Latin Period in Language Studying

Outline:

• Latin period
• Vernaculars
• The description of English
• The Port Royal Grammar

Key words: universal, vernaculars, massive codification, correctness, sets of rules, extremity, grammar.

1. Latin period came into existence with the strengthening of the Roman Empire. Thanks to it Latin became the medium of educated discourse and communication throughout Europe by the end of the first millennium. Largely as a result of this, the emphasis in language study was for a long while almost exclusively concerned with the description of the Latin language in the context of language teaching. The massive codification of Latin grammar by Varro and the subsequent grammars of Aelius Donatus (fourth century) and Priscian (sixth century) are the outstanding examples of this approach. Donatus grammar was used right into the Middle Ages. It was a popular grammar, and was the first to be printed using wooden type, and there was a shorter edition of it for children.

Latin period brought about very few innovations. Language theories and methods of description during this period were all borrowed from Greece. Throughout all the period a high standard of correctness in learning was maintained, especially in pronunciation. All teaching was based on stories describing the history of the Roman Empire. The stories were taken from the books of the best authors. Students had to learn the texts about Rome and speak the language of the best authors. The Benedictine Rule, for example, heavily punished the mistakes of children in Latin class, and historians write that there was even a devil, Tutivillius, especially deputed to collect the fragments of speech which dropped from daugling, leaping, dragging, mumbling kids.

By the Middle Ages when it was clear that Latin was no longer a native language for the majority of the countries, which belonged to the Roman empire or the Roman world, the grammar books became less sets of facts and more sets of rules, and the concept of correctness became even more dominant. The definition of grammar at that time was “the art of speaking and writing well”. Language was thought as something which was contained in the books by the best authors. Everyone had to be as good at Latin as the best authors. Grammar was considered to be the key to good Latin. Latin like Greek had to be presented as far as possible from decadence. All change was considered for the worse.

The effect of these attitudes to language on later thought was considerable. The teaching of Latin grammar and the study of Latin literature were perhaps the two most important aspects in the history of language study for promoting the development of misleading principles of analysis in traditional grammars. Grammar to many was the basis of all arts and all education (as the phrase “grammar school” reflects the term latinskole. In Danish being an even more interesting formation). The sixteenth century provided the peak period of prestige for Latin, and other languages suffered accordingly. The presentation of the Classical tongue was felt to be the main task of the literate.

2. The vernaculars were thus clearly inferior. Spanish and French were seen simply as examples of much decayed languages. The favourite adjectives for English in the sixteenth century were such as “base”, “barbarous”, “rude”, “gross”, “vile” and “ineloquent”. Languages, it was felt, were competed by commoners and preserved by the educated. Dictionaries, moreover, were only to define the words used by the best authors. It is not difficult to see the long term effects of attitudes such as these. To study language became to mean to study the texts of the best authors. Only they used it correctly. All the others were always in different ways corrupting it.

Grammars came to be considered as preserving a language’s purity. Their role was to tell people authoritatively how to speak and write. The Latin grammars were to be used as models for the description of all new languages. Only the best authors, the literary giants, were to be studied as examples of what a language was like. With the literary giants, by the way were numbered two Belarusian authors, Gousovsky and Sorbevsky.

3. The description of English. When English grammars came to be written, especially in the eighteens century, the authors, steeped in these Latinate and literary traditions, regularly produced rules of “correct” usage (“normative” rules, as they are sometimes called) which bore little relation to the facts of everyday speech, and rules derived from Latin into which the features of English structure were forced (such as the use of a case system for nouns). D. Crystal states that Dryden seems to have introduced into English the “rule” about not putting prepositions at the end of sentence, taking his idea from the grammatical situation that existed in Latin; and his influence was so great that it has appeared in most grammar books since – though it is doubtful whether these has ever been a time in English when prepositions were so restricted in their placement in a sentence.

Similar standards of correctness were imposed upon other languages too, sometimes being formalized in a more extreme way, as in the establishment by Cardinal Richelieu of an Academie in 1635 to preserve the purity of French. The attempt failed, as it was bound to do: the language continued to change with the years; and in France, as in England, the prescriptions of the grammarians simply became more and more removed from the majority usage, i.e. from the reality of the times. Due to this removal Latin itself finally became dead.

In a way, much of the concern over language teaching, literary standards, speculation about the origin of language, and so on, was superficial, though influential. There was, however, throughout this whole period a more serious movement of philosophical though which stemmed from early Greek speculation, and which was later to interpret most of these ideas in its own terms. It is important to realize that almost all of the discussion about language which went on in the early Greek period was continued with a more general, philosophical purpose in mind.

4. The Port Royal Grammar. Contemporary ideas about the nature of linguistic universals have several forerunners. The so-called Post Royal Grammar (1660) is one of them. It is widely recognized as the most influential treatise of the Latin Period. It was published anonymously, yet the author ship of the grammar has been ascribed to Claude Lacelot (1615-1695) and Antoine Arnould (1612-1694). It was written in French. Its subtitle, referring to that which is common to all languages and their principal differences provide a neat summery of the treatise. The authors aimed to establish principles which are common for all languages and explain the reasons of differences between languages. Theoretical basis of the treatise was the teaching of becartes (Cartesian philosophy). It claims that there is a relation between grammar and logic. If language is based on thinking then its categories are nothing but realizations of categories of thought. That’s why to describe language from the grammatical perspective we must lay emphasis on logic. And it it’s true that humans have the same logic then it’s equally true that grammar is universal.

There is certainly some correlation between logic and grammatical categories. But this doesn’t mean that all logical categories must be straight forwardly reflected in language, e.g. notion should correlate to the world meaning, statement or argument to various sentence types and that language phenomena cannot go beyond rules of logic.

In every language there are words which don’t reflect logical notions, but refer to feelings, wills, motives, etc. In any language there one member sentences, interrogative and exclamatory expressions, that contradict logic.

The Port Royal Grammar was a great success as rational principles come up in many grammatical books of the nineteenth century (Esperanto).

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16