The Vatican's Latinist
newcriterion.com
The Vatican's Latinist
1–10 of 63 posts
Re: The Vatican's Latinist
#2I 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.
Re: The Vatican's Latinist
#3The 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 computer science can also reap rewards which let us have the freedom to live the lives we want. Just because what we do is useful or hard doesn't mean it needs to be financially fulfilling.
Re: The Vatican's Latinist
#4I 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?
Re: The Vatican's Latinist
#5I 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.
Ditto. I totally wasted the years I had to sit in a Latin classroom...
I've bought a book of Latin stories that we used in school, and I'm looking forward to diving back in. If my 13-year-old self knew that, he'd be horrified.
Re: The Vatican's Latinist
#6I 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?
Labor omnia vincit!
Re: The Vatican's Latinist
#7I 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?
Lingua Latina by Hans Orberg.
https://www.hackettpublishing.com/lingua-latina-per-se-illus...
Re: The Vatican's Latinist
#8Anyone interested in this might enjoy reading about Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti[1] and other "hyperpolyglots" in Michael Erard's Babel No More.[2]
An excerpt from the Introduction:
"...Mezofanti liked to quip that he knew 'fifty languages and Bolognese.' During his lifetime, he put enough of those on display -- among them Arabic and Hebrew (biblical and Rabbinic), Chaldean, Coptic, Persian, Turkish, Albanian, Maltese, certainly Latin and Bolognese, but also Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, and English, as well as Polish, Hungarian, Chinese, Syrian, Amharic, Hindustani, Gujarati, Basque, and Romanian -- that he frequently appeared in rapturous accounts of visitors to Bologna and Rome. Some compared him to Mithradates, the ancient Persian king who could speak the language of each of the twenty-two territories he governed. The poet Lord Byron, who once lost a multilingual cursing contest with Mezzofanti, called him 'a monster of languages, the Briareus of parts of speech, a walking polyglott, and more, -- who ought to have existed at the time of the Tower of Babel, as universal interpreter.' ...
"On one occasion, Pope Gregory XVI (1765-1846), a friend of Mezzofanti, arranged for dozens of international students to surprise him. When the signal was given, the students knelt before Mezzofanti and then rose quickly, talking to him 'each in his own tongue, with such an abundance of words and such a volubility of tone, that, in the jargon of dialects, it was almost impossible to hear, much less to understand them.' Mezzofanti didn't flinch but 'took them up singly, and replied to each in his own language.' The pope declared the cardinal to be victorious. Mezzofanti could not be bested."
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezzofanti
[2] - https://www.amazon.com/Babel-No-More-Extraordinary-Language/...
Re: The Vatican's Latinist
#9The 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…
"If you don’t know Latin, you know nothing! I had my first experience of Latin forty years ago, and I have not been bored by Latin for ten minutes in these forty years. Latin is one of the greatest things that ever happened in human history." -- Renigald Foster
Re: The Vatican's Latinist
#10I 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.
One of my best friends studied under him in Rome, he had some amazing stories to tell.