From dlupher@ups.edu Sun Aug 20 00:28:40 2000 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.9]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id AAA141274 for ; Sun, 20 Aug 2000 00:28:39 -0700 Received: from mail.ups.edu (traveler.ups.edu [192.124.98.2]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id AAA18904 for ; Sun, 20 Aug 2000 00:28:39 -0700 Received: from [207.207.116.71] (wyatt1dhcp71.ups.edu [207.207.116.71]) by mail.ups.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id AAA07108 for ; Sun, 20 Aug 2000 00:28:31 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 00:28:27 -0700 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: David Lupher Subject: Re: Conventional Latin Christian Kopff asked if teachers of Latin should > vote for candidates whose actions and positions will >probably have the effect, inter alia, of privileging Spanish in the >schools to the exclusion of other languages, [snip] Well, American politicians' championship of Spanish goes way back. Here's Thomas Jefferson's advice to Peter Carr (Aug. 19, 1785): Our future connection with Spain renders that the most necessary of the modern languages, after the French. When you become a public man, you may have occasion for it, and the circumstance of your possessing that language may give you a preference over other candidates. True, he does say "after the French," and true, he does assume, after recommending an impressive list of Greek and Roman authors, that young Carr will be "reading everything in the original and not in translations." Still, Jefferson was clearing nudging what CK calls "the Spanish juggernaut" down the slippery slope (to mix fairly mixable metaphors). By the way, I am not especially fond of the notion that we classicists need to go mano a mano with our Hispanicist hermanos y hermanas. After all, I've written a forthcoming book on the use of the model of ancient Rome in the Spanish debates over the justice of the conquest of the New World. The bulk of the bibliography is books and articles in Spanish, a language I did not read before I began to investigate this fascinating subject. > or for a candidate who had >four years of high school Latin and introduced the most important part of >his acceptance speech with a Latin phrase? ....and who, when asked if he'd studied evolution in high school, replied, "I never studied it in school, because we studied Greek and Latin. We didn't have biology and chemistry." (P. Buchanan to John Judis, GQ, Nov. 1995.) Since Buchanan believes that evolution should not be taught in public school but that Latin should be, I'd humbly suggest that he is perhaps not the ally we classicists should be most eager to embrace. David Lupher Classics Dept. Univ. of Puget Sound .