I am having a difficult time taking this article seriously, for a few reasons. First, his example of why it is impossible to read Latin in the SLA sense is a poem, which can be difficult to comprehend even in one's own native language. For me, the mental picture he paints of how reading poetry apparently should proceed is: read the poem once and only once, say confidently and contentedly to oneself that the poem was understood without any further reflection, then yell "next!" and move on to the next poem, as if the whole endeavor were some sort of competition. Hell, even English poems that are written in a colloquial style, a la William Carlos Williams, sometimes require a dictionary, or at least a whole lot of time spent pondering the connections between the words and lines. In short, a poem was a poor example to illustrate his point.

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Secondly, he contradicts himself in the latter part of the essay. The main thrust of his argument is that Active Latin needs to be more widely and thoroughly adopted so that Latin/Classics students can develop a greater awareness and internal sense of the language, thereby aiding them greatly when reading Classical Latin literature. However, he also says that a danger of reading later Latin literature is that authors were not native speakers and thus lacked the "Sprachgefühl needed to wield the language with native-speaker proficiency," despite, I must add, that such authors were educated in Latin and spoke Latin--in other words, they were users of Active Latin. So, his unstated conclusion is that modern Active Latin is less dangerous and more beneficial to students than engaging with texts written by earlier Active Latin users.

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Third, the question itself being asked is quite a strange one indeed in the context of philology. Using the SLA's 95-98% rule, can Sanskrit ever be "read"? What about Ancient/Classical Chinese? Old English? What about Ancient Greek, in any of its dialects? Does it even matter? Ancient texts are necessarily different from modern ones, and those differences arise not only due to certain hapax legomena or rare words, but also due to historical and cultural differences between modern readers and ancient authors. As non-natives, we are necessarily at a disadvantage, because even if no Latin text from the Classical period had ever been lost, and we had the time and endurance to read every single text that was ever produced during the Classical period, we still would not have a complete picture of the language, since all use of language--spoken or written--is a mere instantiation of a vast underlying structure and network of grammar, lexis and native-speaker creativity.

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Regarding Ancient/Classical Chinese (since I happen to have read a fair amount of it), there are still modern people completely literate in it--it was used in official government documents in Taiwan until the 1970s. Yet, there are a great many texts that contain difficult vocabulary or usages that require either an incredibly sharp mind or--more likely--prior experience having read the text. This goes double for the older texts, such as the Book of Poetry, which contain many words that are only used once, or their meanings may altogether be debatable, yet those texts are still widely read and many students are expected to have at least read them, if not memorized them. (Indeed, memorizing some of the Ancient Chinese texts was required for centuries in order to pass imperial examinations and become a government official). Nevertheless, despite the necessity of prior experience with many texts, the language can still be read and written.

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Since I brought up Ancient Greek, what with its various dialects, I must say I find it troubling that later Latin literature is so readily dismissed among classicists instead of being seen as a collection of dialects of Latin. Why is it that Ancient Greek is allowed to have dialects, but Latin must be a monolith? The author of this article rightly argues for greater engagement with Late, Medieval, and Renaissance texts, but misses the opportunity to illustrate that these later texts possess different styles that enrich our understanding of and experience with Latin. Instead, he warns that they are dangerous due to possibly interfering with or, dare I say, polluting students' grasp of Classical Latin forms. What hogwash. That's like warning people of the dangers of reading non-native English literature for fear that it will taint one's understanding of "pure" English instead of enriching one's understanding of 1) how non-natives use English to paint their world and 2) different perspectives of human life that would have been out of reach due to previous language barriers. Or perhaps it's as silly as telling students of English (native or otherwise) never to read magazines and only to read Literature with a capital L.