Paradigm, No. 15 (December, 1994)

Comenius has been generally praised by scholars and some teachers for his innovative ideas about textbook composition and language teaching. These ideas were mainly concerned with the teaching of Latin to children and adolescents in schools. As a practising teacher he was naturally much interested in what went on in the classroom, but for him -- as for so many others in his day -- classroom instruction was essentially bound up with religious instruction, a pervading strain through all his works. ‘Anything I have written for the young, I have not written as an educator, but as a theologian’. ¹ This admission was made in 1657, towards the end of his life. It is not always possible to take him at his word, as his views were apt to change with time, but here we shall not be wide of the mark if we do: teaching was for him part of a mission to spread the good news of the Moravian Brotherhood in general and his ‘pansophic’ philosophy in particular. By concentrating exclusively on his ideas about language teaching I shall fail to do full justice to the merits of his works; on the other hand, they are full and rich enough to enable one to highlight this aspect without damaging the whole. The question I want to address is one that seems to be largely ignored in the vast body of literature on Comenius; still, it is a relevant, even obvious, one for the history of modem language teaching and vexing for any person familiar with the practices of imitation and borrowing in earlier times. The question springs from the claim by Comenius himself that his new approach was suitable not only for learning Latin but for any other language as well: ‘compendiosa Latinam (& quamlibet aliam) linguam . . . perdiscendi methodus’. ² In view of the fact that the works by Comenius were so successful in terms of number of reprints and translations, how far did their influence actually extend to the classroom and materials written, and to what extent did modem language teachers in particular take to his ideas, if at all? It is my belief that any influence would be reflected in their works through explicit references, borrowings, imitations, and the like. As a first step to find an answer to this question, I have looked at the works of Nathanael Duez, contemporary of Comenius, translator of the Janua, and conscientious teacher of French, German and Italian at the University of Leiden, who may even have been introduced to Komensky during the latter’s long stay in Amsterdam (from 1656 to 1670) by their shared patron, Laurens de Geer.

Comenius wrote three textbooks of Latin that were soon to be translated into many modern languages, an indication perhaps of their perceived relevance for learners of these languages. The material was ordered after the nomenclator fashion, or as ‘areas of vocabulary’. Curiously enough, these works were published in an inverted order of difficulty; that is, the most accomplished of them came first, the Janua linguarum reserata of 1631 consisting of 1,000 short sentences (or periods) caught under a hundred titles and dealing with some 8000 words. It was soon followed by his Januae linguarum reserata aureae vestibulum in 1633. This was written as an introduction to the Janua and consisted of 500 brief numbered questions with one-word answers and a forty-page catechetic Latin grammar; pictures were included in some editions to illustrate the first 284 questions in this book. Finally, there is the prominent Orbis sensualium pictus of 1658, in many respects an extension of the Vestibulum as well as an illustrated summary of the Janua (the title of an earlier proof of this book in 1653 was Vestibuli & Januae linguarum lucidatium); really a picture dictionary consisting of 150 sections with one picture to each section. A fourth textbook, the Eruditionis scholasticae . . . atrium. Rerum linguarum ornamenta exhibens of 1652, contained an advanced Latin grammar and may be excluded from the present discussion.

The three books are all heavily centred on vocabulary, this is not surprising as they were written for schoolchildren in their first years of Latin; Comenius himself reminds us in the third period of the Janua that ‘the ground of all scholarship’ is in ‘the right-naming of things’. Pictures were added gradually as a useful learning aid, none in the Janua, some in the Vestibulum and a full set in the Orbis. Their inclusion was based on the almost Baconian principle that nothing can be really grasped if it has not gone through one of the senses (‘in intellectu autem nihil est, nisi prius fuerit in sensu’) and it was speeded up by Comenius’ experience that the Janua did not quite work out as expected. Still, Comenius insists that his books have more to offer than just isolated words: they provide, as it were, a portable encyclopaedia of the world by placing the vocabulary in a meaningful framework. This was achieved by presenting the words in context, a practice nowadays widely accepted by language teachers as useful and applied in many vocabulary books and learners’ dictionaries. The context could be pictorial, or supplied through the nomenclator ordering, in short sentences. An example of the latter can be found in no. 55 of the Janua (which had no pictures), in the section about ‘childbirth’, referring to the mother:

597. Quae nisi abortit filios & filias enititur, quandoque Gemellas, raro tergeminos [‘Which except she fails or miscarries, she bringeth forth and beareth sons and daughters, sometimes two, or twins at one birth’]. ³

598. Puerpera, sex septimanis seu hebdomadibus latitare lege ludaica tenetur [‘The childbed woman is bound and ought to lye hidde, and to keep chamber sixe weekes’]. ⁴

