The Edge of the Map

Posted: October 2, 2026 | Author: David | Filed under: Child Centered Activities, What is an Art Farm |1 Comment

Our 8th grade year begins well, with confidence.  In late August, before we began, I mentioned to my son that the Latin language will be included, to which he concurred.  I told him there will be four days of Language Arts classes to which he replied,  “I’m good with that!”  I let him know we would focus on the language to get started, then add in science and math.  He seemed quite good, even upbeat.

The Magister had felt that Latin would appeal to my son’s orderly mind, while deepening grammatical understanding.  The Magister wasted no time in getting started, and time management has been a focus; our goal is not only to learn, but to use time well and productively.  

Early on, my son arrived 2 minutes late for class.  The Magister pressed him, emphasized he should arrive 2 minutes before class.  Pausing for emphasis, he explained, “Our culture is all about distractions.  We are fighting that tide.  I want you to know when you see me becoming a bear it is for the reason to help you master your use of time.  When we get to the end next spring, and you have finished the Latin book, you will say ‘I am somebody that I wasn’t last fall.  I can do things I could not do then.’  That is why I am a bear on punctuality.  You will be far ahead of everyone else.”

And so my son learns Latin, which communicates meaning through word endings, rich in grammatical meaning using case, number, gender, tense and person.  English follows a strict subject-verb-object order, using prepositions and auxiliary verbs to clarify relationships.  Latin has five cases (Nominative, Genitive, Accusative, Dative, Ablative) while English has three (Nominative, Accusative, Possessive).  The difference is significant, and reveals how different cultures organize reality.  

The Magister is firm, fair and demanding.  My son is required to conjugate verbs, inflect nouns, determine phrases adjectival, adverbial or prepositional; learn the English derivatives for Latin words, use Roman numerals to cite historic dates such as when did the Roman Monarchy begin, or in what year and century did the Roman Republic end? 

Pronunciation is practiced, with syllabification and correct accent on the antepenult, penult, or ultima syllables.  The “r” sound is a trilled alveolar, somewhat like a snarling dog, what ancient grammarians referred to as “the dog letter.”  Cursive handwriting is taught, both in English and Greek.  The learning is multi-sensory: sight, sound, speech, and muscle memory.  Rigorous it is – I am challenged to assist – but all proceeds well.  

My son’s translations are charmingly literal.  “Mars Rheam Silviam amat” is translated “Mars, the god of war, Rhea Silvia loves.”  “Amulius Rheam Silviam vinculis claudit” becomes “Amulius Rhea Silvia with chains locks up.”  He is literally capturing the Latin word order, rather than converting it into the subject-verb-object of English.  Those differences open worlds of perception; every culture’s understanding of the world is different, and none are superior.  In a world increasingly argumentative and combative, humility is a significant lesson.  

Chinese does not have future tense verbs, but uses helping words to establish “time when.”  In Urdu/Hindi, KAL (short a) means both yesterday and tomorrow, PARSON means both day before yesterday and day after tomorrow, TARSON is three days out while NARSON is four days away.  The past and future are simply a direction from “now.”  English forces us to say which direction (yesterday versus tomorrow) but Urdu/Hindi express that using context and verb tense.  

Some languages conceptualize time as a flow moving toward you, others that you move through time, but for Urdu/Hindi proximity to “now” matters more than which side of “now” you’re on.  

Albert Einstein once commented, “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”  Grammatically speaking, his was a profound truth.

While learning his Latin, my son also works through the classical grammar of English; toggling back and forth stretches and strengthens a limber and keen mind.  Our homeschool’s approach is “both/and”, which underscores that “reality” is not fixed but fluid, not absolute but perceptual.  Intellectual humility is a trait of the wise.   

English allows a vague, unclear relationship to knowledge, while many Amazonian languages require the speaker to state precisely how something is known: did you see it, hear about it secondhand, infer it, or dream it?  One must specify “it rained (I saw it)” or “it rained (I’m told)” or “it rained (I woke up and the ground was wet, so I infer).” 

If time is an illusion, then space has myriad understandings.  Australian Aboriginal and some Balinese and Mayan languages have no words for “left” and “right” relative to the body; cardinal directions are used for everything (“move your cup a little to the north-east,” “there’s an ant on your south leg”). 

Word order in English is essential to meaning (“the dog bit the man” vs. “the man bit the dog”) but Latin opens vast and varied opportunities for emphasis, rhythm, and rhetorical impact.  The titans among Latin authors – Ovid, Horace, Virgil for poetry and Cicero and Tacitus for prose – wrote literature that influenced European authors for millennia.    

I mention none of this to my son.  

I leave him to his studies, trusting the grammar itself will open worlds.  It seems to be working.  Recently while doing his school work, his voice cried out, “I really like having the Magister as a teacher.  I really like learning what many adults do not know.  I like knowing something my classmates do not study.”

It is a paradox, but to learn a language deeply is to see the edge where the verbal “map of understanding” is one-off from life, itself, where that plays out.  Essentially, my son gains insight to the limits of language.  

Dorothy Sayers, a paragon of modern classical education and homeschooling, wrote in 1948, “…the incessant battery of words, words, words. [Students] do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.”

Aldous Huxley, a towering man of letters, author of Brave New World, described the student of languages, “He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.”  

We pursue the mystery.  Grammar is our means to that end.  

What Huxley described as, “…to cut holes in the fence of verbalized symbols that hems him in” the Magister has compared to “dwelling closer to that border and hem of all languages, beyond which lies…but a purposeful illusion.”

In an essay titled, “Learning Another Language” the Magister wrote:

The language we each are raised up with is truly our world, but if we take the trouble to learn a different language, we travel to another place, remaining ourselves in our central awareness of being, but dispossessing ourselves of all the peculiar ways of seeing the world which our first language determines and restricts.  For when we name some object or event in our world (and what is language if not a collection of names), we make something what it is by saying in effect what it’s not. That’s a coffee cup next to me there, so don’t think its anything else. I’ve rationed it off, sectionalized it from the rest of experience by virtue of that word cup—and that is what we mean by a rational world: clear-cut and defined, permanent and explainable, reliable and real.

All that definition and permanency could very well be an illusion—not a delusion, but an illusion, a playing at (the original meaning of the word). 

But that is what language does and must do: set the world up as a stage, believable for a time, but thankfully not believable always. And if we can command, to some working degree at least, another language, modern or ancient, we get a ticket to go to another play and see how those actors, those nouns and verbs and all they do together, make appear real what surely—just look around—will not last. All the world’s a stage, said, of course, Shakespeare, and all the men and women merely players. There is no performance without language, and every language will perform the world differently. So another language is another conceptual costume whose colors and folds and decorative buttons give us another character to watch—or even to play ourselves—while we look day by day for the really real.

My son does his work in the computer nook that he built.  He made the measured drawings, we cut the wood, he sanded and varnished it, drilled the wire management holes, installed the brackets.  He does his studies there, quiet some time, humming and chirping loudly at others.  

I call out, “Hey, how is it going?”  He calls back, “Going well. I have one more assignment.”  He studies his declensions, learns his vocabulary, builds his sentences, dials in for his classes on his own.  The focus on time management is paying off, his study paying dividends, his pride in “learning what many adults do not know.”

A grammar of being.  

Our 8th grade is learning the Mystery.  

And the Magister keeps it grounded, “See you at 9:58:00 ET Thursday. (0 seconds). Remember that the morning before class is only for review, not study.”

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