As the debate on the new national education law approaches in the Romanian Parliament, I spent some time thinking about which politicians from across our political spectrum might support the cause of the Latin language. More precisely, who would agree to propose and support the amendment proposed by the Society of Classical Studies of Romania, namely the restoration of the optional exam in Latin at the undergraduate, philological profile. Latin was an optional undergraduate subject for philology students until 2009, when it was dropped out of the blue, without anyone agreeing, by a decision of the Ministry of Education. As long as they had the opportunity, Latin was the second language chosen as an undergraduate examination, just after English and before other modern languages ​​or universal literature.

With a broken and mistreated tradition and, due to the violence of history, with too few (and fewer and fewer) apologists, the classical languages ​​in Romania found themselves once again in the hands of politicians. In short, the absence of Latin as an undergraduate exam that can be chosen by interested students, as is scandalously blithely provided for in the current Deca law, means that students will be less prepared for this subject and future students of literature, foreign languages, history, philosophy, law will be less qualified for the field in which they will specialize. By the way, does anyone know who the “experts” are who determined that the discipline is “relative” to the field of philology? Economyagain Latin no, as the Deca project suggests? Or does anyone even know who wrote these laws?

As Latin has been gradually phased out of Romanian schools and universities over the last 20 years, I wonder if the reason is that it always slides between ideological faults: too left for the right and too right for the left, too national for the pro-Europeans and too Europeans for nationalists, it is not easy to colonize it politically and go along with it hoping to win voters.

And yet the recognition that Latina has these two important opportunities should unite the political spectrum in her defense.

First of all, Latin is the source of the national language – and even if we think that we have sufficiently demonstrated this by establishing the orthographic norm of writing ba with Q but with â, the majority of Romanian speakers do not have minimal arguments to respond, for example, to the statement of the spokeswoman of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the Romanian language should be called Moldovan. Not to mention that the theory of the Dacian origin of the Romanian language is gaining more and more supporters. So, if we want to respect our language (and ourselves), it goes without saying that we prioritize learning it. Apart from a few poetic words with a Latin tinge, such as edge and field, which was recently mentioned by Mr. Alex Stefanescu as proof of our Latinity, we will discover a large number of impressive etymologies, morphological and syntactic forms taken directly from Latin. And we shall still discover a civilization and a literature of great power to give us impetus and inspiration as we sink into the fruitless and disorienting tedium of our late age.

On the other hand, the classical languages ​​and the culture behind them are the foundation of Europe. Without them, any knowledge of European history is superficial, and literature, art, philosophical currents, and jurisprudence are simply incomprehensible. The West recognizes this fact, often due to the cultural inertia that we Easterners, traumatized by the chimera of the new man (the proletarian without a past) proposed by communism, have lost. France, Italy, Germany continue education at the pre-university stage, with a final exam, at least in Latin, if not in ancient Greek, and most European states are in the same situation. Even our neighbor Hungary offers high school students the opportunity to take the bachelor’s exam in Latin. These students automatically have a sense of belonging to European culture, which they understand in its substrata. By making room for Latinas among undergraduate options, we convey to our young people that their Europeanness is unquestionable, we offer them an anchor of identity in the cosmopolitan environment in which they will inevitably live, we lead them to what brings us together (not what except) from the European spirit.

However, apart from the appreciation and respect for the Romanian language and Europe, the most obvious and least considered aspect of learning Latin in the education system is its ability to create competence and productivity. It is very difficult to cheat on an exam in Latin or Ancient Greek, extremely difficult to plagiarize a bachelor’s or doctoral thesis. Mastering such a complex language requires discipline and clarity of thought that makes cheating or academic amateurism virtually impossible. The fact that our humanities specialists are already forced to turn to translations, often even in languages ​​other than Romanian, for the Latin or Greek documents they study significantly reduces the quality and originality of their research. As for classical philology, the only academic section that still produces experts in Latin and ancient Greek, they do not have the opportunity to reach the same academic level as classical philologists from other countries: three years of the Bologna system itself is not enough for students to complete their studies. first-year beginners, let them also be brilliant (as they often are), in being able to read fluently in the original Ovid, Seneca, Plato, and Homer.

If we summarize this last argument, then the presence of Latin in the program of the philological department of the upper school is not accidental, but necessary. As this was reduced to a negligible number of hours per week and without the prospect of a final exam, the philology sections also declined exponentially (they remained at about a third of what they were 10 years ago). The specialty of the profile, with its emphasis on rigorous and disciplined study of this complex language, made philology an excellent alternative to a real profile. Instead, today philology has become the profile of the weak and undisciplined, who hardly want to work more than necessary. Even modern foreign languages ​​are often better in the real world… We’re headed for a pre-89 situation where high schools no longer had a human profile. What does this mean politically? Where were we then and where are we now? Read the whole article and comment on contribuotrs.ro