Dead_Languages._Why_Should_We_Learn_Them_

Dead languages. Why should we learn them' With this presentation I intend, from a practical point of view, to prove the importance of the study of the dead languages. The question that I want to make is Why is it important for the students to learn languages that are no longer in use, languages such as Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit or, for example, Old English' Many students, of secondary school, high school and even university, have had at least once in their lives this question: Why should I study a language that is no longer spoken, another foreign language, but one that I will never speak with anyone' And many of them have agreed that learning a language like this is useless, has completely no importance in their lives. Others, in change, admit that learning Latin or Ancient Greek is useful. There is a third category of people that, without being asked this question, have answered that a dead language is the perfect hobby, that knowing its vocabulary, how to analyze and translate it into the mother tongue is the most exciting thing. But before entering the matter of dead languages I should make clear some important points about the “life of the languages”. Nowadays, in the world there are about seven thousand spoken languages. This means that there are native speakers of each and every of those about seven thousand languages. But this number has not been so forever, because there were some languages that due to historical, political, social or religious reasons have disappeared. These are the dead and extinct languages. Normally the transition from a dead to an extinct one occurs when a language undergoes language death, also known as linguicide (the Latin term) or glottophagy( the Greek term) while is being replaced by another different one. Such is the example of the Native American languages that were replaced by English, French, Spanish and Portuguese as a result of colonization. Language extinction may also occur when a language evolves into a new language such as Old English evolved into Modern English; Old Scandinavian evolved into East Scandinavian and West Scandinavian linguistic groups; or Ancient Greek evolved into Modern Greek. The difference between extinct and dead languages is that while the extinct one is no longer spoken, the dead one remains in use for scientific, legal or ecclesiastic functions. These last ones are languages like Latin and Sanskrit, also considered sacred languages. There are also endangered languages, a topic open to debate lately, due to the economic and cultural globalization. David Graddol, in his article from the Science Journal English won’t Dominate as World Language, 2004, argues that by 2050 about 90% of the almost seven thousand spoken languages will become extinct, and the population of the world will speak English, Chinese or Spanish. But it is not all about linguistic danger, death and extinction. The phenomenon of the revival of dead languages is also known. Cornish, Hawaiian and Maux, among many other examples, are languages that have been revived, and even if they have not the same status as a modern language, lately they started being spoken more and more. After having made clear the status of different languages having in mind the classification of whether they are spoken or not, I want to concentrate my attention on the dead languages. We have seen that there are extinct languages that no longer interest anyone, that there are extinct languages that are given excessive importance either because they want to be revived, like Sanskrit in some villages in India where it is used for teaching in school, or because they want to be used in understanding later languages, also extinct, as it is the example of the Proto-Indo-European ancestral language, studied from the perspective of the internal reconstruction, that is, recover information about a language’s past from the features of that language, but from a later date. Focusing on the dead languages, on one hand, Latin is in Europe, undoubtedly, a fundamental one. This fact is due to the existence, in Antiquity, of the Roman Empire. It was spread almost all over Europe and its language, like its way of life and culture were imposed in the conquered territories. This is why nowadays there are important languages that descend directly from Latin, the most widely spoken of them being Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian and Catalan. The territories where these languages are spoken are very marked by the print that Latin and the Roman culture let on them. It is inevitable to get to understand the history and culture of France or Romania for example, without taking into account the Latin influence. On the other hand, another very important dead language that has influenced the course of knowledge is Ancient Greek. Philosophy and its understanding would have not been possible without knowing Ancient Greek. People wanted the knowledge to be as spread as possible, ant in Ancient times the printing press was not yet invented, so they had either to handwrite or to learn the language in order to be able to learn new things and deliver them to coming generations. The huge legacy that Ancient Greek let for the world, its Mythology, is priceless; the understanding of the world as we have it today would not be possible. So it is clear that languages are directly related to culture, and the fact that if a culture has an influence in another one, its language will also influence in it. It is also clear that if a modern language has evident and important traces of a precedent dead language, it is useful to