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The Vatican's Website in Latin

vatican.va

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Re: The Vatican's Website in Latin

#51

Post by Pay08 »

cwnyth wrote: post #44
efskap wrote: post #11

If anyone is interested in learning it, there's nothing better than Ørberg's Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. It's entirely in Latin, including grammar explanations, but it starts out incredibly simple and ramps up gradually with lots of repetition. And that's fun AND effective, since you're immersed rather than grinding tables.

As a former Latin instructor with literally decades of experience, I strongly recommend not relying solely on Ørberg. The outcomes of those who refused to supplement it with a proper grammar and dictionary were far, far behind those who used Wheelock alone. It's very popular online, but it's methodologically bunk.

I've only been on the student side of this (with Hebrew), but that has been my experience as well. These sorts of books can work, but it needs extraordinarily good teachers to do so.

Re: The Vatican's Website in Latin

#52

Post by dhosek »

reaperducer wrote: post #12
jdw64 wrote: post #4

I used to think the Vatican would be old-fashioned, but the writing on its site is more readable than I expected. In particular, while reading the section “Development: Humanism and Posthumanism,” I found it interesting to compare the religious worldview of the West with my own more humanistic worldview. This passage especially stood out to me: > At the application level, AI in the strict sense raises questions about…

People love to wallow in the stereotype that the Catholic Church is old fashioned and anti-science. That's mostly propaganda leftover from 300 years ago. Catholic nuns were instrumental in the development of computers. A Catholic priest is fundamental to the Big Bang Theory†. Dozens of craters on the moon were named by and for Catholic clergy who discovered them. † https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître

I follow a couple Jesuit brothers on Blue Sky who work at the Vatican Observatory. One of them was tapped to receive an award for another astronomer at a ceremony she couldn’t attend. Beforehand, he said that he would be doing this but couldn’t name the astronomer but said that it was someone well-known and I realized that the only contemporary astronomers I could name were either Jesuits or Neil DeGrasse Tyson. (I don’t remember the actual astronomer, but she was none of these).

Amongst scientific clergy, there’s also Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit who was part of the team which discovered the Peking Man fossils (although looking at the Wikipedia page, it appears his legacy is a bit more complicated than one can address in an HN comment).

Re: The Vatican's Website in Latin

#53

Post by aidenn0 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #22
mcookly wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing this! My wife and I have been interested in refreshing our Latin from high school, and we've been looking for good resources. We've also toyed with the idea of learning it as a living language, which seems to be an increasingly-popular method among autodidacts these days.

Duolingo has a Latin course.

After trying Duolingo a bit myself and seeing my family members try it, I've become convinced that Duolingo is worse than doing nothing, because it does a much better job of convincing you that you're learning than it does actually teaching you.

Re: The Vatican's Website in Latin

#54

Post by bigstrat2003 »

throw0101a wrote: post #15
osullivj wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Catholic Social Teaching: 19th C origins. An alternate base to Marxism for social justice.

> Catholic Social Teaching: 19th C origins. An alternate base to Marxism for social justice. See specifically perhaps the encyclical Rerum novarum ( Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor ) from 1891: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_social_teaching Various others over the decades.

Rerum Novarum is an absolute banger. I had the pleasure of discovering it thanks to the discourse surrounding Leo XIV choosing his papal name, and I'm really glad I did. Leo XIII had some really insightful things to say about the problems surrounding workers' rights.

Re: The Vatican's Website in Latin

#55

Post by satvikpendem »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #22
mcookly wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing this! My wife and I have been interested in refreshing our Latin from high school, and we've been looking for good resources. We've also toyed with the idea of learning it as a living language, which seems to be an increasingly-popular method among autodidacts these days.

Duolingo has a Latin course.

Duolingo simply does not work for actually learning a language. It's better to use something where you practice immersion learning, preferably with other people and there are apps for this online too.

Re: The Vatican's Website in Latin

#57

Post by riffraff »

DeathArrow wrote: post #56

I imagine a parallel universe where Latin is used as lingua franca instead of English. If you squint enough you can see English as a barbarised form of Latin.

It'd be more a return to the past, we still had a lot of latin in science a couple hundred years ago.

One very fun thing I discovered recently is that Dante (and presumably other people in the middle ages) thought that Latin was a constructed language designed to go over linguistic differences, and that's why it had a proper grammar, unlike romance languages :)

Re: The Vatican's Website in Latin

#58

Post by vintermann »

efskap wrote: post #49
cwnyth wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former Latin instructor with literally decades of experience, I strongly recommend not relying solely on Ørberg. The outcomes of those who refused to supplement it with a proper grammar and dictionary were far, far behind those who used Wheelock alone. It's very popular online, but it's methodologically bunk.

Thanks for the perspective! I guess it depends on the outcomes in question If they're measured by traditional academic metrics (parsing, recalling declension tables, translating into English), then Wheelock's grammar-first approach really does optimize for that. On the other hand Ørberg optimizes more for reading fluency and intuitive comprehension, which is harder to measure on a standard Latin exam.

There's also the thing about "the best exercise plan is the one you actually follow". The direct method isn't "bunk", it's a very good method if you take into account that students don't have boundless enthusiasm and rote learning ability.

I learned English with the direct method (the teacher was an old Esperantist free to do his own thing) and German with the traditional grammar memorization way, and I wouldn't be able to write this post in German.

Re: The Vatican's Website in Latin

#59

Post by drdaeman »

satvikpendem wrote: post #55
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duolingo has a Latin course.

Duolingo simply does not work for actually learning a language. It's better to use something where you practice immersion learning, preferably with other people and there are apps for this online too.

It sure does a little bit, but a) quality varies a lot - some courses can get you from zero to dos cervesas por favor, some are just poorly structured noise that has no chance of sticking in mind; b) doesn’t explain grammar (it’s an exception when it does), so results greatly vary on preconditions like languages you’re already familiar with and can relate - anything too foreign and you’ll have hard time trying to understand how those examples generalize.

Duolingo it got me just enough Spanish (with zero prior knowledge) to get around, communicate basic needs (like a caveman, sure) and understand simple instructions, all without putting serious effort to learn language properly (putting serious effort into it) but only casually, as a side task.

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