Talking Latin in Plain English with Martha Altieri

In this new segment, CQ endeavors to discover whether a delightful interview format (props, to Ms. Solomon at the Times) is copyrightable. We sure hope not!

Altieri teaches Latin at Woodbridge High School in Irvine, California. She is a longtime participant in the Junior Classical League.

Can you tell me a little bit about the history of Latin education in the U.S. and around the world? I can tell you that it was certainly part of public education in this country’s since its inception. And then in the eighties and nineties, there was a pretty solid decline. But I think there’s been resurgence in the past ten years.

What provoked this resurgence? I think that a lot of it had to do with the Junior Classical League. Also, so many students were finding that they didn’t have a firm grasp of language. It just became popular again.

What lead to the decline? A lot of people thought it was outdated because it’s not a spoken language. There’s been a real push in language the last few years to focus on modern, spoken language.

Has that affected Latin teaching? A lot of Latin teachers around the country are learning to speak Latin to keep up with their colleagues who teach the spoken languages.

Is that a good thing? I don’t know if it’s good or bad. I was not taught that way myself, so that is not what I do in my program. But there’s certainly nothing wrong with it.

My 13-year-old brother is studying Latin right now. Why is this a good thing? Because it’s pretty much the foundation of everything we do in this country. So many of the things that we do culturally are embedded in the ancient Romans, the way we build our roads, our system of government, the buildings that we build, many of our customs, our marriage customs. The list just goes on and on.

What has it done for the English language? Between seventy and eighty percent of English words come from Latin. In this day and age many students do not read and everything just flashes by them on the television and computer screen. With one Latin root you can expand your English vocabulary ten fold. It also teaches language structure.

Do you think that Vatican II and the near elimination of the Latin Mass had a big impact on Latin? Umm, no. You can still go to Latin Mass. And a lot of the people who went didn’t understand what they were saying anyway.

Interview Undertaken, Redacted and Creatively Reorganized by Daniel Denvir

Photo courtesy of Martha Altieri