For anyone curious, this is one of the best places to learn about some early Indo-European languages:
The Vatican's Latinist (2017)
61–70 of 73 posts
Re: The Vatican's Latinist (2017)
#62I've mentioned here that I got to study with him in his summer course the very last year it was held in Rome (when he got sick and ultimately came back to the U.S.). He was a really cool guy and teacher of some really cool students, many of whom are still teaching Latin with their own spins on it. This article was published in 2017, so it doesn't mention that Foster subsequently died in 2020.
He's quite a character! I found a great video[0] of him speaking for over an hour to a classroom filled with former students. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZLcWl_NCMY
Some of the suggested videos from that link him speaking just in Latin, which is pretty interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBIZEkTKuq4 [LatinTalk: 045 Duo suadeo, duo propono]
Re: The Vatican's Latinist (2017)
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
That is great; thanks.
I think of it as reading the very best writing, e.g., Charles Darwin, and not just another paper or book. Wouldn't you love to have a conversation with Darwin? That's what you get when you engage with their writing.
Re: The Vatican's Latinist (2017)
#64Foster 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…
>That's hard to believe.
I understand why you'd feel that way but classics departments aren't what they used to be. It's pretty common for even elite universities these days to not require grad students to understand the languages of the cultures they purportedly study across the board, let alone for Latin.
https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignor...
Re: The Vatican's Latinist (2017)
#65A bit late to add to the discussion, but a couple things of note:
1. Foster died in 2020 (he tested positive for Covid at the time of his death, but it’s unclear whether that was the cause).
2. The promised second volume to the bones is available now.
3. There is a third volume coming out in August.
Re: The Vatican's Latinist (2017)
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 written. Because Latin has died out as a spoken language, it doesn't really change over time like modern languages do. If you find a sentence written 2000 years ago and another elsewhere written 1500 years ago, it's likely they mean the exact same thing. "Latin is a dead la…
While Latin has indeed evolved very little after it stopped being a native language, its vocabulary had continuously expanded until 2 centuries ago. Until around the beginning of the 19th century, Latin had remained the most important language for the publication of scientific works and for international correspondence between well-educated people, and during this time many words have been added for naming things unk…
The use of it by the Catholic Church means its vocabulary continues to expand. After all, it’s necessary to speak of the modern world in church documents whose official version will be in Latin.
Re: The Vatican's Latinist (2017)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
The Vatican publishes a newspaper which, among other things, has a sports page, written in Latin.
Re: The Vatican's Latinist (2017)
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 written. Because Latin has died out as a spoken language, it doesn't really change over time like modern languages do. If you find a sentence written 2000 years ago and another elsewhere written 1500 years ago, it's likely they mean the exact same thing. "Latin is a dead la…
> Because Latin has died out as a spoken language It evolved into Italian, Spanish, etc : * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages
With an intermediate stage of “Vulgar Latin” of which little trace remains because it was predominantly a spoken language. Literate people, even if they might use Vulgar Latin themselves in conversation, generally chose to write in the more formal classical style. As I recall, most of what we have from Vulgar Latin is in the form of graffiti and other informal writing.
Re: The Vatican's Latinist (2017)
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 written. Because Latin has died out as a spoken language, it doesn't really change over time like modern languages do. If you find a sentence written 2000 years ago and another elsewhere written 1500 years ago, it's likely they mean the exact same thing. "Latin is a dead la…
To add a bit of detail: At least in English etymologies, there are significant differences between classical Latin and post-classical Latin. But post-classical Latin unhelpfully covers Rome from ~200 CE into the 20th century, including the Catholic Church and all those scholars and scientists. I'm not sure what differences arose before or after the fall of Rome in 476 CE, which began the Middle Ages.
There were shifts in the meaning of words as well as shifts in some grammatical structures. English has seen similar shifts in meaning, e.g., villain originally meant a person from a village.
Re: The Vatican's Latinist (2017)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Sorry, what? Who is this? Even the PhD students I knew in classics, the ones who were specializing in history or literature, were comfortable reading texts written during their time periods of interest.
https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignor... — per this blog post (which takes https://www.the-tls.co.uk/regular-features/mary-beard-a-dons... as the starting point), most classicists “can't sight-read a complex Latin text all that well” [unlike medievalists and Renaissance scholars].
Granted I’m 35 years out of undergrad, but my classics professors could most definitely sight-read complex Latin just fine.