Why is French taught in schools, and not Latin?

Akabula - not struggling at all, was hoping for some more informed posts.

LFC said - "It’s strange that all children are equally able to learn a language and adults are not". My post was merely to point out that this is b ollocks. Hth.

More likely to be taught Latin Dancing in a Transgender neutral way these days.

There was currently a new advert for the Open Uni. What is the big selling point for it you ask?
The quality of the education?
The Job opportunies?

No it is APPARENTLY the freedom it allows for people to have time off to go through Transgender reassignment procedures.

I'm not kidding, saw it earlier.

Ita Vero

I know her, Irish/Italian singer.

Bay

Bay Jay US

Latin is a masochistic language though? I mean it's really hard, lot harder than modern Italian. Lots of wierd cases that are alien to English speakers that have thankfully been dropped by the Romance languages.. I'd far rather learn Italian or Spanish, at least they are useful.

You put your own interpretation on LFCs post BB.
Read it again and hopefully you'll twig. HTH
PS can you translate my effort at Latin?

Thread hi-jacked by the loons. Anyone want to start a thread on the original subject where intelligent debate and argument might be continued.

The lords of the internet will be shaking their heads that finally, that last bastion of intelligent reasoned cyber-debate, "Betfair Chit Chat", has fallen into the mire, and people are talking crap

there is no point reading words ....

if you don’t understand words

I know Billy Bunter studied it, but it's not as necessary now in Western countries.

From the point of view purely of vocabulary, you need Latin (and Ancient Greek) to understand your own language.

You could be confronted with the most obscure, jargon-filled text on any subject going, but as long as you have a grasp of the classical languages, you never feel completely out of your depth. Whether it's physics or philosophy, medicine or religion, there'll always be a degree of familiarity with the jargon, and a basic understanding of what's going on. And that gives you the confidence to investigate further.

But without that classical education, you'll just spend your life dismissing so much stuff as "too complicated" or "beyond my pay-grade" or, worst of all, "something to leave to the experts - I'll take their word for it".

As well as that, all the other Indo-European languages, outside of French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, are virtually impossible for a native English speaker to grasp, unless you've been taught the grammatical structures of the classical ones. Just try learning Russian or Hindi without a grounding in Latin and Ancient Greek.

And as lfc1971 points out, you can only think in words and sentences. If you lack an understanding of grammar (and if English is your only language, you will do), then structured thinking is going to be a very hit-and-miss affair. You'll just have feelings instead.

Amo
Amas
Amat
Amamus
Amatis
Amant

Surprised that came straight to my head after so many years....

The only other thing that comes to mind is....

Discipulos osculo puella qui in ludum advenit (may not all be spelt correctly)!

Domina Faye, praestantem euge.

On holiday in Malta years ago, they were having a bingo session around the hotel pool area.
The bingo caller mispronounced a word, and everybody laughed.
The bingo caller took the hump, and snapped back, ''I can speak five languages how many can you speak.''

And a voice in the audience shouted - ''just the one, and it's the only bugger that matters.''

Hey, Dr. Did you go down "The Gut", in Valetta?

I know Valetta a bit Kenny but I don't know the Gut.

Actually I was on the Ryanair site yesterday. Fly out to Malta 2 Oct £21.61, come back  9 Oct £26.71

That's less than £50 return from Birmingham..

It is called Strait Street and leads downhill to the harbour for about 350 yards. Quite an experience (or it was in '74) Unbeknown to us the  red light area.

here it is, well past its heyday

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEdy03NG20k

We've often walked down to the ferry point to cross over to Sliema, we must have gone a different way.

I think the Grand harbour is on the other side of Valetta though.

So that explains it.

Did you do any business while you were there by the way Kenny?

ha ha, no, the only time i did business was when me and the 2 pals went to a trotting donkey race and i backed the fav.

Was tempted though in all honesty. The Maltese girls were stunning.

We stayed in Sliema, and a girl at the hotel was celebrating her 21st. One of her friends was Dom Mintoff's neice who I got very friendly with if you know what I mean.

Shocking behaviour kenny, no wonder the Brits have got a bad name abroad.

It gets even worse,Dr. some years earlier, a Douglas constable threatened to put my pals and I on the first boat back to Liverpool the following day if we didn't stop singing so loudly.

Alioqui grata loqui tecum. Est scrinia, forma studere.

