latin in Europe through the Middle Ages and Renaissance and even into the early modern period, those Latin authors were not native speakers as the ancient Romans were.
So, Latin written by Cicero or Caesar is "authentic" Latin... while Latin from the Middle Ages is inauthentic (really, that is just extraordinary, isn't it? but the prejudice against later Latin runs very deep in the world of classical studies), Latin from the Renaissance is inauthentic (no matter how beautifully Ciceronian it might be), as is Latin written by someone today, by any teacher who is writing Latin to use in the classroom, writing Latin to use in a textbook, etc.
It also means that any Latin produced by students is inauthentic, and I think this is what bothers me the most. By declaring only Latin created by ancient Roman authors to be authentic, and all other Latin to be inauthentic, these folks have condemned our students to having only one possible goal in their Latin lives: to read Roman texts. Anything Latin they write, any Latin they speak in class, any Latin they hear their teacher or other students speaking, is all under a cloud of inauthenticity.
The cult of authenticity also pulls the rug out from under the real virtue of studying Latin, even though it is a dead language. By studying Latin, you gain access to hundreds of years worth of written thought from a wide variety of European countries, a range of countries whose vernacular languages you could never hope to master. Those writers were not native speakers of Latin, but they were REAL users of Latin, and there is nothing inauthentic about what they did - it is fully a part of the history of the Latin language.
If I were to use only "authentic" Latin versions of the fables, this would mean only the poems of Phaedrus and perhaps Avianus (although I am not sure where the mysterious poet Avianus falls on the "authenticity" meter). What a loss that would be! One of the many reasons that prompted me to work on Barlow's Aesop instead of doing a student edition of Phaedrus was precisely the opportunity to include really wonderful fables which are not attested in the ancient Latin corpus at all, but which are vital to the Aesopic tradition at large - such as the story of the tortoise and the hare, the goose that laid the golden eggs, the dog in the manager and so on. What a shame it would be to discard those stories, in the quest for a ghostly authenticity! :-)
What does the phrase "authentic" Latin mean? Logically, it seems like it would refer to grammatically correct Latin - in which case, people should probably just say "grammatically correct" Latin. And on that we could all agree: I doubt anybody would ever advocate asking students to read grammatically incorrect Latin!
Unfortunately, though, when people use the phrase "authentic" Latin they have in mind something quite different - they mean Latin produced by classical Roman authors. Perhaps they might more specifically mean Latin produced by native speakers, which ends up amounting to much the same thing: although there was widespread use of Latin in Europe through the Middle Ages and Renaissance and even into the early modern period, those Latin authors were not native speakers as the ancient Romans were.
So, Latin written by Cicero or Caesar is "authentic" Latin... while Latin from the Middle Ages is inauthentic (really, that is just extraordinary, isn't it? but the prejudice against later Latin runs very deep in the world of classical studies), Latin from the Renaissance is inauthentic (no matter how beautifully Ciceronian it might be), as is Latin written by someone today, by any teacher who is writing Latin to use in the classroom, writing Latin to use in a textbook, etc.
It also means that any Latin produced by students is inauthentic, and I think this is what bothers me the most. By declaring only Latin created by ancient Roman authors to be authentic, and all other Latin to be inauthentic, these folks have condemned our students to having only one possible goal in their Latin lives: to read Roman texts. Anything Latin they write, any Latin they speak in class, any Latin they hear their teacher or other students speaking, is all under a cloud of inauthenticity.
The cult of authenticity also pulls the rug out from under the real virtue of studying Latin, even though it is a dead language. By studying Latin, you gain access to hundreds of years worth of written thought from a wide variety of European countries, a range of countries whose vernacular languages you could never hope to master. Those writers were not native speakers of Latin, but they were REAL users of Latin, and there is nothing inauthentic about what they did - it is fully a part of the history of the Latin language.
If I were to use only "authentic" Latin versions of the fables, this would mean only the poems of Phaedrus and perhaps Avianus (although I am not sure where the mysterious poet Avianus falls on the "authenticity" meter). What a loss that would be! One of the many reasons that prompted me to work on Barlow's Aesop instead of doing a student edition of Phaedrus was precisely the opportunity to include really wonderful fables which are not attested in the ancient Latin corpus at all, but which are vital to the Aesopic tradition at large - such as the story of the tortoise and the hare, the goose that laid the golden eggs, the dog in the manager and so on. What a shame it would be to discard those stories, in the quest for a ghostly authenticity! :-)
Comment
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Comment by Laura Gibbs on December 30, 2008 at 9:36am -
Ah, Yiannis, I agree with you absolutely! I love the idea of learning a language as a quest for unknown words ... plus the way you can bring life to a word with etymology. Sometimes there are the most amazing surprises there! As a Greek speaker, you have such a special relationship to the whole tradition of the Greek language. As English speakers, we are the inheritors of a huge hodge-podge of words taken from so many different languages!
The same prejudice against medieval authors is true among classicists who study Greek, too, unfortunately - for example, one of the most marvelous collections of Greek fables is attributed to "Syntipas" (a.k.a Michael Andreopoulos, a Byzantine scholar of the eleventh century) - but because he is not a classical Greek author, his wonderful Greek fables do not get the same attention as the classical collections in Greek prose or the poems of Babrius. I don't have much time to work on the Greek Aesop these days (oh I wish I had more time), but you can see the fables of Syntipas here - have you ever read them? I think they are delightful!
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Comment by Yiannis on December 29, 2008 at 7:20pm -
Let the "authenticators" delude themselves! Learning Latin, or any other language
for that matter, should be (IMHO) the relentless quest after unknown words.
In order to accelerate this accumulation, each individual must find entertaining ways
of doing it. A good grounding of etymology and simultaneous learning of many
languages BRINGS LIFE TO THE WORDS! (sorry, being greek, I had an unfair head start!)
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