I wish I could remember anything about my Latin teacher. Not
because I’m interested in him as a person, but because I’m interested in how he
managed to make this dead, irrelevant language important to an eight-year-old.
I think it wasn’t actually about Latin as
such. More likely, he inculcated an
interest in ordered structures, which grew and has persisted ever since. The notion that a chunk of language could be
broken down into verbs, nouns and such, then rebuilt into phrases, clauses,
sentences and such – all according to a set of rules (or at least conventions)
that could be codified and obeyed – that must have been deeply comforting to
that insecure ungrounded infant I was.
Of course, that was all drummed out of me when I moved on to the grammar
school. (We can’t have them teaching grammar, can we?)
I didn't start to learn Latin until I was 11, but I loved it too. I think it was the logic, the order; just as you say. I only ever obeyed rules that made sense, but Latin did. Until I moved on to A level, but that's another story and a much harder one to follow.
ReplyDelete