study about that dead language, because according to Kira Tregoning in her article Dead Languages are Still Pertinent, September 2010 in www.suite101.com, “Dead languages are not only useful for gaining a deeper understanding of a modern language, but also for gaining an understanding of the people who lived before the modern era and the cultures that lived before the current ones.” Recently, another use was found for the importance of dead languages: teaching foreign languages. Ingrid Mosquera Grande, teacher at the University of La Coruña, puts the emphasis on the importance of a dead language, such as Latin or Old English in learning a foreign language such as Spanish and English. There are similarities and differences between two modern languages, that will surely help the student in his learning a second language, but if he relates these similarities and differences to a third language, even if dead, but with great influence in his mother tongue, the process of learning that second language will be easier and more efficient. How many times did our German teachers tell us in the first class that learning German is easy if you know Latin' Then we have to take into account the great number of words borrowed and formed from these dead languages that are present in nowadays English, Spanish, French, and almost all languages that have undergone the Industrial Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, all those languages whose speakers use a telephone, a computer, watch the television, are ruled in a country where democracy is above everything, have phobias to some things, and love other things, being called philanthropists, or anglophiles, or bibliophiles, they study cartography or biology and take steps forward in anatomy and the cure of more and more pathologies. All these words coming from dead languages like Latin or Ancient Greek entered the modern languages relatively late in the history, after the moment in which they reached the status of a dead language, and the simple fact that they were preferred to the invention of new ones means that these languages were really important in the course of history. And they should be studied. But is the study of their grammar and syntax really necessary in secondary schools' Is it really pertinent to know all the endings of all the declensions, of all the nouns, plus their exceptions, when all we really use in our modern language is the root of the word, the significant part of it' Who will ever ask us, if not our Latin teacher, all these rules, in our life' What else for, if not for becoming a Latin, or Greek teacher, do we need to know all the syntax, morphology of these languages that nobody speaks nowadays' Some can come with counterarguments, arguing that learning so in detail a dead language helps in understanding the culture that spoke it, its literature and art, its way of thinking. All these things were already made clear: we know Homer wrote the Odyssey and why Julius Caesar made his Gallic Wars, and there is at least a translation of these works in each and every language. But for the ordinary secondary school pupil, who has no interest in translating from Ancient Greek or Latin because he does not even want to follow superior studies, or he may want to study physics and mathematics, memorizing all those rules of a dead language is irrelevant, maybe a little slowing down for him. It is my view that yes, learning dead languages in secondary schools is important, but only up until a certain point. It is even interesting to learn how the words we use every day come from so ancient times and they were used by so important people, it is interesting to find out how new words can be formed with words from these dead languages, and yes, it can be reason for being proud knowing when to say a Latin phrase like ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing), or knowing that the name Andra comes from the Ancient Greek ἀνήρ, ἀνδρός ὁ and it means “man”. So my point is that studying the vocabulary of dead languages is important, while its syntax and morphology are not so important for the average student. They should be parts of deeper and more specialized studies that enthusiastic people like those who wrote the fifteen thousand articles of the Latin Wikipedia should take. Do you think we should charge the memory of our children with material like the seven case endings for the first nominal declension in Latin, and seven more for each of the following four declensions, and other inflectional endings that are relevant for the grammarians' Do you think children and students should know how to and translate from, let us say, Old French' Is it true that we know well our mother tongue only when we have studied it from the diachronic perspective' 1. Rapallo, U. and Garbugino, G., 1998. Grammatica e lessico delle lingue ‘morte’.(Grammar and Lexic of the ‘Dead’ Languages). Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso. 2. Mallory, J.P. and Adams, D.Q., 2006. The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European World. New York, Oxford University Press 3. Graddol, D. English Won’t Dominate As World Language in the journal Science. 20/02/2004 4. Mosquera Grande, I.(teacher at the University of La Coruña).1998. La importancia de las lenguas muertas en la enseñanza de una lengua a extranjeros (The importance of the dead languages when teaching a language to foreign students). Centro Virtual Cervantes, Actas IX 5. http://www.suite101.com/content/dead-languages-are-still-pertinent-a289587 6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages 7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language