Throughout the history of the workshops, and the graduate courses partly based on them, two elements have remained constant. First, we emphasize the use of Latin, in addition to the mere reading of texts written in it. Latin is the exclusive language of instruction and activities. Secondly, we also read Latin, but this reading always includes Latin texts from the entire range of Latin’s literary greatness - from the Roman republic right up to relatively recent centuries. We treat Latin as a continuous tradition from antiquity until virtually the present. I would like to explain each of these two elements in a little more detail.
Oral Latin in general has received quite a bit of attention in North American pedagogy in the last decade or so. Articles have been published on oral techniques for Latin teachers in journals devoted to classics and language instruction. The topic is often discussed on listservs. Recent conferences and meetings for teachers and professors of the classical languages have included presentations devoted to oral methods and strategies for the classroom. If we may judge from these sources, the use of active Latin both in our summer workshops and in regular graduate courses is distinctive in two ways. First, we make much greater use of absolutely total immersion than what seems to be usually the case. The instructors in the conventicula, and in the graduate courses devoted to Latin, employ only Latin as the means of communication, much like a professor of any vernacular language. Secondly, very many advocates of oral Latin seem to conceive it as a tool primarily for beginning language instruction. Teachers have pointed out to me that the primary reason for most people to learn Latin is to read Latin texts: therefore, they ask, what is the need for using active Latin at a highly advanced and sophisticated level, or asking students to acquire this level?
Although we certainly agree with those who believe spoken Latin is valuable for elementary instruction, our experience indicates that active usage is also a very effective tool at the advanced stages of learning Latin, especially when students are getting used to reading Latin texts. It is precisely as the student must learn to recognize a wide range of complex constructions, put them together in context, and develop a large vocabulary in order to read more easily and quickly, that active use of the language in writing, and even more so in speaking (which is much more difficult), is an incomparable aid to acquiring a more instinctive knowledge and control of all these elements. For this same reason acquiring an active command of Latin is also useful for those who have long since attained the ability to read Latin texts at some level, but would like to read more easily and with more enjoyment. In short, our experience has taught us what perhaps everyone experienced in the pedagogy of other languages accepts as a truism: a person’s appreciation of any language and its nuances is likely to be better if that person has participated in a variety of learning modes, including writing, listening and speaking - and not merely reading and translating.
Yet others may wonder how we can know what way to teach Latin as a spoken language. Didn’t the Romans in the street use a rather different idiom from the elaborate written language we find in Cicero or Livy? Is that latter idiom really practical for spoken discourse? I am among those who would deny that the real 'sermo cotidianus' of the ancient Roman can be fully known to us in all its details. Therefore this 'simpler idiom' not recoverable in all its essentials as a medium we can use. In our conventicula, we don't aim at a 'simpler form' of Latin: we try to speak a species of the literary Latin - but the level of literary Latin represented by some of the letters and dialogues of Cicero, some of Seneca, the plays of Terence (without the archaisms) and later the colloquia of Erasmus and other Renaissance humanists. This latinity is almost certainly not representative of the language of the fruit-seller in the Roman street. Rather it a less formal, less rhetorically elaborate, and more immediate version of the literary language. As a matter of fact, with the right additions to vocabulary when needed, it is an excellent conversational medium, and has the great advantage of not being far removed from the literary texts we read - which constitute for most Latinists interested in active Latin the main reason for doing it. It was this speech that the humanists aimed at in their colloquia familiaria, and it was undoubtedly in this register that Thomas More and Erasmus, for example, communicated in spoken Latin (as we know they did). The Latin speaking scholars and humanists of early modern times had no more access than we do to what the ancient Romans actually said in the street (much of which was probably ungrammatical and perhaps even hardly recognizable by the standards of the literary language). It is therefore the 'literary language' that gives access to the most sophisticated thoughts of so many ages. This 'literary' Latin is precisely the reason for thinking of Latin as a tradition that transcends antiquity. In is through this medium that we can pick up Ovid in one hand and Copernicus in the other, and though they wrote separated by more than a millennium and a half, we can understand both of them with virtually the same linguistic preparation.
