aoo.\ This book is DUE on the last date stamped below JU >t|Q 3 !•** mi IAN 2 5 1938 AVG 5l93 b SSL 2 4- 1829 JW4Y 2 8 I93f, WAY 2 2 1336 A3 li*c>u. '. 8 9 DEC # REC'D ML Southern Branch of the University of California Los Angeles Form L-l 'CUl i Reprinted for private circulation from The Classical Journal, Vol. XV, No. 6, March 19 THE CORRELATION OF LATIN AND ENGLISH 1 A. P. McKlNLAY Southern Branch University of California, Los Angeles The question of correlating Latin and English is of immediate concern especially to a classical association; for, if we are to believe the newly elected superintendent of schools at Portland, Oregon, the president of Reed College, Mr. Flexner, and Dr. Eliot, Latin is on the toboggan. The writer believes that Latin can maintain itself by taking unto itself allies; therefore, it is the purpose of this paper to show what is meant by correlation of Latin and English, how to go about it, and what are the results. In opening the discussion it will be well first to determine what correlation is, or rather what it is not. Most good teachers of Latin might well say, "Correlation with English! Why, of course I correlate." The reply to a large extent is true, but usually the Latin instructor falls just short of arriving at a full measure of co-ordination; for, consistently to point out English derivatives, to demand much parsing, and to be particular about shades of meanings, does not go far enough. Even so, occasionally in our classes some rare mind makes the connection for itself, as in the case of the young man overheard in the street car to remark, "I tell you, Latin is the 'stuff.' Take Latin and you won't have to 'chase' to the dictionary every time you don't know a word." But far too often the mind betrays its innate propensity for shedding knowledge as a duck does water; so that the general run of students finds its type in a college professor not a thousand miles from here, who boasts that he had six years of Greek and got nothing out of it. If immunity against the bacillus of co-ordination with English is the normal trait of the Latin pupil's mind, what, then, must be done to make the innoculation more certain ? Inject a few germs •Read at the summer session of the Classical Association of the Pacific Coast, University of California, Berkeley, California. 353 61097 359 TH E CORRELATION OF LATIN AND ENGLISH of teaching Latin from the English point of view. As far as the secondary school is concerned, Latin is really Old English and should be actually or, at least, spiritually, a part of the English department. After having determined what correlation really is, we are now ready to undertake it. To make my explanation more explicit, I propose to show how it is done in Lincoln High School, Portland, Oregon. That I may not weary you with too much talk, I shall limit my discussion to the handling of the sentence. This aims at acquiring sentence sense through sentence analysis, sentence structure, technical grammar, punctuation, spelling, correct usage, and good form. The Latin teacher familiarizes himself with the principles of the subject either by taking a class in first-year English for a few terms or by mastering the several English outlines. The first of these takes up sentence analysis. It should be started with the earliest exercises in Latin. It should be developed as the sentences become more and more complicated. Particular care should be taken to guard against the idea that the analysis is something extra, a device to make Latin harder; the utility of the method can be made manifest by seeing to it that the student really uses analysis to get at the meaning of the sentence. Especially should he use this outline in turning English into Latin. When- ever he makes an error in translation, he should never be told what his mistake is, but should be required to find it out by analysis. This method should be followed throughout the first year and well on into Caesar. In the Gallic War, day after day, week after week, every sentence should be analyzed till the student becomes sentence sure. Ten weeks will usually be enough to reach this stage. Thereafter every relapse into carelessness should run hard up against the sentence-analysis outline. When the student has mastered this method of arriving at the meaning of sentences, he is ready to learn how to correct such sentence errors as arise from time to time. Plentiful opportunity should be given for finding out errors. Frequent tests and much board work should be called for. In Caesar, after a lesson has been read in advance and then in review, I always have it put on the board. Then it is examined for all kinds of mistakes. These .*. : : •: ;•: •*. ••: : : .♦. • •. ••• .-. •. .• : • .*• .•• ♦. - •• • • ••• * •: • .• *. . : :, • ...... •.♦ • . ... . . , ># . •, • . . f .< * * ••• ; .• • ••• .**i • • .