"Today, every laptop with an internet connection contains more information than the Great Library of Alexandria. At its peak, that library contained 700,000 books, until the Christian Emperor Theodosius I ordered it burned down; today, Google Books has over seven million – and that's before you count everything else online. In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story imagining a "total library" containing all written information. Seventy years later, it exists." Johann Hari, The Guardian, 8 December 2009.
The implications of online catalogues of scanned books, and the availability of the vast universe of literature written in Latin and Greek, previously hidden - even, in many instances, to specialists, should be a amazing us every day we log in to Google Books, Europeana.eu, and Archive.org.
Add to that the gradual advances in scanning and artificial intelligence analysis of the increasingly sophisticated scanned images, that will surely enable us to read the carbonised scrolls of Herculaneum within our lifetimes.
This will certainly lead to strident calls to re-open the archaeological dig at the Villa of Papyri, to locate even more of the books that presumably are scattered around the site - perhaps even the core location of the Villa's Latin library itself (to date, the majority of the scrolls found appear to have come from the Greek section of the Villa's library).
For once, we have an honest answer to give, an answer we can shout from the rooftops - to the perennial question, "Of what use is Latin". The answer lies behind your search box on google books. Type in 'haec est" and a torrent of literature will pour forth to assault you. The cultural production of two thousand years, written in Latin, unread, unknown, there for the picking and reading.
What do we have? Novels - both Roman remains, and renaissance fiction - science fiction even! Poetry - more than you could imagine. Dialogues. Plays. Stories and Fables, Philosophy, Science, Mathematics.....the vast bulk of the intellectual production of Europe, from Roman times, until the mid 1700's, was written in Latin. The most renowned poets in England, wrote in Latin.
Writing in Latin did not stop with the Romans. Latin was used for commerce, business and pleasure as a trans-national language until the mid 1700's.
Due to an ever shrinking pool of readers, this material is largely unknown, a vast terra incognita. The work of cataloguing this material is still in progress. Dana Sutton almost single-handedly has taken on the immense task. And that is just the works that made it into print. There is also a vast, mostly unread mountain of material in manuscript.
There is, as far as I know, no centralised database of these, although some online searchable indices now exist. ,Google books and archive.org have not started systematically scanning and cataloguing manuscript texts.
As one blogger online remarked recently, because of the wonderful thing that is Google, having thrown open the world's libraries - "we starve amidst a banquet". Never before in history, has anyone had access to the breadth and depth of Latin literature, that we have access to now, at the click of a mouse. The volume of material on Google increases by the day. Sitting at your computer, or in front of your phone, you have access to more Latin literature than the most fortunate and well endowed scholar in the renaissance.
We see some signs of adjustment to this changed state of affairs in the Latin teaching profession - with textbooks such as "Latin for the New Millenium" - but old habits and old ideas persist.
Old methods of teaching, that will not equip students to delve into this world, persist. There are no English translations of these texts. To read this material, you need fluency - fluency to peruse quickly, and find the gold nuggets in the dross. Fluency to simply cover ground.
For a Classicist to ignore (or be ignorant of) works written in Neo-Latin that discuss the poetics of Virgil, for instance, while happily reading modern critical texts in Italian or German, is a reality forced on them by the academic reality they inhabit. Most professional Latinists spend more time in their native language, writing research papers, than they do engaging with Latin itself.
As a result, their fluency never reaches a very high level, and for most, reading speeds when engaging with unfamiliar texts remain slow. This is one reason why those with the highest levels of fluency are frequently the self-taught, and those who operate outside the strictures of academia.
Some claim they are only interested in reading 'Classical Latin', but then, they cut themselves off from the 2000 years of literary criticism and commenting on Latin texts, written in Latin.
The vast bulk of scholarship on Latin original texts, is only available in Latin.
Professors and teachers of Latin have not yet adjusted to the paradigm shift that must necessarily take place. The Latinum Latin Language course was created, in part to address this particular challenge, and also to make Latin language study available across the globe.
Many of these critical texts are unknown, and have sat on bookshelves, in vast repositories, unopened for centuries. Even their titles are often unrecorded in the literature, let alone discussion of their contents.
Now, more than ever, Latin teachers need to focus on fluency and an ability to read with fluidity - to give our students the tools to enter this sacrum sacrorum loaded with the wisdom of millenia.
Teachers need to expose their students this vast depository, to demonstrate the usefulness of having a skill in reading this language.
If we do not transmit our wonder and amazement at this turn of events - then we will have failed to grasp an opportunity that no generation has ever had before.
The momentousness of this change is such, that it can be compared to the shift that took place in the world of letters after the invention of printing - leading to the wide dissemination of Classical texts, and to a burst of improved standards of Latin literacy.
Once the preserve of a few monks in cloisters, anyone could now own Cicero, Vergil, and use these texts to improve their Latin. The result, the Neo-Latin Renaissance, that really only took off after the invention of printing.