Translations were not included in the original Janua (1631), but did appear for French and English in the same year. In principle the words were presented once only, and since most Janua editions contain a full index it Is not difficult to trace the words presented for the first time in the two sections quoted and underlined above. Four new words in the first section and six in the second are a heavy burden for most learners: their unfamiliarity would undoubtedly have lessened the advantage of seeing them in a meaningful context. How useful the contexts were for schoolchildren is a topic for discussion elsewhere. From a teaching point of view it may be relevant to indicate that the teacher was advised to read out the sentences in the mother tongue first and explain their meaning. Then he would turn to the Latin sentences, and then go the other way round, repeating the exercise up to ten times and extending the instructional process over a number of days in a scheme of presentation-translation-repetition-memorisation. Comenius saw this approach and these materials, particularly the Orbis, as suitable for initial instruction into the mother tongue also, as a first and indispensable step towards learning Latin.

The novelty of these works sprang from their combination of context (pictorial or in sentences), word selection and explicit teaching advice. The use of pictures was not new, but had never before been used so consistently. Context was the natural domain for vocabulary as well as idioms in the dialogues and idiom sections of existing textbooks, as opposed to the popular alphabetic vocabulary lists. The nomenclator ordering principle was not new either, but again Comenius used it consistently and in a structured way. Word selection was not innovative either: it had always been practised, albeit implicitly, by his predecessors, but Comenius insisted that his selection contained the most useful words for children at their age level, and that his words provided a picture of the basic things and actions in this world: ‘omnium fundamentalium in mundo rerum & in vita actionum pictura & nomenclator’. ⁵ His teaching procedures, to which the materials were geared, were possibly thought of as the most revolutionary and far-reaching, but at the same time perhaps too exclusively tied to his own personality, as is sometimes the case with gifted teachers. Even in his own day the Janua was heavily criticised from different angles, by Joachim Becher, Daniel Morhof and Johann Boecler, for example. ⁶ The Jansenists rejected it all together saying it made the children want to puke and that it was perhaps more useful for teachers than children, thus damning it with faint praise.

The French expatriate Huguenot Nathanael Duez (1609 to 1670 or later) spent almost his entire working life in Leiden as a teacher of French, Italian and German at the university. He was an extremely productive writer, mainly of linguistic books, among them seven which were important for modern language learning. Most of them went through several editions -- corrected, enlarged or reduced (as the case was) by Duez himself -- and reprinted, re-edited and pirated throughout Europe during his lifetime and long after his death. Duez reigned supreme in his profession between 1639 and c.1700, on a level perhaps with Claude Mauger from London, who was equally successful although less versatile.

Since Duez was responsible for one of the French and Italian translations of the Janua, which appeared in many different editions and various languages, and was also a practising teacher, he was in an ideal position to incorporate some of Comenius’ ideas into his own works. The circumstances for this were extremely favourable: he wrote at a time when the Janua was a highly praised book and its novelty had not yet worn off. He was also a competent textbook writer who always adjusted his works to the needs of his students and was never fully satisfied with the end-product. In addition he was a dedicated teacher who took the trouble to explain his ideas about textbooks and teaching in the prefaces of his works.

What then did he take from Comenius? In the dedication (to William II, Prince of Orange) of his Janua edition for four languages (1640) Duez indicates that for language learning the Janua is certainly useful and, in his opinion, much to be preferred to many other works (‘addiscendis linguis opus certe commodum, & ceteris omnibus, meo quidem iudicio, longe praeferendum’). Further on, in his preface, he draws the reader’s attention to period 16 of the Janua, which reads, ‘assay and try, I pray thee, doe but turne and learne these few little sides or pages’. ⁷ These are the only two references to his ideas about the Janua in this work and they may well be read merely as general recommendations from a translator to a demanding piece of work. However, also in 1640, Duez published another work for the same four languages, the Nova nomenclatura, a book of vocabulary, he claims, very necessary for beginners and containing in its 26 sections many words not occurring anywhere in the Janua (‘quae in Janua neutiquam reperiuntur’). The two books were printed by Elzevier and apparently not considered to be rivals, but rather complementary. Indeed, if we take a close look at the words selected for inclusion, we find the choices in the Nomenclatura to be more idiomatic and practical than those in the Janua, which tend to be rather stilted and uncommon. This difference may, amongst other things, be accounted for by another explicit aim of the Nomenclatura: to provide words that could easily be ‘worked into’ the familiar colloquies (‘est autem haec Nomenclatura eo directa, ut perquam commode familiaribus colloquiis adjungi possit’). Apparently Duez considered that this could not be achieved through the Janua. Furthermore, the words in each section of the Nomenclatura are presented in a long list to be browsed through or memorised, the Janua, as we saw, was built up of sentences carefully selected to guide the learner and introduce him to a special world. Thirdly and perhaps most important, the Nomenclatura was written for adults, especially those belonging to the aristocracy, the Janua for children in the classroom. This may be taken to mean that the two target groups were considered to be so different that they deserved different materials and different teaching procedures.

