51–60 of 73 posts
It's fun to set your browser preferences to Latin (ISO 639-1: "la") and see what sites respect that.
Do you have any examples of sites that do that?
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Second-year high school students do read actual Roman texts, but they typically do so very slowly and laboriously - a day’s homework might be translating a single paragraph. I studied Latin from 7th grade through my early undergraduate years (1990s to early 00s), and that dynamic didn’t change as much as you might expect - the focus remains on deeply reading a few texts, rather than building the fluency required to q…
How could you not gain that fluency after years? Every human naturally learns languages; you don't need a Ph.D. at all.
There isn't a firehose of new text being created in Latin, and you never (or very rarely) scan over something to find out what it's about, extract a quick fact from it, or decide if it's worth reading. You know what's in it, you know the standard take-away from it, there's a good chance you've read the highlights in translation already, you may even know one or two hair-splitting academic controversies about it, and you are sitting down for a good hour or several hours with it. It's a completely different kind of reading from scanning a web site or a newspaper to find something worth reading more closely, looking for the answer to a concrete question, or scanning something to decide if you can afford to not really read it.
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> Latin had remained the most important language for the publication of scientific works and for international correspondence between well-educated people ... and important to the Catholic Church.
That is right, but while I have found it very useful even today to read in original the works of Georg Bauer, Newton, von Linné, Gauss and the like, there is much less interest in reading the many ecclesiastic documents that treated subjects with only a limited temporal relevance (unless you are a historian of that time period). In general, I strongly recommend to read carefully in original the scientific literature…
Documents that contain administrative minutiae or legal rulings or whatever may only have value for historical study, yes, but one major reason for the very existence and authority of the Catholic Church is to serve as guardian of her doctrines and their development, and to communicate them faithfully across generations. Meaning, the doctrines of the faith are never made obsolete, or else the faith, and certainly the authority of the Church, is undermined. The understanding of them can be deepened and expanded over time, but the doctrines themselves are fixed.
Foster was basically the rallying point for people opposed to the grammarian methods of teaching languages that started in Classics but ended up taking over how foreign language is taught in most schools and contexts. Virtually everyone actually fluent in Latin today (reading, listening, or speaking) either learned directly from his a tutor using Ossa Latinitatis Sola or was downstream of that. Striking contrast with…
> Striking contrast with the most well known classicist in the UK being unable, by their own admission, to comfortably read Latin text basically at all. That's hard to believe. A friend was a Latin teacher; high school students read actual Roman Latin in their second year. I've heard that few can speak Latin 'correctly', because the skill is almost useless - you can't talk to Romans or almost anyone else; it's all wr…
Not useless at all - speaking Latin helps you to better appreciate both prose and poetry. Understanding the sound of the language helps you to appreciate the word play and nuance. Also as children we learn language mostly by listening and speaking, not by reading, so it makes sense to learn Latin in that way.
There's been significant research on reconstructing classical pronunciation. But Latin was spoken as a primary language for over a thousand years, so the pronunciation naturally changed over that time and there were of course regional dialects - some of which evolved into Romance languages.
In reading Latin, it doesn't have a lot of silent letters (it does have some), so it's quite easy to read aloud a Latin sentence once you understand the basic phonetics. In classical times poems like the Aeneid were recited aloud, so doing so today makes sense.
Fluency is a somewhat subjective concept, but the growth of the internet has spawned a growing community of Latin speakers internationally. (I speak Latin at roughly a B2 level and am constantly improving).
If you find this article fascinating, and are intrigued by the possibility of learning to speak a dead language like Latin, I'm here to tell you that it's probably a lot easier than you think. To start off, there is a textbook that I think really resonates with hackers. It's called "Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata" (The Latin Language Illustrated through itself) and it teaches Latin in a fun and mind-altering way. Th…
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It's because you only ever translate but never speak or synthesize latin exept in a few church circles where it is or was used as Lingua Franca (such as depicted in Conclave last year). I understand the original post to be about the profound difference this makes in acquiring a language intuitively.
I'm skeptical how much speaking/synthesizing the language matters if you only care about reading. I can read German moderately well (can get through newspaper articles pretty easily, and novels with some effort), but I have very little ability to synthesize it (it'd take me quite a lot of effort to construct a sentence in writing, and I can't really speak at all). But the lack of ability to produce the language doesn…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Second-year high school students do read actual Roman texts, but they typically do so very slowly and laboriously - a day’s homework might be translating a single paragraph. I studied Latin from 7th grade through my early undergraduate years (1990s to early 00s), and that dynamic didn’t change as much as you might expect - the focus remains on deeply reading a few texts, rather than building the fluency required to q…
How could you not gain that fluency after years? Every human naturally learns languages; you don't need a Ph.D. at all.
... in the first few years of life. Beyond that, it's an intentional, conscious and often challenging effort for many.
Some people, even as adults, are far more adept at learning new languages than others. For the rest of us, it typically requires devotion to the subject for years.
When Pope Benedict resigned he announced it in Latin unexpectedly. Many present did not understand what he was saying. https://insidethevatican.com/magazine/pope-benedicts-resigna...
Time will tell, but after more than two millennia this might have been the last significant announcement made in Latin.
When Pope Benedict resigned he announced it in Latin unexpectedly. Many present did not understand what he was saying. https://insidethevatican.com/magazine/pope-benedicts-resigna...