Now, we face another paradigm shift - for us, as readers of Latin, we were more akin to the monks, with access to only a few valued tomes - the vast production of the renaissance was unavailable to us, even to the specialist - now, the floodgates have opened.
How will we respond?
The implications of online catalogues of scanned books, and the availability of the vast universe of literature written in Latin and Greek, previously hidden - even, in many instances, to specialists, should be a amazing us every day we log in to Google Books, Europeana.eu, and Archive.org.
Add to that the gradual advances in scanning and artificial intelligence analysis of the increasingly sophisticated scanned images, that will surely enable us to read the carbonised scrolls of Herculaneum within our lifetimes.
This will certainly lead to strident calls to re-open the archaeological dig at the Villa of Papyri, to locate even more of the books that presumably are scattered around the site - perhaps even the core location of the Villa's Latin library itself (to date, the majority of the scrolls found appear to have come from the Greek section of the Villa's library).
For once, we have an honest answer to give, an answer we can shout from the rooftops - to the perennial question, "Of what use is Latin". The answer lies behind your search box on google books. Type in 'haec est" and a torrent of literature will pour forth to assault you. The cultural production of two thousand years, written in Latin, unread, unknown, there for the picking and reading.
What do we have? Novels - both Roman remains, and renaissance fiction - science fiction even! Poetry - more than you could imagine. Dialogues. Plays. Stories and Fables, Philosophy, Science, Mathematics.....the vast bulk of the intellectual production of Europe, from Roman times, until the mid 1700's, was written in Latin. The most renowned poets in England, wrote in Latin.
Writing in Latin did not stop with the Romans. Latin was used for commerce, business and pleasure as a trans-national language until the mid 1700's.
Due to an ever shrinking pool of readers, this material is largely unknown, a vast terra incognita. The work of cataloguing this material is still in progress. Dana Sutton almost single-handedly has taken on the immense task. And that is just the works that made it into print. There is also a vast, mostly unread mountain of material in manuscript.
There is, as far as I know, no centralised database of these, although some online searchable indices now exist. ,Google books and archive.org have not started systematically scanning and cataloguing manuscript texts.
As one blogger online remarked recently, because of the wonderful thing that is Google, having thrown open the world's libraries - "we starve amidst a banquet". Never before in history, has anyone had access to the breadth and depth of Latin literature, that we have access to now, at the click of a mouse. The volume of material on Google increases by the day. Sitting at your computer, or in front of your phone, you have access to more Latin literature than the most fortunate and well endowed scholar in the renaissance.
We see some signs of adjustment to this changed state of affairs in the Latin teaching profession - with textbooks such as "Latin for the New Millenium" - but old habits and old ideas persist.
Old methods of teaching, that will not equip students to delve into this world, persist. There are no English translations of these texts. To read this material, you need fluency - fluency to peruse quickly, and find the gold nuggets in the dross. Fluency to simply cover ground.
For a Classicist to ignore (or be ignorant of) works written in Neo-Latin that discuss the poetics of Virgil, for instance, while happily reading modern critical texts in Italian or German, is a reality forced on them by the academic reality they inhabit. Most professional Latinists spend more time in their native language, writing research papers, than they do engaging with Latin itself.
As a result, their fluency never reaches a very high level, and for most, reading speeds when engaging with unfamiliar texts remain slow. This is one reason why those with the highest levels of fluency are frequently the self-taught, and those who operate outside the strictures of academia.
Some claim they are only interested in reading 'Classical Latin', but then, they cut themselves off from the 2000 years of literary criticism and commenting on Latin texts, written in Latin.
The vast bulk of scholarship on Latin original texts, is only available in Latin.
Professors and teachers of Latin have not yet adjusted to the paradigm shift that must necessarily take place. The Latinum Latin Language course was created, in part to address this particular challenge, and also to make Latin language study available across the globe.
Many of these critical texts are unknown, and have sat on bookshelves, in vast repositories, unopened for centuries. Even their titles are often unrecorded in the literature, let alone discussion of their contents.
Now, more than ever, Latin teachers need to focus on fluency and an ability to read with fluidity - to give our students the tools to enter this sacrum sacrorum loaded with the wisdom of millenia.
Teachers need to expose their students this vast depository, to demonstrate the usefulness of having a skill in reading this language.
If we do not transmit our wonder and amazement at this turn of events - then we will have failed to grasp an opportunity that no generation has ever had before.
The momentousness of this change is such, that it can be compared to the shift that took place in the world of letters after the invention of printing - leading to the wide dissemination of Classical texts, and to a burst of improved standards of Latin literacy.
Once the preserve of a few monks in cloisters, anyone could now own Cicero, Vergil, and use these texts to improve their Latin. The result, the Neo-Latin Renaissance, that really only took off after the invention of printing.
Now, we face another paradigm shift - for us, as readers of Latin, we were more akin to the monks, with access to only a few valued tomes - the vast production of the renaissance was unavailable to us, even to the specialist - now, the floodgates have opened.
How will we respond?