I was talking to a Maltese over there about five years ago who said he'd married an English woman and had lived in London for many years.
Now they've moved to live in Malta since England became a tip.
He said what you need in Britain is a strong government, who aren't afraid to upset minorities for the good of the majority. 

I thought yes and Malta isn't doing so well these days since they joined the Euro. They're pricing themselves out of the tourist market with many hotels closed down.
They've also got a problem with immigrants just like the rest of the EU shower.

I was looking at the new block of apartments where he lived and he invited in to look.
They lived on the bottom floor, completely shaded from the sun.
It was a boiling hot day and as soon as I entered his place I went cold.

I though what a place.
Live in a warm country and have to put the heating on in the summer, while outside it's hot enough to fry an egg on the pavement.

Buyers beware.

caveat emptor indeed, won't affect me, sadly destined to be hatched , matched and despatched in Bradford.

Blackbarn is right, you can learn a language as an adult. Although I spent three years at school conjugating French verbs and declining Latin nouns and adjectives, I understood very little of either language.
Eventually, I went to work in France and learnt the language as a child does, by listening and repeating phrases without academic consideration of sentence structure. This is by far the best way to do it.
Screaming also highlighted a useful function of having some knowledge of Latin and Greek as it helps understand English vocabulary especially scientific terms.

Wasn't there a bloke who taught celebrities and movie stars a quick way to learn a language like that Foinavon, they reckoned he had them speaking a foreign language in no time.

He said because the method he used was unorthodox and teachers weren't interested in getting people to speak a language without learning it properly, the technique was likely to die with him.

Seems to me you were learning a language there the same way you did in school foinavon

What was the difference again?

Now the question is how did you learn French just by being in France

Maybe you knew the words , many of them , had been taught them in school

Having said that I can read French , it’s much easier to read but you didn’t know you could speak French as well until you go there and live there

I think you knew French before you went , but didn’t know you knew it

French is an easy language to learn but it's completely pointless.

I thought Spanish was easier

Not entirely pointless my nephew speaks it and he’s married to a Spanish girl : )

he was taught Spanish at his school I think , and worked in Spain
So again that seems to be the classic and easiest way to learn

I think I’ve solved it !

Maybe it’s the possibility of making friends , and making money that makes it easier to learn a language

Look at it this way.

Our parents teach us to speak, and they had no training in teaching. Yet a teacher wouldn't get us speaking as quickly as our parents did.
Why is this?

Possibly because our parents weren't concerned with grammar or stuff like that, they only wanted to get us communicating as fast as possible. They left the English lessons to the schools we went to.
But what a start that gave us.

A lot of posts there lfc.

Let me explain. The little French I learned at school was useless, I visited France a couple of times before I went there to live and couldn't understand a word anyone said. If I painstakingly constructed a question, I couldn't understand the reply. Learning to conjugate a verb is not how people speak, you knew nothing about grammar when you learnt English, you listened, absorbed, then after a while you started to speak. You used the constructions, phrases and dialects of those around you. It was only after you could communicate effectively that you learned anything about nouns verbs or tenses at school.

Living in an environment where I only heard French spoken I soon picked it up and spoke grammatically correct sentences by repeating what I had heard. It works and it works well. You notice that foreigners who come here to work in our shops offices and businesses soon pick up the language whereas some who stay in their own communities don't, even after decades. You need the exposure and the motivation to learn.

Yes Foinavon I agree completely.

yes I understand that foinavon , the doc , and there is of course some truth in it

But quite honestly I think my theory is closer to the truth : )

I will tell you why , I think the motivation is largely subconscious

What people are doing outside school is trying to make friends , get a job , make money
have sex ( not in your case foin you were married )

But these are subconscious but very powerful forces
And that’s why the brain makes sure you learn to speak

Thanks Dr, our previous posts crossed.
French is superfluous to most people but France is our nearest neighbour and if when you go there you can communicate in French you will have a better experience. I found the language not only useful in France but in Spain and Italy too where it is readily understood by many people.

When you are in a foreign country then your subconscious brain starts to register

It is something that is almost inevitable , it happens without you even knowing

The purpose of language is to communicate, lfc, which is where the motivation comes in. I wasn't married when I went to work in France by the way, it was a long time ago.

yes that’s what I mean , it is the motivation
That is the difference , it’s not about teaching methods at all really

It is simply an evolutionary drive , as a child that is to be feed and comforted whatever

When you are older it’s money and work and friendship and of course sex

That need to learn a new language to achieve these things is largely subconscious
But that is what drives you to learn so quickly

Survival in a way. The reason for writing on this thread was to show that it is possible to learn a language fluently as an adult, I know from personal experience that it is true.
I also know that English people who live in English enclaves, in Spain for example, have difficulty in picking up the language as they are mainly communicating in English and local traders learn to do the same, motivated by profit of course.

