Tales from Germany

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, t...