Languages living and dead
Omniglot reports that Coptic, long thought dead anyway, is now taking its last gasps. Latin, of course, breathed its last a long time ago. One unfortunate side effect of this, of course, is that we tend to teach dead languages differently from living ones. While Assimil teaches Latin like a language for chatter, for example, 90% of what you find on Latin is linguistic embalming fluid, designed to preserve the corpse, not to re-animate it. If we want to sustain dying languages or learn dead ones, they need to be treated as vehicles for communicating living thoughts - thoughts of our own - rather than as tools for getting at the ideas of dead guys. So somebody call the Pimsleur guys while we've still got a few native speakers to record the lessons for Coptic. And when are we going to get Pimsleur Latin? That would be muy cool!
2 Comments:
Rosetta Stone has a Latin course, but I'm not sure how effective it is at teaching conversational Latin!
I attempted it without prior Latin experience, and found it quite confusing.
I have since gone through about 2/3rds of the excellent Wheelock text, but had to stop as Chinese began to take up more time - let's face it: Chinese is useful, Latin ... isn't really.
I completely agree that Pimsleur should put out a Latin course.
In theory, I suppose, if you stared at Rosetta Stone long enough you could start to intuit how declensions work, since Roman children did. But then, the Roman children also had negative feedback: If they said, "Mater video" there'd be someone to say, "Matrem video." With Rosetta Stone, you have to hear the mistake you're making and guess the nature of the mistake.
If you're serious about getting a foundation in Latin, either Wheelock or the Oxford Latin Course (Balme and Morwood) are good starting points. I'm dubious about Rosetta Stone for the purpose. I'd love to see a Pimsleur Latin.
Good luck with the Chinese. I'm not sure whether it's more or less exotic than Latin these days, but there are, as you say, a lot more practical applications - over a billion more, in fact.
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