spoken latin?

[4littleones]

Hi there,

 

do you know anyone that can converse in latin? If yes, to whom?

 

I had some latin in high school and I really enjoyed it. It is actually an easier language than my native Greek.

 

I am just curious....

[C_l_e_0..Q_c]

Yes I do. My uncle. He could hold a complete conversation in Latin with his peers.

I've also met online some youths that thought it was cool to speak Latin.

 

I took an online course in spoken Latin here:

http://avitus.alcuinus.net/schola_latina/invitatio_en.php

 

I didn't get very far, because my Spanish kept getting in the way. I have set aside Latin for now, and am working on my Spanish. I believe that once my Spanish is stronger, it will be easier not to mix the two.

 

You can also look at http://www.academiathules.org/

for more lessons. None of these are aimed at kids btw.

 

ETA: it seems Academia Thules has removed its Spoken Latin classes. I haven't been there in a while. It's news to me!

Edited June 2, 2010 by CleoQc

[4littleones]

Impressive!

 

Thanks for the links, I had a good look.

[MBM]

Hi there,

 

do you know anyone that can converse in latin? If yes, to whom?

 

I had some latin in high school and I really enjoyed it. It is actually an easier language than my native Greek.

 

I am just curious....

 

Years ago when my BIL (then a teen) moved from Europe to the U.S., the only way he could converse with his Catholic school teachers was by speaking Latin. He was lucky that most of the teachers still knew it!

 

Here is a site listing current news that is written in Latin.

http://ephemeris.alcuinus.net/

 

Also, Lulu.com carries a rigorous Latin program written in the 1800s by a German linguist that is based on learning Latin conversationally. My husband plans to try it this year after he finishes D'Ooges Latin. I don't have that site bookmarked, but my husband will be home tomorrow and I'll link it then.

 

I realize this is not quite what you're seeking, but it might be a way to find like-minded people.

[Dmmetler]

Colleges that have a classics program will often have groups of students that get together and talk in Latin (or Koine Greek). I tell you-those can get to be some rowdy bunches ;).

[4littleones]

MBM: Amazing experience, having latin as the lingua franka in modern times!!

 

 

I don't know what has come over me.... As I said, I have a limited experience with Latin. I am currently a postgraduate student pursuing my MA in Education (TESOL emphasis) and recently I finished my ESL teaching practicum. Since I acquired English through the years and I don't really remember not knowing English IYKWIM, I felt I should learn another language just to go through the methods, frustrations and triumphs that my students are going through right now.

 

We are living in an international campus of a postgraduate institution (following American curriculum) and in case I decide to learn a modern language, I have plenty of people to practice with. We have Russians, French, Germans, a thriving Spanish-speaking community as well as the Asian majority.

 

But I keep thinking of Latin. Crazy, huh? I guess Latin is my first love! LOL.

[Ester Maria]

Well, if you're willing to invent vocabulary and end up speaking a Latin-based constructed language - no problem.

 

If you on the other hand believe that a language is tied to its cultural context and shouldn't be artificially transferred to other ones, then you don't speak it. Even if theoretically you could. ;)

 

I remember people who tried holding lectures in Latin in high school: "Habemus rem A et rem B; inter rebus A et B habemus..."

We protested, it was a sacrilege in our eyes - for Heaven's sake speak Italian to us, Italian is the language of NOW, Latin was the language of THEN and the language of one different culture and one different 'Italy', be it the one of Romans or the one of Humanists. We'll read a text with the perfect reading fluency, really. But we'll discuss it in Italian. We won't speak hybrid Latin-Italian in your class and invent vocabulary or allow our Latin to be blurred by the lexical shades of OUR times. We'll allow Latin to remain intact in its own context.

 

IF Latin is ever to be fully revived, on the international level, with a unifying purpose of revival - as was the case with Hebrew - then I might consider speaking it. Until then, not really.

[Michelle in MO]

Every summer, the University of Kentucky holds a Conversational Latin Seminar. From what I've learned, these are fairly well-attended. I also believe that some major universities are moving towards more spoken Latin in the classroom; among them, my own.

 

Spoken Latin has never really been completely absent from the Catholic Church; some movements within the Church (Tridentine) emphasize the Latin mass, for example. A friend of our family, who is also Catholic, maintains that it was not that very long ago that the cardinals and bishops of Rome would gather, speaking Latin to one another. Spoken Latin was a unifying element of the Catholic Church.

 

I'm fairly certain that the professor under whom I recently completed Latin could speak Latin fairly fluently. Also, I believe that increased fluency in Latin is one of the underlying principles of Lingua Latina, by Hans Oerberg.

