Poe ruins everything

[epershand]

This morning in the shower I was wondering about the history of Latin scholarship. Presumably folks were running around ancient Rome using the ablative because it felt right and being innovative and playful with it for the heck of it. That's certainly the vibe I get from, say, Catullus or Ovid.

What, then, was the point when people decided it all needed to be codified into ridiculously elaborate rules to memorize, with distinctions, say, between the ablative of means, ablative of manner, dative of agent, etc? Was it during the middle ages when they were coming up with equally elaborate terminology for any metaphysical doubt one might possibly have? Or was it some folks in the Renaissance who looked back at all the Latin written during the middle ages and blushed at how embarrassingly straightforward it all was? (Not that Renaissance Latin is any less silly, grammatically speaking, but they at least *try*. Sort of.)

Which would be an interesting thing to research, I think. Except what actually happened then was that thinking about silly Latin from the middle ages totally diverted me and put the following mash-up poem in my head:

Bibat ille, bibat illa, bibat servus et ancilla
With the rhyming and the chiming of the
Bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells!

Comments

[via_ostiense]

Which medieval writers are you thinking of? Heloise is one of the most elegant stylists of any age, imo, and Abelard's not bad, either.

There are grammar commentaries as early as Caesar (De Analogia) and certainly by the 2nd century (Noctes Atticae). I have fuzzy memories of reading authors from the Republic or Empire writing about the ablative absolute, but those notes are in storage somewhere. :/

[epershand]

The wrong medieval writers, clearly! I can't remember who it was, because it was ages ago, but the Latin read like it was someone obviously translating from a more modern romance language and it made me sad. I'll have to check out Heloise, clearly!

And I'll have to seek both of those out. I didn't get especially far into my Latin education (two years in undergrad) and as a result have mostly just read poetry.

[via_ostiense]

There are medieval writers whose prose shows how we got from Latin to Romance languages, in that their grasp on cases is fuzzy and shows traces of what will become modern constructions, but Heloise, oh, Heloise is elegant, witty, and passionate, and her writing captures all the eloquent brevity possible in Latin (unico suo post Christum unica sua in Christo).

[eccentric_hat]

It could have happened whenever outsiders started learning Latin, couldn't it? Catullus and Ovid may have used the ablative because it felt right, but that wouldn't be good enough for a speaker of some vernacular who wanted to write like Catullus and Ovid, or just be able to read people like them.

Is the "bibat ille" line from Carmina Burana? I know I've come across it before, but Googling it turns up a bunch of unhelpful results.

[epershand]

That's my thought, but which SET of people moving from a vernacular? via_ostiense above says that there's at least some grammatical commentary from much earlier on, so I'll have to check those out.

It's from a drinking song. You've come across it before because Dani and I used to shout bits of it at each other, and the full text was in her .plan for ages.

[eccentric_hat]

How old a drinking song? It sounds kinda like a spoof of the Dies Irae, but I might just think that because my go-to Latin reference is stuff I've sung. (I can't remember anything I used to know about this--all I can really remember of "stuff that was always on Dani's .plan" is that "Lo! Idou! Ecce! Hark!" line.)

[ellen_fremedon]

It is from the Carmina Burana, and at least that part of it is also a spoof of the Dies Irae. (I've always wanted to hear a setting of the Carmina that sang it that way.)

[eccentric_hat]

Thank you! I'm glad to know I'm not just pulling an "all Latin poetry sounds the same."

[via_ostiense]

Or when teaching schoolchildren how to read and write with correct grammar. I can just imagine the paedogogus shouting, "Si ablativo comparationis uti vis, ne verbo 'quam' utere!"

[eccentric_hat]

...I wonder if they came up with rubbish explanations for the schoolchildren like we do? (I always get irrationally annoyed when I hear English teachers talking about "linking verbs" and "action verbs," where the former means "to be" and the latter means "all the other verbs in existence.")

[via_ostiense]

I wouldn't be surprised. Speaking of linking verbs, I was never able to distinguish between them and action verbs in English and found it all more confusing than helpful. That, actually, is a fair description of all the poorly taught English classes I had before high school. -.-

[tei]

Wouldn't they have recognized their own usage of language through learning and teaching Greek? Since an educated Roman was expected to know Greek, and I really can't imagine a system of teaching Greek that doesn't involve declension charts and verb paradigms. (If one exists, can it be in my brain now, please?) And it's fairly easy to link grammatical features in Latin and Greek, so my guess is that it was codified pretty early, even if not in quite the same way that we codify it.

But then again I could be full of shit, since I don't actually know anything on the subject. I can recite "In Taberna" up to the part with the list of all the people who bibit, though.

[epershand]

Aha, your comment just put into focus for me what was unclear in the original post. I wasn't claiming that the Romans didn't have a formal system for analyzing their own grammar as well as systems for outsiders to learn it, presumably involving a lot of memorization. But there's a fundamental shift between the ways that people analyze a living language and the way they analyze a dead one--it stops being about "how are people using the language now" and becomes "how were people using the language then" and a lot of the teaching pedagogy for Latin feels like it is significantly better suited for learning a dead one.

I can imagine a parent explaining to their child the difference between the kinds of time words that get the ablative and the kinds of time words that get the accusative, etc. I can't imagine them demanding that their children learn whether a particular ablative is an ablative of origin or an ablative of accordance. They were metaphorically similar and you don't need to distinguish between them until there are no native speakers left and you need to compile a fetishistic listing of every way the language was used and force people to memorize it.

I feel like there's an interesting story in there, and that's what I want to poke at. So far this bibliography looks like it'll be a good place to start.

[via_ostiense]

I can't imagine them demanding that their children learn whether a particular ablative is an ablative of origin or an ablative of accordance.

The difference between learning a language and learning to translate. >.< Reggie Foster teaches Latin as a living language and he does go into the various forms of the ablative, but it's more in the vein of "So you told me that you came to class from the market--now, HOW WOULD YOU SAY THAT IN LATIN? DIC MIHI!"

[(Anonymous)]

I miss you! I miss being around people who wonder about the history of Latin scholarship while in the shower!

SK