A PHILOLOGICAL METHOD OF EXHIBITING 

 CLASSICAL DECLENSIONS AND CONJUGATIONS. 



Bv Rev. William Alfred Norton, B.A.. B.Litt. 



Finally received, Ad arch ii, 19 19. 



By way of introduction to these few notes upon a closer- 

 knit conspectus of Latin declensions and conjugations than we 

 find in our present grammars, I beg to quote some paragraphs 

 I was moved to write when I was recently in England, bearing 

 on the grave question, then imminent, and grave enough in educa- 

 tion surely, of the continuance of the demand of Greek at 

 Oxford :— 



" It is difificult for one who returns to England and its 

 education difficulties, after eight years of wandering in the world, 

 to understand how it is that the Greek question has got no farther, 

 and especially that so little compromise has been offered. It is 

 useless to go on peddling at the matter, and the whole method of 

 classical teaching needs to be overhauled, beginning" with elemen- 

 tary teaching in schools ; which should, on the one hand, lead to 

 modern languages, and the use of the classics in general literature 

 and scientific terminology — ^this for the benefit of the modern 

 side : and on the other side, to the developed learning required by 

 classical scholars. 



" Greek, as it has so long been taught in England, is, it is to 

 be hoped, doomed. Anyone who has tried to converse with 

 Greeks knows the maddening experience of finding that his 

 ancient Greek, so far from being a help, at least with the 

 educated, by reason of its nearness to the modern, is a positive 

 hindrance, and often unintelligible from its English vowels and 

 total neglect of accent. I remember well a Greek officer's tirade 

 against this upon a boat bound for Zanzibar, and the similar 

 trouble of an English traveller who had, in conversing with a 

 Bishop of Angola, to write his Latin before it could be followed. 

 Our Latin teaching has since then, happily, been somewhat taken 

 in hand, but has still in most English and indeed African schools, 

 to be taught as a spoken or speakable language, by insisting on 

 the passage being read in the original, either before or after it is 

 construed (preferably both), that the balance of the rhythm may 

 tell out its own meaning. 



" Is not the very reasonable objection of the ' modern side ' 

 to go on spending time over Latin and Greek, taught as dead and 

 buried languages in a way less and less tolerated, say, for French, 

 a call to overhaul the whole method of ancient language study 

 on the lines of modern teaching and as a help to the acquiring of 

 modern languages also? 