•• • • . •« • * • * • * j • THE CLASSICAL JOURNAL 360 mostly group themselves under such heads as structure, punctua- tion, spelling, diction, good usage, and good form. Of these the most important is structure. Sentence structure involves unity, coherence, and emphasis. I require all students to provide themselves with the English outlines on unity and coherence. From these we find out that errors in unity usually fall under one of three heads: the fragment sentence, the run-on sentence, and the and-and-and sentence. We identify all such and correct them by the outline. We find that coherence errors are due to faults in arrangement, agreement, and connection. In arrangement most of the trouble is caused by "only," by the correlative conjunctions, and by prepositional phrases. In agreement pronouns often fail to connect with their antecedents, and verbs with their subjects. Shifts in voice and tense need watching. Participles, particularly in ablative absolutes, are great offenders. In connection the whole question of co-ordination and subordination is involved. Here comes the breaking up of some of Caesar's elephantine sentences, and the transmutation of parts into other parts. Especially note the need of turning participles into clauses. After unity and coherence are well in hand, some attention may be paid to sentence emphasis. The forty-fourth chapter of the first book of the Gallic War with its balance, repetition, and contrast, and its rhetorical questions is a fertile field for illustration. Put your students through this mill and the English teacher will rise up and call you blessed. In connection with this work in the sentence the Latin teacher nas an unparalleled opportunity to enforce the minimum require- ments in grammar. His students should be sure in the identifica- tion of the parts of speech. They should master the noun uses and the formation of the possessive; they should know the kinds of pronouns, their relation to antecedents, and their objective uses. In verbs they should understand voice, tense, and number; transi- tive and intransitive; the past progressive, tense signs, tense formation, and verbals. They should be familiar with the function of prepositions; they should be able to discriminate between phrases and clauses, between compound and complex sentences, 361 THE CORRELATION OF LATIN AND ENGLISH and to classify subordinate and co-ordinate conjunctions. This is the sum of the whole matter, grammatically. Punctuation accompanies sentence structure and grammar. The pupil should be made to identify his errors in pointing by rule, and make his corrections accordingly. The punctuation of the compound sentence should be stressed; also of appositives, possess- ives, and non-restrictives. In distinguishing between restrictives and non-restrictives we use the Ward test as set forth throughout his "Sentence and Theme." To inculcate a feeling for the comma, the semicolon, and quotation marks, have parsing often done in sen- tence form according to models set by the teacher. In no phase of the work can the Latin teacher get quicker action than in spelling. There should be no attempt to cover the whole field. Energy should be reserved for the mastery of the limited number of words on the spelling lists of the English depart- ment. The teacher should f amiliarize himself with these words and with the few rules concerned. He should put especial stress on words that no Latin student should misspell. Of course, there should be no definite assignments in spelling; but, when errors arise in the course of tests and board work, that is the time for their consideration. Mistakes in spelling may be classified under several heads according to the principle involved. Chief among these is pronunciation. No pupil who will syllabize and pronounce carefully will misspell such words as "accommodate" and "pro- fessor." Such words often involve the simple mathematical process of addition. Here Latin comes strongly into play. Stu- dents who consistently misspell "definite" and "benefit" do so no more when shown that the one equals "de"-f" finite" and the other, " bene " + "fit." Derivation, too, should play a great part in the slaughter of spelling demons. The very first time ' ' separate ' ' with an e after the p raises its ungodly head, the teacher should knock it with a club made from the root " paro." Along with the relation of words in a sentence goes the under- standing of the word itself. Hence come the study of derivatives and discrimination in shades of meaning. That this field is all- important goes without saying. Latin teachers who have been TUE CLASSICAL JOURNAL 362 doing good work along this line should try to interest their English coadjutors in an article on "High Schools and Classics" in the July Atlantic by Frederic Irland. Be sure to read the letter by Mr. Irland in the contributors' column of the same issue. Interest your students in such words as "precocious," meaning "cooked ahead of time." Get on good terms with your science brethren by having some study on lists of terms occurring in their subjects. "Cast thy bread upon the waters and