La Tin Ear
Bettany Hughes was just on 'telly banging on about teaching Duh Classics. I must admit to a certain shudder at this, partly from having been victimised by a year of secondary school Latin myself, and partly from guilt by association with Toby Young, Boris Johnson, and that entire Tory "bring back grammar schools and call them something different" crowd. Lots of irrelevant covering fire along the usual "etymology!" and "history!" lines. (So teach etymology and history, then, not the blithering fourth declension!) But things reached "shouting at the TV" levels when she alleged that "all but one of the modern European languages were derived from Latin". Assuming she's not counting English as such an exception (though linguistically, it clearly is), and is just thinking of German, and is going to neglect mere sub-national languages as Basque, the assorted P-Celtics and Q-Celtics, etc, that would seem to me to be neglecting Dutch, the Scandinavian languages, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, and more Slavic languages than one could shake a stick at. If your definition of "European languages" is "ones that we typically bother to teach in the 'modern languages' box of the curriculum", then "three out of four" would seem a more honest way of presenting that piece of information. (And don't some schools teach some of those others, such as Russian for example?)
I liked her much better when she was sweeping across the landscape in black cloaks enthusing about Druidic sacrifices and kinky Spartan sex.
I liked her much better when she was sweeping across the landscape in black cloaks enthusing about Druidic sacrifices and kinky Spartan sex.