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The Vatican's Latinist

newcriterion.com

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Re: The Vatican's Latinist

#51

Post by mncharity »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #49
mncharity wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nifty. I went looking for google translate style audio, and found the Advanced > Audio button, and hit a bug. Page load; for Chinese input, enter "中文 輸入"; Translate; Audio; surprised by English input and Chinese spaced having cat and ffmpeg command lines. Feature idea: permit repeatedly playing the audio for just a part of the phrase. Often when using ggl translate, I want to rehear just a syllable or word I'm unsure…

Sorry! Thank you for exploring the Advanced features, I put a lot of effort into those, but they need more explaining. I'm pleased that you actually looked at it though :). The audio feature doesn't actually play audio. It's supposed to generate input commands to put into ffmpeg. I would write more documentation, but my priority is to get the existing documentation translated to Chinese. I asked 4 friends over the pa…

> get the existing documentation translated to Chinese

http://opennmt.net/ links to a "Live system" with a Chinese option. Discussed on infoworld[1].

FWIW, its translation of "This is a test." was at least recognized by google translate.

> audio [...] using only client-side JavaScript

It looks like the audio starts out as small mp3 files, which are then concatenated? There are WebAudio-based libraries both for playing one file after another, and for concatenating them for download.[2] For the mp4 subtitles, hmm, well, even if nothing else, there's ffmpeg.js[3] (but fonts might be an issue?).

Thanks for your work. :)

[1] http://www.infoworld.com/article/3152050/artificial-intellig... [2] For example (merely the first one I saw): https://github.com/jackedgson/crunker [3] https://github.com/Kagami/ffmpeg.js

Re: The Vatican's Latinist

#52

Post by JoeDaDude »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #29
DrScump wrote: post #28

My favorite quote: About this method he said, “You don’t need a hydrology course to learn to swim. You don’t point at the water and say, ‘This is water, this is how water works.’ you just throw the babies in. ”

I agree completely. Language is alive, and learning words is much easier for me if they're in context. I'm not learning Latin, but I am learning Chinese. I wrote http://pingtype.github.io to put spaces between words, colours for tones, pinyin romanisation, and a literal translation on the line below. I could probably do the same for Latin. First I'm doing English-to-Chinese (the other way), then I might try Taiwanese…

I'd be interested in a Latin version. Your description sounds exactly like what I need.

Re: The Vatican's Latinist

#53

Post by JoeDaDude »

_spoonman wrote: post #4
scop wrote: post #2

I have read many articles across different blogs all highlighting Foster's amazing career. I studied Latin in high school and regret that I was not more engaged at the time. I am thrilled to learn of the publishing of 'Ossa Latinitatis Sola' and will take it as an opportunity to give Latin another, more purposeful, go in the near future.

Any advice for someone like me who has never taken Latin but would like to learn?

This is a stretch but there is a cottage industry that churns out translations of children's books into Latin. Search for "Winnie Ille Puh" or "Cattus Patasatus" and that will lead to several others. This was likely started by Charles Schulz and company who had a Latin version of the Peanuts Philosophy published, a version which is now a rare collector's item. [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Peanuts-Philosophers-Latin-version-2-...

Re: The Vatican's Latinist

#54

Post by thaumasiotes »

InitialLastName wrote: post #45
thaumasiotes wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the grammar (and thus the meaning) is sometimes driven by the meter What do you mean by this? The closest I can come to making sense of it is that some Latin words obligatorily appear as the second word in the sentence, but it seems like you must mean something different?

I'm pulling from my studies of ~10 years ago, but IIRC there are points (noun and adjective endings?) where diacritical marks can change the meaning of the sentence. Unlike, say, Spanish, these marks are not written, and frequently have to be interpreted from language cues, including the meter.

That's basically correct -- some case endings differ only by vowel length and are therefore not distinguished in standard Latin writing, which doesn't indicate vowel length in any way. (Old Latin writing sometimes did.) "Via", in nominative case, meaning "the road" as the subject of a sentence, is written identically to "via", in ablative case, meaning "by the road", but the 'a' of the ablative case ending is longer.