after many days it shall not return unto thee void." In the discussion of the sentence there remains correct usage. This is the part of the subject ordinarily least neglected. Least important intrinsically, it is most important in the eyes of the public. Provided that a writer knows enough to use "don't" cor- rectly, the world will overlook his inability to unify and co-ordinate. Still we must do our part to help with correct speech. I provide myself with the English lists on correct usage, and whenever any such solecism as "different than" occurs, I stop the recitation while the class in concert says " different from " five times. Lastly comes good form. The Latin teacher should get the English instructions on the preparation of manuscript. He should give a test or two early in the term by way of review. All errors should be discussed and then revised. After that no paper should receive more than a passing grade if it contains more than one breach of good form. First, careful instruction; then, diligent holding the class to instructions with severe marking will work a transformation in a few weeks. Such is the plan proposed for the correlation of Latin and English. In its application several points should be noticed. First, it deals only with the acquirement of sentence sense. The subject of co-ordination of the two languages as literature is left for another time. Again there is need of caution. In any attempt to apply the scheme a teacher should use common sense. Aristotle's golden mean. In fact, it is not so much a method that has been set forth as a point of view, simply doing what we always have done, with a more definite vision of how we can be more helpful to our fellow-teachers. Furthermore, the instructor should guard against making a mountain out of a molehill. The chief requisite 363 THE CORRELATION OF LATIN AND ENGLISH is for him to master the English outlines. Then he can apply them incidentally without loss of time and effort. By the tenth week an average class in Caesar will have pretty well-acquired sentence sense. Thereafter it should be taught to get at the meaning of the text through the Latin order with a reversion to analysis when a passage proves recalcitrant. Lastly, the paper will probably be of little help to those teachers whose classes come to them prepared to understand and construct an English sentence. The sugges- tions are for those who, like the writer, have to meet the problem of teaching Latin to classes that, as the years go by, are less and less well grounded in the three R's. These are the lines along which for several years there has been co-operation in the English and Latin work at Lincoln High School, Portland, Oregon. What are the results ? These pertain both to the faculty and to the student body. The most immediate effect became evident in the English classes. A measure of this reaction to the attempt at correlation was seen shortly after the plan was put in partial operation. After the students in begin- ning Caesar had had seven weeks of the drill, the superintendent's office conducted a grammar test in all the third- term English classes in all the high schools of the city. The tabulated returns showed that the average of the high school in question was 89 per cent, or nearly eleven points higher than that of the nearest com- petitor. About half of our English III students had had the sentence drill in Latin. Their average in the test was 94 per cent; that of the non-Latin section, 84 per cent. This showing appeared in the face of the unusually high percentage of foreign students at Lincoln, who ordinarily have much trouble with English. The lead of this school over the other high schools was so great that the office did not publish the results; but its private opinion may be estimated from the fact that the assistant superintendent who conducted the test, though tributary to another school, entered his daughter and later his son at Lincoln. The effect of this demonstration upon the school may well be imagined. The faculty have begun pulling for Latin; the English teachers have become its most enthusiastic advocates; the head of the department of chemistry has put his shoulder to the wheel THE CLASSICAL JOURNAL 364 by showing his poor students to be non-Latinists. The student body, too, is reacting. The teaching girls are up in arms because their course does not provide Latin. This movement has grown until, excluding the fourth-year pupils, more than 70 per cent of the students take Latin. The climax came this spring when the enrolment in beginning Latin exceeded that in beginning English. The field has been planted; the harvest is being reaped. Whether the schools can be immunized against the virus of Flexnerism is "on the knees of the gods." The preceding plan is offered as an antitoxin. 610 9 7 Lithomount Pamphlet Binder Gaylord Bros. Makers Syracuse, N. Y. FAT. JAN ?l, 1908 University Ot California. Los Angeles L 007 625 313 7 iv FfcOirr* \T\tl\ \V nnn'409 4l7_3 j. n ,.>