 

The purpose of reviving spoken Latin is not so much to invent a bunch of words or phrases which the Romans might never have used (i.e., "I need to get the oil changed on my car" or "I would really like to get my nails done") but to take away some of the mystery and difficulty surrounding Latin. We tend to approach Latin with such awe because it is so very different from English, as it has retained most of the inflections from Indo-European; however, learning to speak Latin, albeit slowly, helps to remove some of the mystery and fear surrounding this process. My Latin professor maintained that English is far more difficult, looking from the outside in.

Edited June 3, 2010 by Michelle in MO
additional thoughts

[Ester Maria]

Spoken Latin has never really been completely absent from the Catholic Church; some movements within the Church (Tridentine) emphasize the Latin mass, for example. A friend of our family, who is also Catholic, maintains that it was not that very long ago that the cardinals and bishops of Rome would gather, speaking Latin to one another. Spoken Latin was a unifying element of the Catholic Church.

This is true, the Catholic approach to Latin is a bit different. :)

 

Yet, from my point of view (an outsider, but a one that lived close to Vatican :D and had many friends who were Catholics) Italian is far, FAR more Catholic lingua franca today than Latin. Even their school system is no longer in Latin (including their specific theological study which is largely in Italian today).

Latin has, even for them, become more of an 'ornament', though there are people trying to change that.

 

But still in any case it makes more sense for a practicing Catholic to want to actively use Latin than for somebody who concentrated to the classical component.

 

But the problem of "conlang" still remains. You cannot speak pure Latin anymore since you come from a different cultural context and need different words and different connections. If it's going to be revived, it's going to have to be partially sacrificed, which was the case with Hebrew. It'll have to go towards a conlang, and the semantic shades of lexical elements will probably change too to fit the modern context, morphosyntax will probably naturally adapt too and simplify, etc.

 

Without a HUGE interest of a BIG group of people in making Latin FULLY alive - as was the case with Hebrew - people who speak Latin will remain a minority. An unaccepted minority, since the rest will not go with the "adapted" Latin, admit their new words, etc., and they'll be seen as speaking a conlang rather than Latin.

[Michelle in MO]

But the problem of "conlang" still remains. You cannot speak pure Latin anymore since you come from a different cultural context and need different words and different connections. If it's going to be revived, it's going to have to be partially sacrificed, which was the case with Hebrew. It'll have to go towards a conlang, and the semantic shades of lexical elements will probably change too to fit the modern context, morphosyntax will probably naturally adapt too and simplify, etc.

 

Without a HUGE interest of a BIG group of people in making Latin FULLY alive - as was the case with Hebrew - people who speak Latin will remain a minority. An unaccepted minority, since the rest will not go with the "adapted" Latin, admit their new words, etc., and they'll be seen as speaking a conlang rather than Latin.

 

 

Yes, all this is understood, and my previous post alluded to that; in fact, I gave a couple of examples of phrases which one is highly unlikely to see in a revival of spoken Latin. A FULLY alive Latin today, in the cultural/contextual sense, may never again exist, and I was not making a case for that.

 

As I stated, most Latin enthusiasts are not likely to try to find replacement Latinate words for things which exist only in a modern context. My point was not necessarily that Latin be fully revived to the spoken status of a modern foreign language, but that there indeed is a movement underway to restore many elements of its spoken status, and this movement is growing in some quarters. Part of the purpose for the spoken element is to help remove some of the mystery and fear surrounding what many perceive to be the great difficulty of tackling a language like Latin.

 

Obviously, Latin will not go the same direction as modern spoken Hebrew. :)

[Ester Maria]

My point was not necessarily that Latin be fully revived to the spoken status of a modern foreign language, but that there indeed is a movement underway to restore many elements of its spoken status, and this movement is growing in some quarters. Part of the purpose for the spoken element is to help remove some of the mystery and fear surrounding what many perceive to be the great difficulty of tackling a language like Latin.

I know, I read what you wrote - I'm sorry sorry if I sounded "aggressive", I was more thinking out loud than responding to your specific point (I also read the last paragraph after I responded, we were probably writing at the same time). I should have stated that. ;)

 

I still don't see, though, how Latin is less of a mystery if spoken than if not spoken. I must say that, other than "ideological" reasons, part of the reasons why I disagree with speaking it is because it usually leads to WORSE results in studying than the analytic method. Granted, I haven't done any serious study regarding that, but from the little I interact with nieces, nephews, friends' and colleagues' kids (we have a tradition of studying Latin in Italy, so pretty much everyone studied it at some point) and from the little I visit schools, I see the best results in classrooms with zero spoken Latin but TONS of classical texts (not adapted and not modern Latin writings). All of those kids can also basically read neo-Latin (humanist writings) prima vista, while kids who studied it by the "natural method"... don't really. A couple of them are average and can read fairly well, but I've yet to see many examples of excellence in Latin with natural method.

 

Of course, everyone is free to do what they find best and what they think suits them the most. I just personally believe that Latin should be studied differently than modern languages if the primary goal is not communication - but that there are enthusiasts to whom it might be, of course.