There's no Peter Pedantic saying things romantic
In Latin, Greek or Spic

Our French teacher, Mr Corfield, certainly knew how to get most of his class of 30 plus 11 year olds interested in the subject.

He turned many of the lessons ( sadly not all) into a sport.

French Cricket.

Rules.

Class divided into 2, left and right side of the classroom.

A book of French prose handed to all the pupils.

1st batsman of side A reads from the book, and for every word pronounced correctly, a run is scored.

If any the fielding side (B) thinks a word has been pronounced incorrectly, he can appeal, and if the appeal is successful, a wicket is down. If not, 5 runs added to the score.

Kept us enthralled for the whole lesson.

We were lucky enough to have a French exchange teacher when I was about 14. She was quite young (probably not even 25) and used to wear short floaty type dresses

She was the subject of many wild teenage fantasies and unlike today's snowflakes none of us would have felt traumatised or scarred for life!!

I'd only just turned 20 when I spent a year as an exchange teacher in a German school. It was a bit unnerving at first, having to assert your authority over a class of 18-year-old Abiturienten. I just had to keep reminding myself: 'Who won the bloody War anyway?'

I can't say it was a great help for making me more fluent in German, but that was on account of me being hard-of-hearing. It was no different from English really: one-on-one conversations, where I could lipread, were feasible, but sitting in the staffroom or the skittle alley or the pub, I had no idea what was going on. I still absorbed enough to come back to England speaking German way better than any other students in my university year though, because they had all spent their year as exchange students in German universities. Consequently they spent all their time with other English exchange students.

Luckily none of the teachers realized they were employing a half-deaf teacher, or I could have been sacked. The pupils soon cottoned on though, when they noticed I couldn't hear the bell for the end of lessons. It became a game to see how early they could get a lesson to end, by claiming the bell had rung and I hadn't heard it.

If you're going to learn a language might as well learn a useful one.

Short of time travel you're unlikely to have much success chatting up a girl in Latin on holiday

I mean the hot babe in "Plebs" is German speaking with a French accent. No latin there, and that's as authentic a historical program as you'll get!

Falco tinniculous....kestrel.......kes 1966
Charcharadon summat...great white shark...jaws 1975
Veni vidi vici.....just now...spaffed on chebs

That's the only Latin you need to know

But without that classical education, you'll just spend your life dismissing so much stuff as "too complicated" or "beyond my pay-grade" or, worst of all, "something to leave to the experts - I'll take their word for it".

Can you supply a few examples screaming?

But if you've had a classical education, how would you know what it's like for those that haven't?

Not sure where I'd struggle given I have the world at my fingertips.

Everyone can have the world at their fingertips, I often do when I've had 12 pints of lager and I'm crawling home

I'm above that sort of thing!

Dr Crippen: From working in a couple of offices back in the 1980s. I was translating patents and medical texts, and the staff who had modern language degrees, but no O levels in Latin or Greek from school, simply gave up. (In fact, they mostly got promoted to office managers, on the basis that you couldn't go promoting people who actually had enough knowledge to wade through 200 pages of organic chemistry or reams of LD50 tests on Wistar rats.)

Akabula: Here's the (poorly) translated abstract of a study done a few years ago on the effects of artificial sweeteners. I've chosen it, because it was what I happened to be reading before I came back to this thread:

Modified High-Density Lipoproteins by Artificial Sweetener, Aspartame, and Saccharin, Showed Loss of Anti-atherosclerotic Activity and Toxicity in Zebrafish

First Online: 21 August 2014

Abstract

Safety concerns have been raised regarding the association of chronic consumption of artificial sweeteners (ASs) with metabolic disorders, especially in the heart and brain. There has been no information on the in vivo physiological effects of AS consumption in lipoprotein metabolism. High-dosage treatment (final 25, 50, and 100 mM) with AS (aspartame, acesulfame K, and saccharin) to human high-density lipoprotein (HDL) induced loss of antioxidant ability along with elevated atherogenic effects. Aspartame-treated HDL3 (final 100 mM) almost all disappeared due to putative proteolytic degradation. Aspartame- and saccharin-treated HDL3 showed more enhanced cholesteryl ester transfer activity, while their antioxidant ability was disappeared. Microinjection of the modified HDL3 exacerbated the inflammatory death in zebrafish embryos in the presence of oxLDL. These results show that AS treatment impaired the beneficial functions of HDL, resulting in loss of antioxidant and anti-atherogenic activities. These results suggest that aspartame and saccharin could be toxic to the human circulation system as well as embryonic development via impairment of lipoprotein function.

