Who speaks Latin these days?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21412604

by quasque • 13 years ago

60 60 13 years ago

bbc.co.uk

grahamjl• 13 years ago

nemo

Read that article and replace every instance of 'Latin' with whichever programming language is least 'cool' this week. Way better.

chrisacky• 13 years ago

For no other reason than giggles, when I was at University I managed to "impress" quite a few people at University on nights out that I could speak Latin. I've been exposed to "Lorem ipsum dolor, sit amet consectetuer" so much that it's pretty easy to speak 30+ seconds of "Latin" and wing in.

My other past-times also included trying to talk in a random accent for the night, people would ask where my name "Acky" is from, so I'd pretend to be from SA... Man, I need to get a life.

Kurtz79• 13 years ago

This is golden :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vatican_latin_atm.jpg

Latin enabled ATM in the Vatican.

astine• 13 years ago

I've used that machine. There's an option for English.

alex-g• 13 years ago

The combination of Latin and Comic Sans is really weird.

ybaumes• 13 years ago

The story tells: 'Nicholas Ostler [...] compares Latin's presence on the internet [...] to a small European language - it is comparable to "Icelandic, Lithuanian or Slovenian".'

They didn't think to remove "Lorem Ipsum" texts, otherwise it must even less than that ! .. :-)

fusiongyro4• 13 years ago

I took four years of Latin in high school, which equals probably 3 months of serious study. I recommend it as an intellectual diversion. I remember very little of it today, but it did open up my mind to grammar. Probably studying any other language would, but I liked that learning it wasn't an endorsement of any particular country.

wickeand000• 13 years ago

I would say that the "opening your mind to grammar" is true of learning any new language. Obviously one like Latin where the grammar is very different than English might be more effective on that front, but with any new language you are forced to think about every word as a specific part of speech. It's like when someone tells you that your tongue doesn't fit in your mouth and you spend the rest of the day consciously thinking about something that is usually completely involuntary.

fusiongyro4• 13 years ago

That's such a good point I'm going to time travel back to fourteen hours ago so I can add a fourth sentence to my comment to say exactly this.

antirez• 13 years ago

I remember that in high school while most of us were able to just translate text from italian to latin and the reverse, using a dictionary, the best latin students in the school were able to actually perform conversation. It's not too hard, you "just" require to study it a lot harder and especially do a lot of practice compared to the level required to get an acceptable rating at school.

fmsf• 13 years ago

Latin is one of the mandatory subjects, during high school, to apply to a Law University in Portugal.

icebraining• 13 years ago

I don't believe that's true anymore: http://www.dges.mctes.pt/NR/rdonlyres/D10976FF-C05F-4BF0-B57...

pjmlp• 13 years ago

Even if it was, it is not the same as in many European countries where it is still compulsory.

As Portuguese it always surprised my that in some European countries people have Latin before any other foreign Language.

In France it is still a differentiator as only good students take Latin. So if you don't want to be seen as a bad student, Latin you go.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

This line from the article was interesting: "And he does not think much of Benedict's tweets in Latin - 'the last one was a real case of messing up Latin word order'." That's especially bad, because Latin tends to have freer word order than (for example) English in the first place.

In my university days, I had a girlfriend who was studying German and Latin (to become a secondary school teacher in those two subjects). My wife I won over with the much more practical modern language Chinese. Incidental study of Latin is useful to native speakers of Romance languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, and the like) to understand the origin of their native language, and somewhat less useful to speakers of most languages spoken in Europe, whether Indo-European languages or not, to understand the sources of much of their vocabulary. (Concentrated study of the sources of vocabularly of modern languages through study of word roots

http://www.amazon.com/English-Words-Latin-Greek-Elements/dp/...

http://www.amazon.com/English-Vocabulary-Elements-Keith-Denn...

is very helpful, but that doesn't require learning Latin as a language as such.)

As long as there are great landmarks in Western writing like Newton's Principia available in original Latin editions, there will always be a reward for learning Latin. But with many languages to learn to speak to many people, Latin will not be in first place as the language to learn next for interesting live conversation.

cafard5• 13 years ago

Latin should be a fine language for Twitter, as wedging a lot into not many words. A lot of Spinoza's paragraphs in the Ethics would certainly fit in 140 characters.

