The Unusual Nature of GCSE Latin

Only about 1% of all students study GCSE Latin, let alone go on to sit an exam in it, and I happened to be one of them last year. My school - a small one hidden in London - happened to offer Latin, indeed it was mandatory in Year 7 for everyone, all in part to a small but highly devoted Classics department. They also offered Ancient Greek at GCSE, which I started, but didn't finish. For most people, Latin is a very unusual subject to offer - it's a dead language, with only one country using it officially, and any modern presence of Latin is often consigned in the sciences and phrases. Telling people I studied Latin made them curious, and I didn't take up any study of classics at A Level.

But I'm not disappointed that I chose to study Latin - in fact, I find the whole experience more unusual than anything, and it was one of the subjects I enjoyed learning. If anything, I think choosing it over a modern language, like French, was a wise choice.

Latin was offered as a language subject, but it was more like a hybrid of English and history if anything - about half the GCSE is devoted to answering questions about ancient literature and Roman forums, whereas the rest was translating texts, often adaptations of historical events. It certainly was no French - no need to write sentences on what you'll do to prevent global warming or what you like doing on the weekends. Instead, you must answer how Hannibal got his army over the Alps, and identify the dative verb hidden.

There weren't many words to learn, but amongst them, many variations of words relating to murder. You didn't need to tell the time or identify the days of the week (unless they were historically relevant). The tenses and gender were more important than actually knowing the word, what with the dozens of suffixes which could easily shift the meaning of a sentence. I doubt anyone chooses to study Latin at GCSE with the aim of mastering the language (and with how the specification is laid out, I doubt anyone could master it).

I personally chose Latin as it was something novel, a subject which I had slowly grown to enjoy after having wondered why my school had bothered to teach it in the first place. I had to choose a language, and it was between it and French - the choice wasn't thus that difficult. There was also another, more peculiar reason - I quite liked the textbooks.

Latin textbooks do attempt to teach you the language, but unlike how French focused on topics about social media and friendships, Latin was story-based. The textbooks I (and probably most people) used were from the Cambridge Latin Course, and the approach they took was one I've never seen before. They had characters, all largely centred around the protagonist Caecilius (a Pompeiian banker - photo of Pompeii on the right). As he went to the forum, successfully got a man convicted of theft, and headed to amphitheatres as riots broke out, you learned what the nominative case was and how plurals worked. There were of course sentences to recite - this is a language-based subject in England, after all - but that came secondary to everything else. When Caecilius succumbed to the volcanic eruption at the end of Book 1, one could not help but feel saddened for his loss. Yet my teacher moved on to Book 2 like nothing happened. 

These textbooks have been used for over fifty years, and there's something comforting that future generations may also grow up with Caecilius and others, whereas in twenty years time, French students may now have to learn words about new concepts like AI. To be fair, Latin has always been about history - there's nothing new to add to the language - so the textbooks don't need to be republished as time goes on.

There were no listening or speaking exams, either. Instead, an hour on analysing Martial's epigrams and Ovid's musings on witches would suffice, before a lengthy question about ancient life at the end. There was also a paper on Roman life, so you could write about the lives of women and slaves, the events at the forum, and political campaigns all in just forty-five minutes. So whilst half the course was graded on language, only a third of your time was spent on it during exams. And that was rather great, as it wasn't my favourite part of Latin anyways - you didn't come to study it for the language.

I ended up doing well in the exams, getting a decent grade out of it, along with the joy the subject gave compared to my other choices. I could have chosen Classical Civilisation as an A Level choice, but I opted to go down the science route instead, and whilst I don't necessarily regret it, I can't help but wonder what it could have been like, studying the Odyssey and Aeneid in depth. Perhaps I'd have preferred it.

Latin ought to be studied by more than 1% of all students - maybe it's not the most relevant one today, but it was certainly more enjoyable than pre-GCSE French, however peculiar it may have been, and that's without mentioning how it's linked to English today. Then again, I'm not trying to promote it. I suppose this blogpost is simply a way of me saying how weird it just is.