thesaurus wrote:This is such a prevalent misunderstanding of language learning. For various reasons we've come to falsely associate knowing Greek and Latin with being smart, when in fact they are just languages like Spanish or Chinese. Case, number, and gender are concepts that 8 year-olds use constantly and fluently without realizing it. The only thing that makes them difficult is the way we teach them. In fact, if we were to teach our children Ancient Greek as babies they would be fluent, not because they are "genius babies" but because they have the innate ability to learn languages through immersion.
I'm not sure I agree with your analysis. Yes, children use these concepts "without realizing it," but this doesn't mean these concepts are easy; using is not the same as understanding. Perfectly fluent speakers of English (or any language) often struggle to learn the actual grammar of their language. They may be able to say "I sing, I sang, I have sung," but they often have no idea why they say that, and will have trouble explaining what the difference between these forms actually is. The concepts often are
difficult to understand, in any language. Those who absorb the usage
from birth will not struggle with the usage
, but learning the concepts behind them may still require much effort.
In any case, the reality is that there is simply no way anyone except perhaps the child of two brilliant classics professors is going to learn Latin or Greek by immersion from birth. And for most older learners, immersion is not a realistic option for any language, and so these concepts have to be taught to some degree via grammar: learning rules, learning paradigms, learning concepts like "ablative absolute" and "optative." And it happens to be the case that Latin and Greek have much more
grammar than typical languages. Though the difficulty of a language is always subjective and depends on the background of the learner, for most people, especially English speakers, Latin and Greek are going to be more difficult than Spanish (though maybe not Chinese). This doesn't mean that someone who knows Latin or Greek is somehow "smarter" than someone who knows Spanish. But I don't think it can be denied that mastering the grammar of Latin or Greek does require more effort.
One more thing. You say this association of "being smart" with Latin and Greek "has to do with the authors that wrote in those languages." Yes, precisely. The versions we have received from antiquity are literary versions of the language, with certainly weren't learned by their babies at home, just as we don't grow up hearing literary English (or whatever language our parents speak). Reading a complex novel, even in your native language, can be difficult if you don't have some additional training beyond what you learned as a baby. So I think it's fair to say that, yes, there is something "smart" about Latin and Greek, simply because the version we must learn is on the whole a literary language. Trying to learn any language would probably be more difficult if the only sources for the language were literary works. Learning modern languages often seems easier, but the version taught is more colloquial... and those who learn them often still struggle to understand literary works in these languages, even after years of schooling...