If you grew up in the last few generations, chances are you didn’t have much education in Latin or Ancient Greek. One of the long-standing arguments for phasing out English from the curriculum in English-speaking countries is that it must make room for Spanish, Mandarin, and other languages that are actually used on a large scale in the modern world. Today, as even such classes are under pressure to disappear, the defense of classical languages has an increasingly strong contrarian appeal. They may be “dead” but they live on, not only in the Romance languages, but also in the mighty hegemony known as English. In fact, it is natural to ask whether English speakers with no knowledge of Latin or Greek really understand their native language.
According to classical scholar David Butterfield, you can’t learn Latin without learning Greek at all. Understanding both these languages and their extant texts is not simply a lifelong task. It also fills the house, as evidenced by: A two-and-a-half hour video tour of Butterfield’s personal library above.. (The next two hours include a selection of specific books from Butterfield’s many shelves.) timothy kenney He has uploaded quite a few of these videos about avid bibliophile collections in the past, but describes this one as the largest he’s ever attempted, including the Loeb Classical Library Complete Works, the I Tatti Renaissance Library, the Pauley Wissois Encyclopedia, and more.
But Butterfield himself says he is still a young man by the standards of his profession and has much collecting to do. I’m still about 80% of the way through Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introductions collection. This series is something I’ve been gradually working on in my own way in recent years. Finding that the books there were “very illuminating on any subject or person,” he decided to “collect all the books that interested me, and it turned out to be more than I expected, because I’m interested in almost everything.” But for all of us… So, no matter how wide-ranging his interests may be, some of his interests are stronger than others, as one would expect from someone with the patience to collect a large collection of manuals for writing Greek and Latin prose and poetry (and often containing their scribbles) designed for schoolboys.
After spending several decades at Cambridge, Butterfield moved across the Atlantic from one of the oldest institutions of higher learning to one of the newest. He currently serves as dean and professor of Latin at Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia. The university will accept its first students in 2022. Its master’s degree program focuses on ancient, medieval, and modern literature and art, considered the foundations of Western civilization, and the university appears to have been designed to attract someone like Butterfield, who had already won awards at the library during or immediately after college. “I don’t think I’ll be able to relax until I’ve collected about 10,000 books,” he said. 2008 interview. Kenny’s house, shown in his video, currently has twice that amount. Thumos Clearly she hasn’t given up on him yet.
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Why learn Latin?: 5 videos that make a convincing case that a “dead language” is an “eternal language”
Based in Seoul, Colin Mbemust write and broadcastIt’s about cities, languages and cultures. he is the author of the newsletter books about cities books as well Home page (I won’t summarize Korea) and korean newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter. @Colinbemust.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
