Learn the classics? It’s all Greek to me

24/4/2017

By David Tang

At school I was erroneously put off Latin, but I was mesmerised by the classical Greek legends

What is your view on the relevance of teaching the classics in the context of modern society?

My advocacy of learning the classics is based on the general proposition that any learning is better than no learning. When I first came to England as a boarding schoolboy of 13, I was put off by Latin because I was told it was a “dead” language. I was told that it wasn’t spoken anywhere on earth, except at Oxford and the Vatican at special times of the year, and I needed to devote my time to learning English, although I did not mind putting aside time for French and Russian, because I knew they were alive and spoken around the world.

But while I was erroneously put off Latin and Ancient Greek, I was mesmerised by the classical Greek legends, which I hoovered up from Robert Graves’s translations. I found the labours of Hercules and that whole Greek world of gods and semi-gods and demi-gods and human titans utterly intoxicating. And how wonderful it is to be in possession of the knowledge of these myths. If I wanted to express the pedestrian metaphor “out of the frying pan into the fire”, I’d much sooner use the wondrous tale of “from Scylla to Charybdis”. If I wanted to describe a single weakness in a strong man, I’d use “Achilles heel”. Or to plant an infiltrator, I’d use “the Trojan horse”. And there are wonderful Latin phrases such as mirabile dictu — “wonderful to relate”; or ceteris paribus to mean “everything being equal”. Or hoi polloi, almost an onomatopoeia (another Greek word) to mean “the masses”.

There are so many classical legends that describe our modern world almost the same way. And this reversion to ancient times gives us all an enormous sense of history. In classical Chinese, Confucius compiled the first anthology of poetry, Shijing, tracing the form back to 1,000BC, as well as the Book of Rites, which recorded the precise vernacular ceremonies and behaviour at Confucius’s time of about 500BC. Knowledge of these commands tremendous respect in the Chinese-speaking world, and understanding poetic provenance is a joyful way to illuminate the roots and evolution of our culture.

It’s sad that classical teachers generally have not brought excitement to the learning of the classical world, still less Latin and Ancient Greek. Yet in Rattigan’s wonderful play The Browning Version, we caught a glimpse of the slight pathos of a classics teacher, through a sensitive student who felt sorry for his dull teaching. And when we know the background of Robert Browning’s translation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, we couldn’t fail to be touched. Yet we needed the knowledge of the classics to understand and appreciate the full extent of the marvellous modern tale.

What nettles me nowadays is how the gargantuan world of video games has plagiarised the classical legends, yet those tens of millions of youngsters spending their lives moving their frantic fingers across mice, seem to be ignorant that without the classical legends, hardly any of their games of good and evil would have been created.

If you were raising children in a Hong Kong family today, where one spouse speaks native Cantonese, the other English, would you steer them towards also learning Mandarin Chinese (with all the added stress to the child and family)?

Why regard bringing up a child trilingual a stress? A child’s learning power is at its most versatile and extraordinary. That’s how children are able to speak fluently as young as two or three without ever needing a single language lesson, nor ever touching a dictionary! Their minds absorb so much that it would almost be foolish if you didn’t bring them up trilingually, especially if you were bilingual parents. Besides, Mandarin is easy to learn because of “Pinyin”, which is a simple system of phonetical transliteration based substantially on the English alphabet. Its inventor, Zhou Youguang, who was commanded by Chairman Mao’s premier Zhou Enlai to turn Mandarin into the national language, died only in January this year at the age of 111 — I was greatly privileged to have met him at his home at the youthful age of 106.

Therefore, use every domestic means to get your children to speak three languages. Swiss children don’t seem to have difficulty learning French, German and English, and there isn’t anything special about Swiss children. Singapore children are brought up in three languages: Mandarin and English, and a regional one such as a Chinese dialect or Malay or Hindi, although they somehow don’t seem to speak them as beautifully as the Swiss trilinguists speak theirs. Maybe it’s the tedious humidity and heat in Singapore. Or too much tiger balm, which is a bit good for everything, but not much good for anything.

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