Magna Carta Latina: The Privilege of Singing, Articulating and Reading a Language and of Keeping it Alive, Second Edition

Front Cover
Pickwick Press, 1975 M01 1 - 322 pages
Why another Latin grammar? The history of Latin studies is strewn with the dead bones of textbooks, conceived in enthusiasm, published in hope, and interred in despair. 'Magna Carta Latina' began in Professor Rosenstock-Huessy's son's failure in high school Latin, it flourished in teaching generations of Dartmouth students the mother-tongue of Western culture, and it found its way at long last into the precincts of theology. Can a generation that knows no Latin reason, philosophize, theologize, sing, pray, or worship?

The authors of 'Magna Carta Latina' answer "No" to that question and set out to supply the missing language. In Latin's family tree, they assert, there are no black sheep or poor relations: from its earliest fragments to its latest use in our day, Latin is an organic whole. And the texts offered for study in this book bespeak this conviction. In one semester the basic grammar is learned, within a year a variety of Latin styles of moderate difficulty is mastered.

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About the author (1975)

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973) was a historian and social philosopher who, along with his friend Franz Rosenzweig, and Ferdinand Ebner and Martin Buber, was a major exponent of speech-thinking (sprachdenken). The central insight of speech-thinking is that speech or language is not merely, or even primarily, a descriptive act, but a responsive and creative act, which forms the basis of our social existence. The greater part of Rosenstock-Huessy's work was devoted to demonstrating how speech, as distinguished from mere chatter, through its unpredictable fecundity, expands our powers and unites humankind through time and space. Born in Berlin, Germany, into a non-observant Jewish family, he converted to Christianity in his late teens. In 1914 he married Margit Huessy. Rosenstock-Huessy served as an officer in the German army during World War I, and much of his later thinking was shaped by reflection on the catastrophe of the war. His distinguished academic career teaching medieval law in Germany was disrupted by the rise of Nazism. Immediately upon Adolf Hitler's ascent to power in 1933, Rosenstock-Huessy emigrated to the United States, initially teaching at Harvard University and then at Dartmouth College, where he taught from 1935 to 1957. A prolific author, two of his major works in English are Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man (originally published in 1938), and the Christian Future: Or the Modern Mind Outrun (originally published in 1946), both of which are sold by Wipf and Stock in re-print editions.

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