Hot Latin

Standing in front of a huge slide picture of a Roman citizen, a Latin professor was putting his class through its paces. "Quid est?" said he, pointing to the Roman's eye. "Oculus," chirped the class. "Quid est?" continued the professor. "Pes," answered the class. Actually, the students knew all about pes and oculus already: they were Latin teachers of many years' standing. But last week at the University of Michigan, they did not mind starting from scratch, learning the latest teaching methods of a linguistics expert named Waldo Sweet.

At 41, bookish, spectacled Professor Sweet is considered something of a revolutionary: he thinks that elementary Latin teaching is all wrong, and he is doing his best to prove it. He preached his doctrine at Philadelphia's William Penn Charter School, finally won a professorship at Michigan. Last year the Carnegie Corporation decided to let him carry his crusade even further, gave him a grant for a special summer Latin workshop.

Quintilian Dixit . . . According to Sweet, today's Latin teachers are guilty of one of two errors. Error 1 is that they try to do as the Romans did, falling for some advice from old Quintilian (1st century) that "the children should begin by learning to decline nouns and conjugate verbs." By this method, pupils spend arduous hours memorizing rules and words, just as their predecessors did in Rome. The big trouble, says Sweet, is that the Roman youngsters already spoke Latin, while modern students do not.

Error 2 goes to the opposite extreme: it sidetracks grammar in favor of sight reading. But the reading is usually made too easy, e.g., texts religiously follow a single sentence structure (subject-object-verb), until students get the idea that they can identify all words by their positions. Actually, the Romans identified by endings. As far as meaning went, it made little difference to them whether a sentence read Canis puellam videt, Puellam cants videt, Canis videt puellam, Puellam videt canis, Videt canis puellam or Videt puellam canis. It all meant: "The dog sees the girl."

Juvenis Gerit . . . After 18 years of teaching Latin, Sweet now tries to avoid both these errors by a kind of modified Berlitz system. To give his pupils an idea of what Latin is all about, he starts out with a series of lessons on how languages differ. Soon, students get the idea that they must begin to think in Latin, that they can no longer rely on clues from their knowledge of English.

Sweet builds up vocabulary by using slides. The "Quid est?" routine is only the beginning. "Juvenis oculum gerit" Sweet will suddenly say. "Juvenis pedem gerit . . . Juvenis manum gerit." Gradually the class begins to realize that "gerit" means "has"--until Sweet leaps ahead again. "Juvenis vestum gerit . . . Juvenis gladium gerit . . . Juvenis bellum gerit." By that time, the class realizes that gerit" has a whole "area" of meanings, from "has" to "hold" to "wage" to "wear."

After three weeks, students begin to drill from tape recordings by themselves. In class, Sweet goes on with the slides, adding more case endings and turning to prepositions. "Puer ignem ramo facit," says Sweet, showing a boy making a fire with a branch. "Puer ignem cum fratre facit," he says, showing a boy and his brother lighting a fire. "Quis facit?" he asks. "Puer," says the class. "Quid puer facit?" "Ignem." "Quomodo facit?"

"Ramo." "Cum quo facit?" "Cum fratre." Just how far his method can be carried, Rebel Sweet himself does not know. But after years of crusading, he is sure of one thing: "I used to think that I wouldn't be able to find many people to talk Latin with. But I need not have worried. Everywhere I go, Latin is a hot subject."

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