ARTS, HUMANITIES & SOCIAL SCIENCES Living Latin by Dr Charlie Kerrigan, Research Fellow in the Department of Classics L atin is many different things. You might know it as the language spoken by the emperors and poets of ancient Rome, or for the role it went on to play in religion, education, and European literature. It’s been a proud and important language for many centuries, and it remains part of daily life - in the languages we speak, in the churches and monuments that line our streets, even in the tattoos we brandish – semper fidelis [always faithful], ad astra per aspera [through adversity to the stars] and amor vincit omnia [love conquers all]. Because of the way it has been deployed and taught through the ages, we tend to associate Latin with powerful men and institutions, and it has been used to divide and conquer, imposed on people and cultures as something ‘good for them’ in educational and colonial situations that we’re learning to reject more and more these days. But it’s also been a well- spring for better kinds of education, taken up by generations of teachers to encourage students into their own journeys of self-discovery. Latin has a bit of mystery to it, which makes it a great source of material for writers, screen-writers, and video- game designers – from comedies ( Life of Brian ) to thrillers ( The Da Vinci Code ) to horror ( The Sixth Sense, The Exorcism of Emily Rose ). And, of course, historically Latin isn’t just the language of Caesar and the church – it’s the language in which ordinary people lived their lives for many centuries. It’s in the spirit of creative self-discovery and returning Latin to its roots in ordinary speech, that our team in the Department of Classics has launched the Living Latin project, which seeks to take the best of a long tradition of learning and scholarship and put it at the service of a radical educational practice. Evidence for ordinary, spoken Latin does exist across Europe, and we’ve been integrating it into a range of elementary modules which bring the language to newer and more diverse audiences: not just undergraduates and postgraduates in the Department (who can begin Latin from scratch) but adults learners in our Wednesday-evening extramural course, students from across campus (who can now take the elective module Latin: One Language, Many Cultures to supplement their degrees), as well as secondary-school audiences, through occasional lectures on and off campus. We begin with the diversity of living language (think of the richness of the English spoken in Ireland, for example) and we learn how this same diversity existed all over the Latin- speaking world in the same way that it lives on in the modern romance languages. The classics still feature prominently, but are now firmly contextualized within popular and historical forms of the language. Students can supplement their learning with the suite of twelve lessons offered in the online language-app tabella ; they can explore our fortnightly blog Confabulations for useful context, and they can read a series of international responses to Latin literature in the first volume of Line of Enquiry. I’ll give the last word to Marcus Caecilius, whom students encounter in their modules: bene rem geras et valeas, dormias sine qura (Prosperity and good health to you, may you sleep without a care). Listen to Tabella Read more.
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