There is really a differnce between countries in this regard. Mastering Latin is a cinch for Italian speakers, for example, but much harder for German speakers. In the Romance speaking world, Latin was not much of a barrier.
Mastering Latin is a cinch for Italian speakers, for example, but much harder for German speakers. In the Romance speaking world, Latin was not much of a barrier.
Really? A cinch? Let's try this. You have a comfortable familiarity with American English. How good is your Dutch, or Norwegian, or Swedish. Could you pick up a children's book in one of those languages and understand it? Now imagine doing it with a dense philosophical treatise, in an old manuscript with some of the words beginning to fade. Still a cinch?
Speaking for myself, my reading comprehension of Italian is pretty good, but Latin is, well, Greek to me. I can translate brief passages if I have to, but only with dictionaries doing the heavy lifting. The main problem is the incredibly complicated grammar, which languages like Italian have sensibly smoothed down.
I have the "Hebrew in Ashkenaz" book and have seen Stampfer's essay. If you're ever stuck for post topics, S., there are plenty more in that book for sure.
I still disagree but here is a discussion on the matter with the same disagreements on this point - http://forum.wordreference.com/s...ad.php?
t=258768
While knowledge of a Romance language doesn't mean you can understand Latin right away, it does make it considerably easier to learn Latin.
It's like whether knowing Arabic makes it easier to learn Hebrew than knowing Russian. Maybe it does, but so what? It's still challenging, especially when it's not about learning conversational language, but an advanced technical language for scholarship. So maybe Italians students had an edge over Russians, but how much could it have been? It would still have been a challenging task for boys to acquire Latin skills so that they could partake of higher education, Italy included.
I encountered this topic while researching a paper on the revival of Hebrew, which I talked about here. (S. has already seen both my paper and my post.) One of my sources, Jack Fellman's The Revival of a Classical Tongue, has this to say: "Hebrew wasn't a language of authority to overthrow feudal Europe, but in itself an act of rebellion against authority" (p. 14). I did also use Hebrew in Ashkenaz for my paper, but not the quote that S. cited.
I still have a bitter taste in my mouth re Stampfer after reading his apologia on male/female relations in eastern Europe. I found it indistinguishable from rubbish, on all fours with the trash called scholarship in the world of minority and women's "studies." I know I'm a peon comapred to him, but that article was foul.
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