Why (medieval) Latin?

Yesterday, my neighbour Angela fed me dinner as she sometimes does (I feed her tea late at night in turn), when her son, who is eleven, suddenly declared, "I want to learn Latin!"

Now, the little fellow is extremely clever and imaginative; he's not very fast, though, spends hours in books, is fascinated by history, and maths doesn't like him. Not having kids of my own, I can still remember what I felt like when I was a child, and I whole-heartedly sypathise with the little fellow.

I immediately said that I thought it a good idea for him to start with Latin; after that, English will be easy, and the more strenuous half of the English vocabulary is Latin, anyway.

But when I confessed that I had studied Medieval Latin at the university, they both staaaaaared.

Forget the obvious (most of the hard words in any modern European language are Latin, Latin grammar is the basis of any systematic language learning, all the Romance languages are basically Latin with an algorithm applied etc.), the study of Medieval Latin which I began out of pure interest ('The Name Of The Rose' was my favourite book during my last years in school) has taught me several things that are extremely relevant to modern life. For example:

• Palaeography. The study of old manuscripts and the scripts the're written in (aiming at deciphering and dating them) is part of that course; otherwise, it doesn't make much sense, because you could only ever read the already published texts, which would be regretful - reality doesn't stick to canon, after all. Learning to read and write those (writing was something I did voluntarily on my own, though) has given me an angle into all later typography that commands much more depth than just the modern, linear description. I know where serifs came from, and when the tip of the lower-case 't' started to grow through the roof. I have even read Younger Roman Cursive, which is the Worst Writing Style Evah Evah Evah! Nothing scares me now, not sorting typefaces for the Metropolitans, not DTP, not coolly discussing the merits of the typographer Eric Gill vs. his terrible terrible eccentricity...


• Originality. The middle ages didn't treasure it at all; instead, everything referred back to auctoritates and Great Men, the giants on whose shoulders the present age stands. Everybody copied everybody all the time, rewrote, paraphrased, quoted wrongly, invented quotes, ascribed works etc. This muddle did produce amazing culture; the culture which is the basis of our own. Today's trends like Open Source, GPL, Creative Commons, collaborative storytelling, Wikis, blogs and indeed fan-fiction and RPing takes a very medieval look at both originality and authorship. It is shared, passed around; each scribe is part of a larger whole. Huge industries that depend on copyright to make a living feel immensely threatened by our scriptorium type of approach. When they topple, or at least realign according to current realities, grassroots science and grassroots entertainment can florish.


• Scholastic style. It's the worst. It's the pits. It's latin so heavily codified, so lifeless, so frought with ever-repetitive formulae and dense abbreviations (if you take a scholastic manuscript), it is the dullest thing you'll ever read in your life. Unless you read computer programming code, or try to. Because that is computer code's seret natural great-great-grandfather. If Scholastic philosophers hadn't mistreated the Latin language as cruelly as they did to state their sometimes abstruse theses, language would never have reached the deathly boring precision and abstraction it needed to develop computer code. I went from getting my MA in that stuff (among other things) straight to designing and programming data bases. I learned to edit and write code without any formal education in that ever, thanks to the scholastics.

Yes, I know this is long. Yes, I know LJ cuts are love. Yes, I spam your f-list with it nevertheless. My f-list is spammed with fascinating things every day I wouldn't see if they were behind cuts. Posts with more than one picture, or TMI type personal ramblings should definitely employ cuts. This is neither.

What's in it for you? You can now: a) vehemently dispute what I said, or otherwise discuss is or b) quote a very remote favourite subject of your own and its immense relevancy to the real world.

Thank you!