[Michelle in MO]

I know, I read what you wrote - I'm sorry sorry if I sounded "aggressive", I was more thinking out loud than responding to your specific point (I also read the last paragraph after I responded, we were probably writing at the same time). I should have stated that. ;)

 

I still don't see, though, how Latin is less of a mystery if spoken than if not spoken. I must say that, other than "ideological" reasons, part of the reasons why I disagree with speaking it is because it usually leads to WORSE results in studying than the analytic method. Granted, I haven't done any serious study regarding that, but from the little I interact with nieces, nephews, friends' and colleagues' kids (we have a tradition of studying Latin in Italy, so pretty much everyone studied it at some point) and from the little I visit schools, I see the best results in classrooms with zero spoken Latin but TONS of classical texts (not adapted and not modern Latin writings). All of those kids can also basically read neo-Latin (humanist writings) prima vista, while kids who studied it by the "natural method"... don't really. A couple of them are average and can read fairly well, but I've yet to see many examples of excellence in Latin with natural method.

 

Of course, everyone is free to do what they find best and what they think suits them the most. I just personally believe that Latin should be studied differently than modern languages if the primary goal is not communication - but that there are enthusiasts to whom it might be, of course.

 

Well, I have to admit that I'm speaking rather theoretically :D since I've not studied Latin via the natural method, which I believe Lingua Latina is intended to be. From what I understand, however, from other Latin enthusiasts, Lingua Latina does provide plenty of grammar as well, only I think it is learned more inductively.

 

I did Latin via the normal grammar and translation method, and while the paradigms are planted more or less firmly in my brain, it is still very difficult for me to wrap my brain around the idea of actually speaking Latin. That is one reason why Lingua Latina appeals to me, or the idea of visiting one of these spoken Latin conventicula.

 

From what I gather on these forums and from other friends, the difficulty of mastering Latin grammar is so intense as to become almost mysterious to some of them. Personally, I like the idea of both methods: maintaining a firm grasp on grammar and translation (the analytical method), while spending more time on practicing what I learned with others. My Latin was taken online, through the University of Georgia. They have a highly rated classics department, and the professor, Richard LaFleur, was truly a master. However, although I did practice paradigms, sentences, and translations aloud, it was not quite the same as being in a classroom environment. There was a give and take: since I live in a small town, no Latin is available anywhere near me. Really. So, I had this opportunity to study Latin online with a master, and much time was spent on grammar, but practice was difficult with others. I think the idea of the natural method is not so much a focus on abandoning grammar, but removing some of the inherent fear many experience when trying to master a language with three genders, five declensions, five (or sometimes seven) noun cases, six verb tenses, and all the permutations of active/passive or indicative/imperative/subjunctive. And, studying via the natural method may indeed depend upon how it's handled. I know some who are learning via Lingua Latina and speak very highly of Oerberg's method, and that is intriguing to me.

 

Anyway, this may give some further explanation into my own personal interest in learning about the natural method. :D

[Nan in Mass]

Maybe what you really want is a set of graded readers, something that would let you start using all that grammar and vocab? We are reading Latin now (not real Latin, just fairy tales) and it is definately solidifying and making useful all that grammar I used. I had readings along with my grammar, so they aren't anything new. At this point, I feel like what I need to do to learn Latin is read lots of it, looking up the words I don't know and looking up the grammar if I can't tell how something says what it says. I only translate the most difficult sentences into Englsih; the rest I just read. That might turn out to be just as satisfactory as trying to speak it. We like Fabulae Mirabiles. Ester would probably not approve GRIN (insert a friendly wave to Ester here, who has helped me so much), but we are finding it to be just exactly what we need - stories that we can understand without looking up too much.

-Nan

[cathmom]

I'm all for a bunch of faithful Catholics creating a place to live where Latin is the spoken language and Catholicism is the total cultural context. Where bells ring to call you to Mass...where no meat is sold on Fridays...where confession is more than one hour Saturday morning...where it actually is possible to attend a Saturday Mass that is for Saturday...or Ascension Thursday on Thursday...

 

Sorry, I was daydreaming! Back to the discussion of Latin grammar and trying to speak it.:001_smile:

[MBM]

Some people like to get together to speak Klingon. Doesn't the idea of getting together to speak Latin sound so much better now? :D

 

The Klingon Language Institute for those who might be ignorant of it:

http://www.kli.org/

 

[Nan in Mass]

So to make Latin popular again so you have conversational partners, you need to make a cult TV show in which the most exotic characters speak Latin.

-Nan

[Dee in MI]

Hey, the hot chick in Iron Man 2 speaks Latin!

[Michelle in MO]

Hey, the hot chick in Iron Man 2 speaks Latin!

You're right! She did!

