Language learning: Necromancy vs Time Travel
What does language exist for? Why learn languages? The answers to both of these questions are tied together: communication.
Language exists fort he purpose of communication. That is, you and I as sentient beings share something, and we express and exchange meaning through the means of language. So the why of learning a language is ultimately in order to communicate. And we can talk about communication in three different modes: productive communication, receptive communication, and interactive communication.
If you learn a 'living' language, you're usually interested in some degree of all three. You might be more interested in the receptive mode, that is reading and hearing and watching; you might be more interested in speaking and communicating your own ideas. Most people also want a bit of both of these, and to be able to interact, to converse in the language.
When people learn ancient or historical languages, they tend to be primarily, sometimes exclusively, interested in the receptive mode. Most people don't really want to write ancient Greek or speak Latin, though there are some, but what they most want is to read the works on ancient authors. And so we're still talking about the act of communication, but it's the communication from them and then to us, it's receptive. We want them to speak to us.
Then we come to the question of how to learn languages, and we are again talking about two different types or modes of learning.
On the one hand, we have the 'classic' method, which is not as old as it purports to be, it really goes back to German philologists, but it's the grammar-translation method: study the rules, study the vocab, put the pieces together and learn to translate into your own language. That is one type of knowledge, but it's not language acquisition. It's not what we mean generally when we say that someone "learnt French" for example.
The other for of knowledge is to acquire the language as a living language, to have an internal representation of the language qua language, not as a systematic externalised body of knowledge about the language.
And for the most part, despite our intuitions, the types of activities that lead to the one do not contribute very much to the other type of knowledge.
So, what then is the difference between these two types of language learning, that is knowledge vs acquisition, for the receptive mode of communication from ancient people?
It is the difference between necromancy and time-travel.
You see, both necromancy and time-travel are ways of communicating with dead people. With the people of a previous time and age.
Necromancy, though, is almost never a good idea. Whether it's zombies or vampires or raising spirits, whatever version you think about all our stories are warning fables of how it always turns out badly. And when the dead return, they come back without a soul. That's what's missing, isn't it? From grammar-translation methods of languages.
Time-travel has its own problems, certainly in fiction, not least paradoxes and butterfly effects. But time-travel involves you travelling to a distant country, the past. So now you are involved in a cross-cultural exchange program, to a far away place—the past—and you go there and learn to communicate and receive their messages on their terms, as much as that is possible, by entiring into the context and language.
That is what the communicative approach to teaching historical languages seeks to do. Not necromancy, but time-travel.
So too, that's why I try to teach the way I do, and why it's about communicating. As much as I myself enjoy producing language, that is having conversations in Greek and Latin, writing texts, nonetheless like most people I long to hear from the ancients. Inevitably, we do that by feeding them with our blood (yes, von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff). "Blood" here being time spent in the language, and the effort of comprehending input.
Necromancy seems like a good idea at the time, but time-travel gets you somewhere.
