Ning Diary: Jan. 6 - paradigms

[Laura Gibbs]

One of the regularly recurring discussions at the LatinTeach listserve is about having students memorizing paradigms, chant them in class, write them out, etc. This seems to be a kind of Shibboleth among the teachers of Latin - and I definitely find myself most at home with the teachers who do not use paradigms but who instead teach endings through use in context. One of the posts that most intrigued me was this one:

In my opinion (just my opinion): the best thing to do is to put down the charts. If you want them to learn the language (not about the language), give them the language, even very simple examples of it. That is, chant, use, act out short but real sentences that use the endings. One things I've become convinced of the more I learn myself: time spent trying to learn a new construction is almost always time wasted. Because the things you really need to learn you will learn when you see them over and over again in real text. At this point, sure, I could fill out a declension table, but that would actually be *harder* than just reading some Latin which uses the endings. If you aren't seeing things frequently in real (albeit level appropriate) text, why do you want to learn about them? Real (even easy) Latin has a unique power to motivate and inspire and cement understanding.

I am in total agreement with these sentiments. Just as an experiment, I decided to test it out by writing a declension table - I've been doing lots of Latin, very intensively, for the past few months, so I thought I would see what happened when I tried to write out a chart.

IT MADE MY HEAD HURT. Really - it was fascinating and weird and creepy all at the same time. Definitely an example of Freud's unheimlich! It was like pulling apart the limbs of a living animal or plucking the petals off a flower, something alive and dead at the same time. It felt AWFUL. Of course I could do it - but I got zero pleasure from it. Just the opposite: it felt wrong.

I had not expected such a strong reaction, actually - so this was a very interesting little experiment to do. Then, just to continue the experiment, I tried it with Polish (even more cases than Latin, much more complex morphology)... and I couldn't carry on with it, because I was just laughing too hard. It was so completely weird putting the endings in their little boxes when the endings really just want to go on words, and the words want to go in phrases!

I've always known that the formal ways in which grammar has been codified are often completely alien to speakers of the language ... but forcing myself to write out the paradigms was a great little thought experiment. Very illuminating.

Just to prove that I am not averse to REAL analysis - I got a total thrill from doing a sound chart of the vowels and diphthongs in Latin over the summer. That was a chart that really meant something, a way to really get inside the vowels and the diphthongs - and the semivowels, too! So when a chart is illuminating, give me a chart - a chart is worth a thousand words. But a chart needs to help reveal underlying structures if it is going to be useful... and a declension chart does not do that at all. So I'll take sentences instead of a chart, please - sentences work for me!

This also brings back fond memories of Sanskrit class, where we learned mantras instead of charts - like the mantra about "Ramo rajamanih" - where you get all the cases of the noun in a beautiful verse form, full of meaning, in addition to being full of all the endings you need to know for a declension. Gotta love those Sanskrit grammarians... :-)

rAmo rAjamaNiH sadA vijayate rAmaM rameshaM bhaje
rAmeNAbhihato nishAcharachamoo ramAya tasmai namaH |
rAmAnnAsti parataraM rAmasya dAsosmyahaM
rAme chittalayaH sadA bhavatu me bho rAma mAmuddhara ||