The terms I've highlighted, because they're the sort which I would normally skip over:

lipoproteins: if you know that λῐ́πος is a noun meaning 'fat' in Ancient Greek, then you can guess that we're dealing with proteins which transport fat through the bloodstream here (as well as guessing that in another context liposuction involves sucking away fat).

in vivo: pure Latin, meaning a test carried out within a living thing (as opposed to 'in vitro' (literally 'in glass', i.e. in a test tube)).

anti-atherosclerotic:  σκληρός means 'hard' in Greek, so we immediately know we're dealing with something with an anti-hardening action; an atheroma happens to be a mass of diseased material in an artery, and also happens to be derived from the Greek, but I didn't know that. However, at least with a bit of Greek we know what sclerosis is, so we can look the rest of the term up and not just glaze over it, which is my whole point.

putative: putare means to think or to guess in Latin, so we know the authors are supposing that the effect in question is taking place, without necessarily being certain. This is important - this might be something you'd want to investigate further, but, to spot that, it helps to be sure what 'putative' means, rather than just gloss over the word.

proteolytic - difficult one this, but if you're familiar with processes such as electrolysis, where compounds are broken down using electrolytes, then you could guess that something's being broken down here, and, as it happens, it's Greek again -  λύσις, meaning something being loosened, but I didn't know that. After all that, proteolysis turns out to means proteins being broken up.

Maybe it makes no difference that I can just about decipher this text, thanks to Latin and Greek - after all, anyone who's seen the the effects on John McCririck of drinking too much  Diet Coke is going to avoid this stuff in any case. But it's nice to be able to understand precisely why it might be making you feel lousy.

And I would need to know this.
That aside I googled in vivo and got an explanation, I assume I can do the same for all highlighted terms.
If I saw something in Russian, or Chinese or Japanese I wouldn't have a clue so why is Latin so special?
As I said to the vast majority of people Latin is of no use.
If you have any examples to prove otherwise then please list. I'd suggest the one you showed is of little relevance to most of humanity.

An everyday example would be where something in a written document is scored out with Stet written above.
"What does that mean" the first time encountered. Getting the explanation one remembers and moves on. No need to spend years studying.

Judging by the volume of diet soft drinks which actually are drunk, I think it would be of use to most of humanity if they were able to look at a text like this, and get the gist without having to look up things in Google. And then there's the problem of having to memorize those terms for when you meet them again. It's a lot easier to do that if you understand what the various parts of the word mean in their original language.

But it's the initial business of having to look up things which appear utterly strange and foreign which puts people off. Familiarity with Latin and Greek helps overcome that.

"Why is Latin so special?" you ask. Because so much technical and legal jargon in English derives from it. It's not a question of whether that's a good or bad thing. It's just a fact, which unfortunately means the door's shut on most of the population these days.

Looking at a can of sugar free irn bru.
Few words I don't know the meaning of but could look up.
But so what? Unless we allow and accept the 'experts' to do their job we'd spend our whole lives analysing everything we encounter.

" World Cup "

Yes, but my point is that if you have a knowledge of Latin and Greek you don't necessarily have to slog through an analysis, or key every other word into Google, in order to understand subjects on which you're not an expert.

But knowing the meaning of a word is only the start surely.
You would then have to look up it affects the body etc if you wanted to go that far.
Like I say Latin is a dead language and only used as a form of shorthand nowadays.

Half the English language is derived from Latin, and it's the half which comprises nearly all the unfamiliar jargon used to impress and obfuscate.

There are many books , plays , poems and films to be enjoyed in French .
I have very little Latin so perhaps somebody could translate this for me?
"Extinctor draconis labrator Anubis"
I know it refers to St George killing a dragon but is it a play on words?

Anubis is an Egyptian god with a head of a jackal.

Extinctor draconis latrator Anubis (latrator rather than labrator) means 'The killer of the dragon, the snarling Anubis'.

The killer of the dragon is obviously St George, but what he has to do with the dog of the Egyptian underworld is beyond me.