GuiA• 13 years ago

If that's a criteria for language selection, might as well all go with Chinese :)

FreakLegion• 13 years ago

It's very difficult to 'mess up' Latin word order. Just because something doesn't read like Caesar or Cicero doesn't mean it's wrong. Latin allows for a lot of rhetorical flair -- Horace's word order, for example, can be incredibly jumbled, but it's perfectly correct. The tweets are probably fine, just like Milton's English is fine.

decasteve• 13 years ago

My interest in learning Latin is to read Newton's Principia and Gauss' Disquisitiones in original form.

fusiongyro4• 13 years ago

Have you tried Newton's Principia: The Central Argument from Green Lion Press?

http://www.greenlion.com/principi.html

I have this book, and it's really swell. No calculus, because Newton's Principia doesn't have calculus. It's all geometric arguments. They put Newton's text in red and their commentary in black. I haven't studied it (I'm still trying to work my way through their Euclid) but I like having it on the bookshelf.

squozzer• 13 years ago

Latinos? Having a Dan Quayle moment.

cafard5• 13 years ago

Radio Finland does put effort into coming up with Latin for all sorts of things never envisioned in the Roman days: depleted uranium projectiles, the internet, etc.

dbaupp• 13 years ago

Radio Finland? As far as I know, Finnish is further from Latin than almost all the other European languages. Or is it just for fun?

kryptiskt• 13 years ago

They broadcast news in Latin on their international station.

pjungwir2• 13 years ago

They are crazy about Latin in Finland! I don't know why. Here is their Latin news broadcast:

http://yle.fi/radio1/tiede/nuntii_latini/

oscardelben• 13 years ago

I know some people who speak latin, including in the US. They may not be fluent but people still study it. It also helps if you're a linguist interested in romance languages.

toyg• 13 years ago

If I had a dime for every time this question was asked in the last 25 years, I could afford to own a VC fund.

Latin is Latin is Latin. It's been the lingua franca (sic -- hey, three latin words already!) of European culture for almost 2000 years, hence transmitting and influencing each and every field of human knowledge. As long as we value European culture, there will be a consistent amount of people who have to speak some version of Latin. In most of Europe, you can't excel in law, medicine, philosophy, biology, history or theology without a decent knowledge of Latin, and it certainly helps even non-European scholars.

There will always be problems with "updating" what is essentially a fossilised language in order to include modern concepts, but the core language will survive pretty much forever, at this point. It's the "K&R C" of human languages.

gruseom• 13 years ago

a decent knowledge of Latin

"Decent knowledge" is ambiguous. There is a huge difference between being able to read a language and being able to speak it. The OP is unusual in being about the latter.

teilo2• 13 years ago

"some version of Latin" is right. Because, really, Latin is not Latin is not Latin. For a language that had such wide use for such an extended amount of time, learning one form of Latin, such as ecclesiastical, does not necessarily help much in understanding Ovid or Plutarch.

This is much the same as with ancient Greek. Knowing New Testament Greek is almost useless in understanding Plato or Homer. Even Classical Greek from extreme ends of the period differs substantially.

StavrosK• 13 years ago

That said, a modern Greek can understand quite a bit of the New Testament, even though it's been around 2,000 years since it was written.

tragomaskhalos• 13 years ago

I think someone who had learned Koine would be able to have a decent go at Plato at least, the grammar is not so different. The biggest difference I can see is that the word order in the NT is a lot more regular - classical authors (in Latin as well as Greek) played around with word order a lot more than ordinary joes speaking the languages day to day, whereas the NT is a lot closer to how people would actually have spoken.

Mvandenbergh• 13 years ago

>Latin is Latin is Latin. It's been the lingua franca (sic -- hey, three latin words already!) of European culture for almost 2000 years, hence transmitting and influencing each and every field of human knowledge.

The lingua franca of the Roman empire was actually Greek.

diego• 13 years ago

Latine loquor. Inutilis id est, sed iucundus.

My brother and I had six years of Latin in school. He's a biologist, and used to put it in his resume for kicks.

meerita• 13 years ago

I finally went to Rome the past June, 2012. I loved it and my GF loved it a lot too because I was able to translate most of all latin inscription she could find on the Roman ruins and other buildings. All the tourist around me were sniffing my back all the time because I knew a lot of the Roman history as well, but mostly because i was able to translate most of the inscriptions :)

protomyth• 13 years ago

As an aside, there is an old article in Dr. Dobbs Journal (cannot find it right now) that talks about Botanical Latin and the precise description of plants.

pjungwir2• 13 years ago

I can read Greek and Latin, and I think they make great hobbies for a programmer. Reading Greek feels a lot like reading Perl. (Take that however you like. :-)

cafard5• 13 years ago

Reading Greek feels a lot like reading somebody else's Perl. Now if only it felt like reading my own...

grellas2• 13 years ago

The Familia Sancti Hieronymi (Family of St. Jerome), out of Florida, promotes the idea of Latin as a living language within the context of the Catholic Church.

I have no special connection with this organization except that, having struggled to learn Latin on my own for some years, my breakthrough came via the Cursus Linguae Latinae Vivae (Course in the Living Latin Language) offered by that organization, as taught by Fr. Suitbertus Siedl entirely in Latin (for a rich set of Latin-only materials offered by FSH, see http://www.hieronymus.us.com/Venalia/IndLatin.htm, with English translation of the offerings here: http://www.hieronymus.us.com/Venalia/IndEngl.htm).