 

Well, my point is that I believe that reviving spoken classical Latin will help increase fluency and (hopefully) decrease fears associated with learning Latin. My online courses were excellent, and served their purpose inasfar as they definitely provided the strong grammatical base. I think hearing and attempting to speak Latin, as well as lots of reading, would provide more of a context, which I lacked, to some degree.

 

My hope this summer is to spend some time in Lingua Latina and gain more of a fluency with reading/hearing spoken Latin, as LL does have the CD, with Hans Oerberg doing the readings.

[Ester Maria]

(I hope I don't sound like I'm arguing. :) I just find the discussion very interesting so I wanted to add a few more thoughts.)

From what I understand, however, from other Latin enthusiasts, Lingua Latina does provide plenty of grammar as well, only I think it is learned more inductively.

... and my 12 year old (the one that isn't crazy about Latin) can read most of the texts from the second book prima vista (I have both LL-1 and LL-2 at home, I just don't use them with the girls unless I want to specifically check something and prove to myself that my methods are better :D), which says enough about their increasing SYNTACTIC complexity (this child has not studied complex syntax yet) - or lack thereof - which is just as important element in a textbook as an increasing morphological and lexical complexity. :)

 

That's basically my main objection to Oerberg: a student finishing LL-2 is syntactically incompetent for reading texts. And this is not Greek we're talking about so that we can get away with morphological hints - in Latin, syntax is VERY important.

 

In the second part of LL-2 that's a bit taken care of, though. But not enough in my opinion. You just cannot replace the native speaker's complexity.

 

Also, I'm not happy with what I consider to be "the lexical imbalance", many lexical items are introduced just too late in the textbooks.

From what I gather on these forums and from other friends, the difficulty of mastering Latin grammar is so intense as to become almost mysterious to some of them.

I don't think it's due to the inherent difficulty of the Latin grammar, I think it's simply due to the lack of culture of learning Latin in most of the western world today. Unfortunately. While a generation or two ago it was a default knowledge of an educated person, today it is no longer, except in maybe Italy (though even there it has gone downhill a LOT).

 

I think that's where the mysterious component you mention comes from, not the difficulty. Unfortunately, except in the almost impossible case of the importance of Latin being restored, I don't think there's a way of properly handling it. Inventing story books in Latin (with numerous mistakes and syntactic simplifying... can't produce a native competence, especially in a foreign cultural context) isn't going to solve it, it's only going to "defer" it.

 

In the beginning stages of learning, I really don't think there's any "harm" in such material (I'm talking about fairy tales in Latin and alike). It's more the issue of "where do you draw the line" for me. At the end of the day, you have to be very clear to yourself about your goals. No better way to learn Latin texts than Latin texts, or to learn a language through its cultural context and its texts; "proxies" will only defer the task and will not make it significantly easier.

They're fun, but that's pretty much all there is about them: the fun component. Excellent to break the routine from time to time, but to base your study on it... I don't think so.

Personally, I like the idea of both methods: maintaining a firm grasp on grammar and translation (the analytical method), while spending more time on practicing what I learned with others.

Ideally, it IS done that way. I totally get what you're trying to say, Michelle, and I fully agree. No better way to learn the language than taking the best of both worlds.

 

But we have to be very, very careful here: we're talking about a different cultural context, and the "practice" element CANNOT go in the direction of our world, while "practicing" we must stay in the mindset of the classical world. That's the only way we're going to save lexical shades of the language from losing their meanings.

 

It's really very late and I can't write the long version now, but something similar happened to Hebrew. In fact, the reason why we understand many religious concepts in Hebrew through culturally totally different eyes is because of this overtranslating and shifting of the meaning in our mind that happened when we applied one word for something that wasn't its exact equivalent, and it NEVER is ("language is not a taxonomy" etc.).

As long as there are native speakers and living culture, no problem - the original shades will remain.

 

BUT if we have a culture that nobody lives or a language that's only "holy" and we attempt to view it from the outside, words will lose their original connections. So we will get utter nonsense that "tfila" means "prayer" (no, it DOESN'T - not in the context of Judaism; the notion of "prayer" as known in non-Jewish world is a foreign cultural concept that entered Judaism and did it a LOT of harm, since "Jewish prayer" has little to do with that, on a fundamental level, and that 'mistake' has entered our minds and our relationship to tfila), or that "ani maamin" means "I believe" (totally, totally wrong idea hidden in it, but today, the verb DID start to mean the belief, even more so, the kind of belief that is in the opposition with "knowledge" - again, a dichotomy unknown in the Jewish world that way - so when you have non-religious kids who read Jewish texts today as speakers of modern Hebrew, they don't fundamentally understand the words because of the semantic shifts that have occurred).

 

That's why I emphasize and maybe even overemphasize the importance of the cultural context you wish to cover. If "currus" is going to mean anything other than "currus", you're making a semantic shift that didn't occur naturally with the development of the language and you're burning one more bridge between you and the text of another culture and another time.

