The Vatican's Latinist

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2017/3/the-vaticanas-latinist

by jthnews • 9 years ago

148 61 9 years ago

scop3• 9 years ago

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.

_spoonman• 9 years ago

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

nyi• 9 years ago

Labor omnia vincit!

petertotleben• 9 years ago

Lingua Latina by Hans Orberg.

https://www.hackettpublishing.com/lingua-latina-per-se-illus...

scop3• 9 years ago

Go for it! Here is a good quote from the article from Fr. Foster:

"Latin is the best thing that ever happened to humanity. It leaves you zero room for nonsense. You don’t have to be a genius. But it requires laser-sharp concentration and total maturity. If you don’t know what time of day it is, or what your name is, or where you are, don’t try Latin because it will smear you on the wall like an oil spot."

kawera• 9 years ago

My suggestion would be Hans Ørberg's Lingua Latina per se Illustrata series, it's brilliant and you can start from zero.

https://www.hackettpublishing.com/lingua-latina-per-se-illus...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_%C3%98rberg

bshimmin2• 9 years ago

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 level a decade-and-mumble years ago, and to my great shame have not kept it up at all. On the rare occasions that I am required to translate some Latin - an inscription in a church, for instance - I try my best, but I am usually a far cry from Indiana Jones. (I do have a moderately extensive selection of pretentious phrases in Latin that I can deploy when necessary.)

We used Kennedy's Revised Latin Primer and The Cambridge Latin Course at school; I think the latter starts pretty much from the basics, and the former covers probably all of the grammar you'd ever need to know. I think you can get some of the Harry Potter books in Latin, if that sort of thing takes your fancy. Once you've acquired a moderate mastery, you will find something like Caesar's Gallic Wars to be quite an easy read (though stylistically he ain't much cop).

jkingsbery• 9 years ago

I took Latin in college (having not taken it in high school), and found the Wheelock text book pretty helpful (https://www.amazon.com/Wheelocks-Latin-7th/dp/0061997226 ). If you're looking for Latin texts, check out the Perseus Project (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/) and the Latin Library (http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/).

If you get stuck on something, swing by the Latin StackExchange (https://latin.stackexchange.com/).

jamesash• 9 years ago

Current Latin learner here. I found the Great Courses Introduction to Latin by Hans-Friedrich Mueller to be helpful. 35 audio lectures, plus 35 chapters of exercises. It's a good introduction that covers all the basics, and has set me up quite well for working through selections from The Gallic Wars.

JoeDaDude3• 9 years ago

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-...

favorited• 9 years ago

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.

Ascetik• 9 years ago

One of my best friends studied under him in Rome, he had some amazing stories to tell.

0xCMP• 9 years ago

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 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.

scop3• 9 years ago

"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

emmelaich2• 9 years ago

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

Bromskloss2• 9 years ago

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?

pmoriarty2• 9 years ago

Anyone 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/...

brianwawok• 9 years ago

At what point do you cross from polyglot to hyperglot?

I would enjoy being a programming hyperglot I think...

duxup• 9 years ago

I assume at then Gregory turned to some other Cardinal and handed over a handful of scudo saying "I was sure we had him this time..."

kingofpandora• 9 years ago

For those thinking "what the heck is Syrian?", I'm guessing the author meant Syriac.

GnarfGnarf• 9 years ago

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.

dkarl• 9 years ago

I wish I did, too, but I think instruction in all the other languages was even worse, at least in my school. While my class was memorizing charts like -r -ris -tur, -mur -mini -ntur the students taking Spanish and French were learning the "better" way, but their results were worse. Language instruction in the U.S. is just shit all around.

