PrintReaders of this newsletter and personal friends have long known me to an enthusiast for Latin. I have produced Arabic and English translations of Latin texts, and occasionally write in Latin and translate longer texts into Latin for fun, continuing a passion since my youth. In general, I believe that more people should learn Latin, and I feel dismayed whenever I see news of universities potentially dropping Latin instruction.
However, enthusiasm for Latin should not mean support for all efforts to teach the language, particularly when such efforts are combined with promulgating blatantly false ideas and conspiratorial thinking. The same of course is true for any language learning. For comparison, I am also a literary Arabic enthusiast, and support teaching the language. If, however, I promote such learning with notions that people need to learn Arabic in order to learn the 'truth about Islam' in the face of a 'politically correct' (or conversely, 'Islamophobic') academy that supposedly wants to suppress this sordid or glorious truth respectively, there would be good reasons to question my enterprise. Similarly, I love Old English and the Germanic features of the language such as the strong verb ablaut patterns, but if I then promote instruction of the language on the basis that English people need to rediscover and emulate their 'ancestral Germanic warrior culture and tradition,' there would be legitimate grounds to raise concern as to whether I am trying to promote völkisch and Nordicist ideas.
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