Duez also wrote a textbook for French and another for Italian, a French grammar and two dictionaries. He did not use pictures in any of them; he did not follow Comenius’ sentence-context approach to build up vocabulary to explain the world around the learner, he did not advocate the teaching principles so clearly explained in the Great Didactic and elsewhere. Even worse, where Comenius favours inductive grammar, Duez advocates a deductive approach: without a thorough grounding in grammar, he writes, the learner will not grasp a language correctly but with difficulty and slowly (‘. . . dass ohne derglichen fundament einer gar schwerlich und gar langsam eine Sprach recht erlernen konne’). ⁸ His conviction that the Janua was useful only as an aid to vocabulary learning is confirmed by a brief remark in his Italian textbook: ‘que plusieurs simples paroles en ont ete a dessein retranchees, dautant que l’on en peut avoir suffisance dans la Porte des Langues du sieur Comenius, en nostre vocabulaire, ou en quelque autre, selon que chacun le trouvera plus a son goust’ [many simple words (have not been included in the three dialogues of this work) because they can be learned well enough from la Porte de Langues du sieur Comenius, our own vocabulary or whichever other book of this kind]. ⁹

Our conclusion can be brief: Duez was not concerned with Comenius. He provided translations of the Janua possibly as a way to make money or a name for himself -- certainly a hazardous affair, as there were already at least three other French translations in circulation -- but certainly not as a disciple of the great master. In his well-informed study of the teaching of French in seventeenth-century German-speaking areas Bernhard Schmidt ¹⁰ expresses his disappointment at Duez’s reluctance to follow his master Comenius (an exaggeration), and goes on to say that he (Duez) only took over some isolated phrases like ‘from easy to difficult’ and the view of the human soul as ‘tabula rasa’. He himself developed his materials and his teaching style along traditional lines and did not see fit to incorporate much of the ideas of Comenius into them; quotations from the Janua, Vestibulum or Orbis do not occur in his works; if he had considered these works as particularly relevant for his teaching purposes, he would have included quotations from them, as was the practice. Nor have I come across any of them in other textbooks of the time. It is certainly true that children in a classroom -- Comenius’s place of work -- require different materials and a different approach from young aristocrats in a university setting -- Duez’s home ground. But the two need not be entirely unconnected, as is the case here.

This study suggests that even during Comenius’ lifetime the Janua was viewed only as a book of vocabulary, at least for foreign languages, and more suitable for children than adults. Its more pedagogic aims were lost on many of its users. It may have had some impact in this way, although perhaps mainly as a tool for learning Latin. As for Duez, he was a successful textbook writer, his traditional approach, with its emphasis on grammar, translations both ways, vocabulary learning and the like, met with approval from many sides. His works were a popular source for cannibalising and exerted an influence over a long period of time. Comenius too was a successful textbook writer, but his unconventional ideas did not earn him much of a place among foreign language teachers. His claim that the Janua was suitable for the learning of Latin as well as any other language may, it seems, have been the conviction of a visionary prophet who saw, but saw too much.

Notes

1. Opera didactica omnia (1657) iv 28.

2. Part of title of Janua, 1^st ed. 1631

3. trans. Anchoran (1631). ‘Raro tergeminos’ [triplets] is omitted from the translation.

4. Ibid. ‘lege Iudaica’ omitted from the translation.

5. Orbis, title page

6. See Michel (1973)

7. Anchoran’s translation

8. French Guidon (1657) Preface

9. Preface

10. Schmidt (1931) p. 31

References

Comenius, J. A. Orbis sensualium pictus hoc est omnium fundamentalium in mundo rerum & in vita actionum pictura & nomenclatura (Nüremberg: M. Endter, 1658) [repr. Dortmund: Harenberg Kommunikation, 1978.]

Comenius, J. A. Porta linguarum trilinguis reserata, Latin with English and French translations, trans. John Anchoran (London: G. Miller, 1631) [repr. Scolar Press, 1970.]

Michel, G. Schulbuch und curriculum (Ratingen/Kastellaun: A. Henn Verlag, 1973).

Schmidt, B. Der französische Unterricht und seine Stellung in der Pädagogik des 17. Jahrhunderts (Halle: Ed. Klinz, 1931).

 

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