 

My kids maybe cannot chat in Latin, but they're establishing a real diachronic communication with the text - and if I've taught them THAT, my job here is done.

I'm not teaching them the language as a set of words and rules to be combined and workable with; I'm teaching them also a cultural and a semantic code, and using it in a different context - or sometimes using it AT ALL - might produce a contra effect to my goal.

 

That's why I and a lot of other people are so adamant about NOT speaking Latin, minimizing the active usage of it and focusing on the reading fluency from the linguistic point of view, and on syntactic and semantic shades from a cultural and - if you wish - "psychological" one, and on a proper explication de texte (diachronic first! Because the one who doesn't understand a text in diachrony will never understand it in synchrony on "universal level" etc.).

We like Fabulae Mirabiles. Ester would probably not approve GRIN (insert a friendly wave to Ester here, who has helped me so much), but we are finding it to be just exactly what we need - stories that we can understand without looking up too much.

-Nan

My kids discovered those too! :lol: And Asterix and Obelix, and Winnie the Pooh in Latin.

My approach is, "it doesn't count as a schoolwork", but I stopped actively hiding such stuff from them. :D

[Nan in Mass]

Are you saying that at this point in history, when the Roman catholic church is no longer using it as universal language, we are facing a choice about Latin: keep it a dead language or continue it as living language? And that if we choose to keep it a living language, it may jeapordize our ability to understand it as an ancient one? Hasn't this already not-happened many times? Italian and other romance languages are living versions of Latin. Their existance doesn't mean we can't understand ancient Latin, does it? When the living versions of Latin first started diverge, weren't people able to distinguish the various meanings depending on the context? Wouldn't that be the case here? I'm abysmally ignorant about these things, so I am probably missing something, GRIN a large chunk of history, perhaps. Maybe I should switch to Klingon. Or make up my own language. We almost are, at the rate we are mangling French, sigh. I hope you are finding this truly very interesting discussion as amusing as I am. We are discussing whether we can kill something that is already dead (or at least, considered dead by most people) and one of the people discussing it is living in a country that has used the supposedly dead language for thousands of years without stop.

 

Switching to something more serious... I have a question. It is going to take a bit of explaining, though. This is a very timely discussion for me because yesterday, my youngest informed me that he still would like to read The Aeneid. This was a surprise. He is 15, in 9th grade, and has complained about putting precious time and energy into learning Latin for years, legitimately, I think, since he is headed for engineering or something like it. I have been unwilling to drop Latin entirely because we put a lot of time and effort into getting through the grammar and should finally have gotten to the fun part. This didn't seem like a good time to quit, to me. This is something I have been learning along with my children, and I certainly don't want to waste it all by stopping here. We do have little time to spend on it, though, since math,science, French, English take precidence. We did the fairy tales this last year as a way of treading water and because although I was able to do Ecce Romani 3, my youngest wasn't. Mostly, I think, because he wasn't applying or didn't remember his grammar, and he had trouble picking out which words' meanings he needed to look up and was unwilling to double check the meaning of them all. I was going to continue sort of treading water with things like the fairy tales until he could do ER 3 with less effort, ER seeming like the best bridge between modern made-up Latin and The Aeneid for us, since we have done, albeit badly, ER1+2. And I thought that if we never quite made it, it wouldn't matter, because my son was no longer interested in his childhood goal of reading The Aeneid. After yesterday, I am having to reassess. The fairy-tale reading has been fun and it no longer takes us ten minutes to get through a very simple paragraph. My son noticed and took the opportunity to remind me about The Aeneid. I know less than my son about The Aeneid. He, at least, has read children's adaptations of the story. I am not knowledgeable enough to be at all familiar with our choices of books and methods. I know that we are trying to do something with less than minimal time and effort, mucking about on our own, that normally takes hard work and expert guidance. We are, however, willing to try. So here is my question (finally - sorry): You said in your post, "...proxies will only defer the task and not make it significantly easier." Does this mean that the switch to reading "real" Latin is a hard leap no matter when you choose to make the leap? And that we might as well make the leap now rather than later? I am planning on trying ER 3 again Mon. to see if it has gotten easier. That may answer my question about whether we have or have not learned anything doing the fairy tales. It seemed like my son wasn't learning anything when we tried before, but it is hard to tell if that was because he was unwilling to put any effort into it, or whether he didn't have the grounding, or whether he needed to gel the grounding (I don't know the educational term for that - sorry). My guess was that it was a combination of all three and that the fairytales would help with the first and last, if not the second. I guess my real question is whether you think this is a step that we just plain have to make an effort and leap, or whether we can build a ramp and stroll up it with minimal effort. And if you think we can reach reading The Aeneid at the follow-the-plot level of understanding by strolling up a ramp, can you make any sort of guess about how long it will take us? Can we do it with a 20-minute-a-day-for-two-years ramp (leaving ourselves a year to read The Aeneid)? Not that we aren't going to try anyway, but forewarned is forearmed and all that... I consider the fairy tales a smashing success because at the very least, they rekindled his childhood goal and made him laugh. He xeroxed a bit of Fi-Fae-Fo to use a spell in his D+D games. : )