The word play is simply that the first two words rhyme with the second two. Maybe it's just someone trying to sound clever. What's the context?

It comes from Proust and your translation fits the scene . Thank you Screaming .

I should have gone to Specsavers . I read latrator as labrator which is why I could not find a translation of the word .

FOEDUS UEFA gentes - quae est infernum, est?

The only connection I can think of between the two phrases ('killer of the dragon' and 'the snarler Anubis') is that latrator Anubis is mentioned by the poet Vergil in the Aeneid, and Vergil also composed another book of poetry, about rural life, called the Georgics. (The name George comes from the the Greek word pronounced Georgos, meaning a peasant, or someone who works the soil - 'ge', or Gaia.)

But a quick Google shows nobody else making this connection, so you have a character in Proust trying to show off how clever they are with a couplet no other character will understand, and it appears in a book whose readers don't get it either. But that's Proust for you.

By the way, about thirty years ago David Smalley, in his weekly round-up of events in the Southern betting rings in the Sporting Chronicle Handicap Book, mentioned a punter he'd spotted in the car park before racing who was working his way through Proust in the original French. That wasn't you, by any chance? Because by my calculations you'd just about be reaching the end by now.

No the reference makes perfect sense now . Proust is hard work but well worth the effort .
It only takes me 14 months to read the original these days .
The Sporting Chronicle Handicap Book was a wonderful publication . Those were the days!

rememberance of times past

I think it’s good that we have Latin because it’s taught in good schools

maybe the two things are related

They teach dance in some schools now , and drums

probably pole dancing I don’t know

Many they think Latin is elitist now ,

That’s only because bad schools don’t teach it , what does that tell you

How can we learn to understand our fellow human beings if some speak Latin and some do not

Get the ones who do to pretend they don't

I think it’s better to have Latin in schools even if most people have no use for it

or even remember a word

That’s the way of most things anyway and you  have only to look at the difference Latin makes to a school

We had to teach it because we had the British Empire

And English of course , Latin was too difficult for the natives

All these things are connected in some way I’m sure

Learning the basic Latin and Greek prefixes and suffixes is interesting and useful, and even some vocabulary, but there is a difference between knowing a vocabulary (i.e. recognising words) and an arcane sadistic heavily inflected grammar that isn't any use anywhere else. If you want a hard grammar that is at least usful, try German.

German grammar is really simplified and straightforward. It's the Slavic languages which mirror the numbers of cases and inflections of Latin.

I couldn't make head nor tail of my dad's language (Ukrainian) until I was lucky enough to pass the 11-plus, and went to a grammar school, where the first class on day one was Latin. Suddenly everything fell into place.

They did things the right way round back then: you learnt Latin first, and didn't tackle German or Spanish until the third form. That way the latter were really easy. Modern schools start with the modern languages, 'cos they're they're the only useful ones innit; everyone finds them too difficult without a knowledge of Latin grammar, and hardly anyone now leaves school with a working knowledge of any foreign language, ancient or modern.

Learning a harder language first that is useless makes it harder to learn an easier language that is useful so they can't learn them?
Makes absolutely no sense!

It's like saying people can't do the breast stroke because they didn't start with the butterfly.

Well, if I haven't convinced you of the usefulness of Latin by now, then there's no point trying any more.

But the reason Latin is the best choice for a first 'hard' language to learn is the sheer familiarity of the vocabulary and the pronunciation. No other language offers that to English speakers. You start with dominus, domine, dominum, and you think of 'dominate', 'dominion'; bellum, bellum, bellum gives you 'belligerent' and 'bellicose'; recite amo, amas, amat and you can see where 'amorous' came from.

If you start straight off with Polish or Russian, the whole thing looks so strange that just coming to grips with the pronunciation, for instance, is a massive hurdle. The thought of at the same time having to learn what the nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative and locative cases represent, in terms of these strange and baffling words, is enough for any sensible person to just give up. And that's just the nouns.

Believe me. Learning the parts of speech in the familiar surroundings of Latin is the only way for an English speaker to do it. I took a Russian language course as part of my degree, and both of the students who had no knowledge of Latin simply dropped out after a few weeks. They were just floundering.

I certainly learnt about tenses etc from Latin and English made more sense after.

I can't say I ever liked Latin, but it has been very useful.  My wife is particularly jealous of my knowledge in determining what many words, whose roots are in Latin, mean.