(I remember one of the smartest kids in my school took four years of Spanish, and by his senior year, he was the only kid taking Spanish who wasn't a native Spanish speaker. So the teacher spoke English with him and Spanish with the rest of the kids....)

coldcode• 9 years ago

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.

dhosek• 9 years ago

Northside College Prep in Chicago has Latin (and my nephews actually took it at the K-8 level in public schools as well). If you read the story, you'll find that many of Foster's former students are teaching Latin, and Santa Monica High School (another public school) is given as an example of where his graduates teach. My local public high school also offers Latin (as does the Catholic high school half a mile down the street). There's been a bit of a renaissance of Latin in the schools of late.

tzs• 9 years ago

One of New York's special public schools not only teaches latin, they require everyone to take four years of it: Brooklyn Latin School [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Latin_School

wyclif• 9 years ago

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.

jjtheblunt• 9 years ago

We had it in Wheaton, Illinois, in public school. Sort of just depends on the school district.

throwaway91111• 9 years ago

Latin is a lot more fun if you don't focus on the grammar, and perhaps ironically, you may pick it up faster.

Unfortunately, grammar is super easy to test.

jeremyis• 9 years ago

no te creo que lograste fluencia en dos meses incluso con el conocimiento de latin...

pmoriarty2• 9 years ago

Here's a video of Foster teaching a letter of Cicero:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACJDtJ0UDzA

sumobob• 9 years ago

I took latin in High School and loved it, thanks for posting this, it reminds me to get back into it

DrScump• 9 years ago

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.”

peterburkimsher2• 9 years ago

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 and Japanese, but the structure of the program is all the same. I just have to gather the data for each new language.

Comment if you're interested, and I'll let you know when I finally get around to working on it. There have been a few Latin/Greek posts on HN that get upvoted a lot, so I think there's some demand.

mncharity5• 9 years ago

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 of, or am having trouble with. Google makes you rehear the whole thing, which is simple, but discourages double-checks, and impairs iteration.

JoeDaDude3• 9 years ago

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

mncharity5• 9 years ago

Thank you for doing the excerpt! I'd not have read the OP otherwise. And it turned out to provide additional perspective on describing a current project in science and engineering education transformation.

Like Rome, the physical world has science and engineering stories that are highly connected, richly interwoven, and best taught that way. By exploring in conversation with one who is familiar with them. Like the "hydrology" example, hydrodynamics is best taught by swimming (in VR/AR) - sure there's a Reynolds number order-of-magnitude scale and slider on the side, and length and time, and a live Navier-Stokes on the wall, but that's all in service to playfully messing around in/with fluids. In K-4. Like Latin, the way science is taught doesn't work, doesn't inspire, and leaves out lots of accessible engaging stories. Like Latin, perhaps there's hope for change. Unlike the instruction, you really need an conversation system with eye tracking, to notice your interests, answer questions, and mentor understanding. An expert and teacher to walk with. Anyway, my thanks.

mncharity5• 9 years ago

What the book cannot give, of course, is the experience of [...] strolling through the streets of Rome with him. For that we will need his like—or to wait for the Reginaldians to start writing memoirs.

Shouldn't someone point these folks at VR headsets and livestreaming stabilized 360deg video? It doesn't matter that he can't walk and is stuck in the US. With someone to be his walking and conversation companion in Rome, and to hold his eyes, he could walk Rome every morning, telling stories, and recording it for posterity.

mncharity5• 9 years ago

Morning-after edit: streamed phone video, or even just a conversation with photos, would be much easier.

tdumitrescu• 9 years ago

Previous discussion when first published a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13789097

hyperdunc• 9 years ago

Bill Maher called this guy Father Maverick when he interviewed him for the movie Religulous. The interview is quite amusing and can be found on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy1lPOzDvs4

eru• 9 years ago

Foster’s model has proven to be imitable (though his energy and expertise is not—Paideia last year used six teachers to cover what Reginaldus would do alone).

I wonder if that can be ported to eg math education?

Bromskloss2• 9 years ago

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?

osullivj• 9 years ago

I believe Latin is a language option on Vatican City ATMs.

The Vatican's Latinist

Related Stories