 

-Nan

[jvenice]

Hi Nan,

 

I understand the difficult choices you are making in curriculum decisions. At a conference two years ago, I was soul searching about curriculum for our school and how much time we would devote to Latin. I had a great conversation with a linguist there who spoke Latin, Greek, Italian, Hebrew, and various other languages (and of course English). My question was concerning how much time to spend on ancient languages vs. modern languages in high school. Though he loves Latin most of all, he said I would be doing our students a disservice if they did not learn at least one modern foreign language in high school (the rhetoric stage). I thing it is lovely that your son's study of Latin has kindled a flame for literature and learning. Keep that going. Now that he has the foundation that Latin provides, you will find it easier to introduce a spoken European language. My husband is an Engineer. He travels extensively and has to speak Spanish and German. It would also be helpful if he could speak Korean and Chinese, but we certainly didn't learn those languages! Best of luck to you.:)

[Nan in Mass]

Thank you!

[Ester Maria]

PART I.

 

Nan. :) I thought a lot about how to reply, since your reply and you as an interlocutor certainly deserve a reply on some of the rather valid points you bring up, but the argument you're introducing might be getting out of the format of the forum (if I'm interpreting your post correctly) and I'm not sure I'm willing to participate in an academic-level discussion on these (or any, in fact) boards. Not only because things that border Italian linguistics, on this level, are potentially identity revealing for me, but also because such a discussion would require a lot of effort from both sides - both from me and you. We'd have to dust off those books from the shelves, start quoting this and that, start talking on the concrete textual examples and analyzing them, reconsider the equivalence, or lack thereof, of certain cultural concepts throughout Italy (Italy as a land) throughout millenia, etc. It would just not be a forum thing, and, if I am to be completely honest, I'm not sure I'm *willing* to dwell so much on the topic even if we took it to private correspondence, because it's a time consuming thing, not something I can dedicate half an hour of my time to while browsing the internet and sipping tea - and I usually limit my forum participation to that level, without going... serious, to a direct suggested by the first part of your post. It's also not in my *narrow* area of expertise so other than laziness to get into it, there is a fear that I might be fundamentally misunderstanding some things that we would inevitably get to, since Latin-Italian connections - particularly the changing semantics - are something that I, if we're talking on that level, have a rather basic knowledge about.

 

That being said, the bare bones of what I would tell you if we talked about it "seriously" would be this.

Are you saying that at this point in history, when the Roman catholic church is no longer using it as universal language, we are facing a choice about Latin: keep it a dead language or continue it as living language?

We are not facing that choice now. The Catholic Church is facing the choice on whether Latin, and the understanding of the dogma through the "Latin lenses" and through the precise concepts they understand it through now, is of a crucial importance to it. Remember, they have already given up on Latin a long time ago, they retain it now as a sort of "fashion accessory", other than the top levels of the Church that deal with the most comprehensive and complex scholarship. For everybody else - not only for an average Catholic, but for an average priest as well, I would dare to claim - Latin is no longer essential to understanding the nuances of the dogma. I'm not Catholic but, from what I see around me and from what people tell me, they do very fine without it.

 

Abandoning Latin is, of course, only a part of a wider process, the process of transforming Catholicism from "a way of life" into "a religion". And again, to draw the parallel with the Jewish world, we are facing a similar choice in this generation. Giving up on a serious knowledge of Hebrew on the level of masses is parallel to giving up on a usage of Latin on the level of masses, even when the two are not spoken languages. OF COURSE that "at the top" both Latin and Hebrew will be fine because there will be people who will take care they don't die and they don't end up misunderstood, but the gap that has been creating from the "top" and the "bottom" is becoming a very serious one.

 

You must also take care of the wording: Latin never really "died" in Catholic circles, not even as a spoken language. It "died" among the masses in the context of "religious bilingualism" in Italian and Latin, which then switched to Italian with occasional fashionable Latin, parallel with the process of the marginalization of Latin in the school curricula that has been going on in the past century.

When you make that switch, you no longer understand Latin because you're not brought up with a systematic training in both and with the understanding that Italian developed as a different language, that Italian is NOT a linear sequence of Latin (again, if we talk on "that" level, that's one of the FUNDAMENTAL mistakes people make; of course that, in a caffe or on forums, I'll talk about Romance languages that "developed out of Latin" and alike, but strictly speaking, that's a very misleading formulation).

