Latter-day Latin Lamentations

There I stood this week at the grave of Erasmus of Rotterdam in the Basel Münster at a loss to read the inscription in the lingua franca of Europe. Albeit the lingua franca of an earlier Europe, when a common written language prevailed - Latin. That was the world of this Dutch Renaissance humanist.

Coming from Africa I never saw the advantages of Latin as a subject. Moving from Jozi barely a century old to Germany’s oldest Roman town, a mere 2,000 years old , I was soon confronted by Latin.

In our area some secondary schools offer the option of pupils starting with Latin as their first foreign language when they, aged barely ten, start Gymnasium, the most academic of the three-tier secondary schools. Because numbers are low a lot of marketing goes into attracting pupils.My tri-lingual daughter was seen as a natural candidate.

„Latin is a dead language,“ I proclaimed loud enough for all to hear. Whereas the German intelligensia, in other words the professors, the architects, the doctors and lawyers were cajouling their reluctant offsprings to start with Latin, my kids started with French. My then 9-year old daughter duly reported my philistine views to the primary school headmistress, married to a top notch specialist.

„Mrs Fischer said Latin is not a dead language,“ she told me over lunch. „Oh and who speaks Latin?“ I retorted. „The Romans,“ came her quick answer. „And do you see any around here?“ I asked waving my arm around what used to be the Roman Zoo where they kept their wild animals, but where we now live, before readily supplying the answer, „No, we only have Roman ruins and dead Romans.“

So my children started with French – the only language they did not know. I scoffed at people who started off with Latin, as often in my experience teaching students, they were later in life very poor in speaking English. In my daughter’s class there were even pupils who started off with French and then took Latin, finishing school without any English at all, and this in this day and age.

I myself have learnt French and Portuguese without feeling a need for Latin and have dabbled in Spanish. But the German education system always catches up with us boorish halfwits from Africa.

And they eventually got my daughter. Any student studying for a Bachelor degree in either German or English in this country is obliged to have studied Latin. I always thought both are not classified as Roman languages. But my now student daughter explains, “Some Middle High German texts are only in Latin and the professors need to translate from those original texts.” For the three idiots who want to spend their lives in dark cellars translating those texts, it may be fine, but why punish everyone? And more effort seem to go into acquiring Latin, than Middle High German.

Studying German as a sub-major at Wits University all those many years ago, I managed in two short years to read Middle High German texts like the Nibelungenlied, read Faust One and Two, read Schiller and Goethe and novels from the Enlightenment to Expressionism. We read modern authors (well in 1979 they were modern) like Peter Handke, Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll. Now doing four hours of Latin a week, my student daughter seems to lack the vast knowledge of German literature, such as we acquired all those many years ago in southern Africa.

The same applies to English. I have now battled for a decade with incompetent English school teachers who marks what is right as wrong and often have absolutely no grasp of, or feel for the English language. It is rather different to Latin. They were most probably struggling with Latin, when they could have explored the vast literatures of the English language.

That probably explains why a professor of English here in Trier would in his introduction to World English literature tell students that Nadine Gordimer is a writer from the southern hemisphere (right), specifically from the New Zealand, Australia region (wrong). Did my learned friend ever open ONE of her books?

Our other South African Nobel Literature Prize winner, JM Coetzee, the only Commonwealth author ever to win the Booker Prize twice, no-one teaching English in Trier, ever seem to have heard of. And yes, Professor Doctor English, he actually lives in Adelaide in Australia these days.

PS As an afterthought, could anyone translate the Erasmus inscription for me.