The premise of the Cursus is that language is primarily an aural experience - hence, trying to learn Latin by translating words and sentences into another language such as English is a fundamentally poorer way to learn than by simply hearing and repeating it in the Latin itself even as one learns the grammatical rules and syntax. Asculte et alta voce legere (listen, and repeat out loud) is the command one hears throughout, along with Repetitio est mater studiorum. In each segment, there is a teaching from the ancient Latin of Rome, from historic Catholic Church materials, and from daily life. And you will hear Fr. Siedl vigorously proclaiming: "Lingua Latina non mortua est sed viva."

Take it for what it is worth. But clearly there are pockets within today's world where people take seriously the idea that Latin should survive as a spoken tongue and where their gatherings are held entirely in Latin. For anyone who wants to learn the language, it is well worth dipping into that world. A pretty fascinating place for those with an inclination to learn about it.

ScottBurson• 13 years ago

Repetitio is mater studiorum

"Is"? :-)

eric_bullington• 13 years ago

Repetition is the source of all learning (literally: "repetition is the mother of studies").

EDIT: And you're right, obviously the parent comment should have written "est" in lieu of "is". Sorry, missed what you were pointing out initially.

asveikau2• 13 years ago

> Cursus Linguae Latinae Vivae (Course in the Living Latin Language)

It's been a while since I studied it, but that looks like genitive case to me. I parse it as "Course of living Latin language".

maw• 13 years ago

Yes, it's genitive, but "course in" is more idiomatic English than "course of."

fusiongyro4• 13 years ago

That's really cool. I have been tempted to try the Lingua Latina books, which argue a softer version of this thesis: that memorizing tables of inflections doesn't work as well as "immersive reading." I'm inclined towards this because, as a non-Catholic, my interface with Latin is textual rather than aural. It would be interesting to hear from someone who tried both.

pavelpadovan• 13 years ago

ego

bitwize• 13 years ago

I remember learning just enough Latin to come up with a cool motto for a proposed coat of arms for the software group at the robotics company I worked at: Fungitur simulatoris, which is dog latin for "it works in the simulator" but I think it means something closer to "it functions at/for the liar".

ihaveajob• 13 years ago

I'm Spanish. I took one year of Latin in high school, and I thought of it as a puzzle solving class. It was fun in the end, but of reduce applicability. Until I took my GRE exam. The standardized difficulty gradation made for the most bizzarre experience during the verbal part of the exam. I felt that words that ought to be easy to native English speakers were sometimes completely obscure to me, whereas if, by skill or luck, I made it to the set of more difficult words, they suddenly became easier to me, as they were often direct Latin or ancient Greek borrowings into English.

fduran• 13 years ago

Same here.

Yhippa• 13 years ago

Who keeps Latin alive these days other than niche uses like this?

When I was in high school the top three languages were Spanish, French, and Latin. We had more students take Latin than German and other languages!

To me it has usage in understanding the bases of words and scientific terms. It makes guessing the meanings of things whenever you're visiting a country that uses a Romance language easier. Other than that I'm not sure why this is taught so widely in American schools.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very glad it is since I took Latin for six years and was an active participant in state Certamens, Latin club, and JCL events. I'm just amazed that students would even choose that over a living and more productive language.

easy_rider2• 13 years ago

>It makes guessing the meanings of things whenever you're >visiting a country that uses a Romance language easier

Spanish, French, English, Portuguese. It's a big deal.

easy_rider2• 13 years ago

Latin is helping me a lot, in understanding ( bold that "understanding") words in French, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Italian How can one understand the difference between i.e. and e.g. without being schooled in Latin?:)

gus_massa• 13 years ago

The most important lesson is in the first paragraphs:

> There are not many occasions when a reporter needs a grasp of Latin. [...] Most of the reporters present had to wait for the Vatican's official translations [...]. But not Italian wire service reporter Giovanna Chirri [...]. Her Latin was up to the job and she broke the story of the Pope's resignation to the world.

Domain expertise is useful. If you are going to cover a catholic / klingon / phyton / whatever event, it's better if you know the main language.

lists• 13 years ago

Slightly off-topic: Though there's usually a lot of support for the idea of knowing Latin in order to understand the history of thinking in the west (Greek as well, of course), it rarely comes up that one actually has to know Arabic too for that some 500 years where Western learning was germinating in the Islamic empires.

cafard5• 13 years ago

Well, yes and no. It took quite a while before the western universities got their Aristotle etc. translated directly from Greek rather than via Arabic. But they--the translators apart--mostly were reading their Averroes and Avicenna in Latin translations.

pclark• 13 years ago

I seem to remember Cambridge Medical School students learning Latin. Can anyone confirm?

Who speaks Latin these days?

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