 

Continue it as a living language, sure, but as WHAT KIND of a living language? Latin-Italian diglossia has been an academic (in some periods) and, more importantly, a religious one, it was NOT a situation of a full, balanced bilingualism, even in historical periods which we like to mark as Latin-friendly. As a matter of fact, even if we go back to the epoch of post-classical Latin, but it still being the language of communication, we will find a diglossia with what's usually referred to as "vulgar forms" (even though some of them don't even emerge from Latin in the same linear fashion, some Italian dialects to the present day retain some such characteristics). And even more, what we often disregard in colloquial speech, classical Latin is more often than not stylistically marked, just as are various neo-Latin literary productions throughout the epochs.

Keeping "Catholic Latin register" as an alive one is not an issue AT ALL, actually.

 

But back to the point: when you have a coexistence (and by now I hope we're all aware of the fact that the two COEXISTED rather than one replaced the other one), and it's not total, you don't switch registers that easily, even if you have a mental idea on using two systems as opposed to two variations of the same system. So you know that "anima" and "anima" aren't exactly equivalents, even though you use the same word in both registers, and you consciously limit the usage of one register on specific contexts (academia, religion, law, minimal practical matters). With time, those contexts get lesser and lesser importance, since one language is favored.

 

It's been one of the two, historically: either Greece (where they ended up having an "official language" that very, very few people spoke and nobody really knew - before they made a switch to dimithiki as opposed to katharevousa; I have to say, though, that the Greek situation is also a lot more complex than that and that I would do it a wrong if I attempted to tackle it here too), either Italy (where people gradually gave up on most of the registers of one language, and fully kept the other one).

 

Now that we got that part down, the essence is this: people who are attempting to speak Latin outside of the surviving active and documented registers are not speaking Latin - they're speaking a conlang, a reconstruction of a register which wasn't saved; even people who genuinely do try to speak ONLY based on the documented registers (thus "applying" those to new contexts and assuming things, without inventing new vocabulary) usually mess up the linguistic part (not often on a very "obvious" level of not getting the cases correctly, but we get more into syntax, yes, and if we get to locutions, yes) and there's no guarantee for that kind of reconstruction, etc.

[Ester Maria]

PART II.

 

The catch is here: if you GET USED to something which is not necessarily the case (thus pretend you're a Roman family with a daily life and conversations which are so culturally similar to ours :D, etc.), you start treating it as if it were the case, and that affects how you treat things that were the case.

I prefer to spend time on that which WAS the case, and of instructing very clearly what was that which was the case, and which registers we don't have left. :)

 

The completely different story are those that not only invent and reconstruct things, but which actively want to apply Latin to our cultural context (Harry Potter in Latin and alike). Though, in a way, those are a lot more innocuous than the former, you still face some of the "old" and some of the "new" problems. It's a conlang, it's not Latin, it's not Latin culture, it's not Latin mindset behind those words and formulations. Of course that nothing bad will happen if your kids read HP in Latin, and KNOW everything which I just wrote, and HP is fun and not a part of Latin studies. That way, you make a mental "impediment" to confusing of registers and semantic shifts.

And that if we choose to keep it a living language, it may jeapordize our ability to understand it as an ancient one? Hasn't this already not-happened many times? Italian and other romance languages are living versions of Latin.

I think I already responded on this one above, but I want to underline it one more time: Italian is NOT, by ANY stretch of imagination, "a living version of Latin". Well, not on this level at least.

 

With the coexistence of two languages, the misunderstandings didn't happen - at least not on the huge scale. It IS happening in the age of poor Latin instruction, crazy modern pedagogy applied to classics, and the idea that the non-existing living active registers of the language should still be taught. And not everyone teaches that way, BECAUSE of that and BECAUSE people notice what's going on.

Their existance doesn't mean we can't understand ancient Latin, does it? When the living versions of Latin first started diverge, weren't people able to distinguish the various meanings depending on the context? Wouldn't that be the case here?

It doesn't mean per se, but if we start treating Italian ONLY as a "different stage of Latin" it WILL happen. We will no longer be able to understand that the lexical equivalents are not necessarily semantic equivalents (I think I just managed to sum up half of my point :D).

 

Maybe I'm talking too "professionally", so for the sake of our readers, I'll explain that concrete example. What "anima" means in Latin is NOT what it means in Italian. EVEN IF part of the meaning is shared, EVEN IF the essence of the meaning is shared (it's not necessarily, though), the overlapping is not total. It's like, you have two circles with SOME area of overlapping, but NOT with total overlapping.

Treating them as synonymous, as a same word (outside of the Catholic register ;), I'm talking classical antiquity), is a VERY DANGEROUS mistake for your understanding of the classical world.

 

To paraphrase "linguistics 101", you can't exactly take "elements" of the language (various words) and just "replace" the labels. That way of studying a language (a modern one too!) is fundamentally wrong, because the language is a STRUCTURE, not a mere sum of its parts - but also a sum of RELATIONS BETWEEN those parts, contexts of meaning in which some parts can stand.

