552. Writing in Latin you asked!?


Yesterday I came across an interesting text about teaching and learning languages. The text appears in a Spanish magazine, so it is in this language. It was written by Blessed John Henry Newman. I’ve given up looking it up on the Web, in English. Here I offer a translation into English by me myself – sorry for the likely errors. The text is within his book The Idea of a University. I hope it be any useful to you teachers. The passage is a dialogue between a father and his son. My version is not between quotation marks, for, as I said, is a translation by me, not the original text. / Photo from: writing-man1.jpg valeriefioravanti com

The general matter of your composition in Latin, my dear son, has always been of great interest to me […]. The main moral which I would like that you should keep etched on your memory is this: That when you are learning to write in Latin, as in every learning, you should not confide in the books, yet only make use of them; you should not keep like clinging from the teacher like a deadweight, but grasp something of his life; manage what is given to you, not as a mere formula, but as a guideline to copy and to increase a capital; launch your heart and your mind in what you are doing, and henceforth unite the separated advantages of being tutored and of being an autodidactic, - an autodidactic but with no odd things; and tutored, yet with no conventionalisms.

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