However, you can't describe this as "the meter driving the grammar". The grammar requires the same cases and vowel lengths regardless of the meter you're trying to achieve. Rather, we modern-day people reading Latin poetry can use the meter to help us determine what was originally written. All of the causal influence is from grammar to meter, not the other way around.

Re: The Vatican's Latinist

#55

Post by JoeDaDude »

bshimmin wrote: post #13
_spoonman wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any advice for someone like me who has never taken Latin but would like to learn?

My advice would be to have reasonable expectations. Latin isn't easy to learn - you can't practise talking to real people, it has plentiful grammar, there isn't so much vocabulary (relatively) but many words have a vast variety of meanings depending on context, and sentence structure is entirely alien to English speakers. It is, essentially, quite hard (though easier than Classical Greek). I studied Latin to degree l…

> you can't practise talking to real people

I have not tried this myself, but there is a skype channel used to converse in Latin [1]. I'm sure the quality varies widely, but it is there.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T9V04fDh6o

Re: The Vatican's Latinist

#56

Post by Bromskloss »

> Sundays were not off days but day-long excursions into the countryside with twenty-page packets of Latin texts: to Cicero’s birthplace, Tiberius’s cave at Sperlonga, Horace’s villa in the Sabine mountains, and many other locations. The course was free and no one received any official credit for taking it—Foster wanted only people who loved Latin for its own sake. “Summer school” became a kind of legend in Rome, particularly within the American expatriate community (it was taught in English and attracted mostly Americans).

Does he still do this course?

Re: The Vatican's Latinist

#58

Post by Bromskloss »

emmelaich wrote: post #32
0xCMP wrote: post #3

The industry we do I think we are well suited to appreciating the devotion you can give to a craft or knowing something well. It's pretty inspiring and also shocking how someone could be so devoted to something for so long and how little it gave him other than what he intrinsically got from it. We should be thankful that we live in a perfect time for those of us who want to devote ourselves to engineering and compute…

An uncle of mine was a priest who more or less fluent in English, Latin and Italian. Also Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinean Pidgin English) for that matter from when he was a missionary. He spent quite a lot of time in the Vatican and may well have been one of Foster's students. I sometimes think whether his great talents were wasted as a priest* but stories like this help me think they were not. * there were expectations…

> there were expectations of you going into the priesthood if you were the eldest son in an Irish Catholic family.

Doesn't that make for an overabundance of priests?

Re: The Vatican's Latinist

#59

Post by InitialLastName »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #54
InitialLastName wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pulling from my studies of ~10 years ago, but IIRC there are points (noun and adjective endings?) where diacritical marks can change the meaning of the sentence. Unlike, say, Spanish, these marks are not written, and frequently have to be interpreted from language cues, including the meter.

That's basically correct -- some case endings differ only by vowel length and are therefore not distinguished in standard Latin writing, which doesn't indicate vowel length in any way. (Old Latin writing sometimes did.) "Via", in nominative case, meaning "the road" as the subject of a sentence, is written identically to "via", in ablative case, meaning "by the road", but the 'a' of the ablative case ending is longer.…

That's pretty much what I meant... A naturally fluent reader of Latin poetry would have had to follow the same process of inferences (drawing from a far more intuitive and internalized model of the meter, of course).

Re: The Vatican's Latinist

#60

Post by wyclif »

coldcode wrote: post #26
GnarfGnarf wrote: post #14

I wish I had had a teacher like that when Latin was being shoved down my throat. I so rebelled, I knew less Latin in my sixth year than I did in my fourth. The wasted hours of rosa, rosam, rosae, rosa . However, it did enable me to become fluent in Spanish in two months. Fluent enough to teach high school physics, in Spanish, at the Instituto Americano of La Paz.

My favorite teacher ever was my high school latin teacher. I took latin for 3 years, each class was packed as everyone loved being there. In a public US high school at that. Today I doubt there is a single public high school in the US teaching latin.

It's increasingly rare. I had 4 years of Latin in HS, in public school (N.B. tax-funded government sponsored school for you non-American readers). I think I was the last student in the school district to do that, because after the teacher retired, who was exceptional, they cut the program from the curriculum.
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