 

The problem with Latin is that the registers we study (again, NOT talking about Catholic stuff now, that's a different issue and I hope I more or less covered it above) no longer actively exist and the only way not to misunderstand them is to keep the meanings clear and SEPARATE from other contexts.

I just can't stress enough how important that is, because I know the effects of it on Hebrew (people from the Orthodox world DREAD the way Hebrew is taught through modern Hebrew and conceptual equivalents in other languages, because it leads to total, but TOTAL misunderstanding of concepts), and more and more I see the effects of that way of teaching Latin, if the final purpose is the understanding of the classical antiquity and how it relates to the world of today.

 

Basically, I'll say the dreaded sentence I heard once which I think describes that pedagogy, without aiming it personally at you or Andrew or anybody else who thinks differently about these issues - somebody once said that "natural method", and its variations, is a recipe that perfectly suits - intellectual laziness. Unfortunately, what's easiest is not necessarily what's the best, especially in cases like this. The STUDENT might not see the repercussions of that kind of instruction when they learn, but if within a few generations we LOSE what's left of the nuanced understanding of that world aside from the very few circles that will adamantly continue to treat it as a closed register that we're not to interfere with, we can blame it only on our modern pedagogy and the idea that instruction should be driven by fun.

 

Of course, I fully realize that what I'm saying is saying in the context of the goal which is not the goal of 99% of people who study Latin at some point in their lives (for vocabulary, or cultural literacy, or whatever), but if we're talking on the level of 1% - and I was unlucky enough to be born in those circles, that adamantly opposed some of those things and ways of teaching, not only Latin - this was an approximation of the answer "why". I can't explain it any better, any more reasonably, any more coherently, in the format of forums. If you insist on the discussion "on another level", we'll have to take it to personal correspondence, though, I like I said, I prefer to just end it at agreeing that we don't agree, since such a discussion is incredibly time and energy consuming which we're both better spend at other projects in life. :D

 

I'll reply to the Aeneid part later, sorry for the length, but I swear, it's the SHORTEST I could do, and I cut off half of what I wrote anyway (so if there's some incoherence along the way, it's because of that :)).

[Nan in Mass]

Dear Ester,

 

I put off answering this because I am still thinking about what you said and I wanted to respond with more than "I guess I see at least part of what you mean. I'm thinking about it." And I do see at least part of what you are saying. I spent some time with Native Americans this spring and they complain bitterly about being robbed of learning their languages by being herded up and sent to boarding school, and how they lost much more than just words. They also complain about the way their religion was translated into Christianity in the effort to convert them. As I said, I am thinking about how that relates to ancient Latin and Hebrew. Time is flying by, though, and I don't want you to think that I haven't read your post, so in the meanwhile I would like to say thank you. This is a subject I have always found fascinating. I very much appreciate the time and thought you have spent trying to satisfy my curiosity. Like you, my board time (except when I am planning or panicking) is break-and-tea time, so I agree that this is as far as this discussion need go. I do not know enough about Italian and Latin to argue the points and it certainly would be unfair to ask you to teach me just so I could argue with you. That would be a long endevor indeed : ). And we are very busy. When we are both old and chair-bound, perhaps we can take this up again. Perhaps by then I will know enough to hold up my end of the conversation.

 

Gratefully,

Nan

[MyFourSons]

Well, if you're willing to invent vocabulary and end up speaking a Latin-based constructed language - no problem.

 

If you on the other hand believe that a language is tied to its cultural context and shouldn't be artificially transferred to other ones, then you don't speak it. Even if theoretically you could. ;)

 

I remember people who tried holding lectures in Latin in high school: "Habemus rem A et rem B; inter rebus A et B habemus..."

We protested, it was a sacrilege in our eyes - for Heaven's sake speak Italian to us, Italian is the language of NOW, Latin was the language of THEN and the language of one different culture and one different 'Italy', be it the one of Romans or the one of Humanists. We'll read a text with the perfect reading fluency, really. But we'll discuss it in Italian. We won't speak hybrid Latin-Italian in your class and invent vocabulary or allow our Latin to be blurred by the lexical shades of OUR times. We'll allow Latin to remain intact in its own context.

 

IF Latin is ever to be fully revived, on the international level, with a unifying purpose of revival - as was the case with Hebrew - then I might consider speaking it. Until then, not really.

 

Latin is still the official language of the Catholic church, which has the purpose of unifying people across various continents speaking hundreds if not thousands of different vernaculars. It is still used to publish major church documents. Although it has been ignored by the lay people for quite a while, the clergy still learn it, and the last generation expected to be able to speak it and converse in it are still alive. To me, that makes it very much a living language, even if it is in need of a populist revival.