
The Vatican's Latinist - jthnews
https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2017/3/the-vaticanas-latinist
======
pmoriarty
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezzofanti)

[2] - [https://www.amazon.com/Babel-No-More-Extraordinary-
Language/...](https://www.amazon.com/Babel-No-More-Extraordinary-
Language/dp/1451628250/)

~~~
duxup
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..."

------
GnarfGnarf
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.

~~~
coldcode
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
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.

------
DrScump
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._ ”

~~~
peterburkimsher
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](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.

~~~
mncharity
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.

~~~
peterburkimsher
Sorry! Thank you for exploring the Advanced features, I put a lot of effort
into those, but they need more explaining. I'm pleased that you actually
looked at it though :).

The audio feature doesn't actually play audio. It's supposed to generate input
commands to put into ffmpeg. I would write more documentation, but my priority
is to get the existing documentation translated to Chinese. I asked 4 friends
over the past 3 months, all have promised to do it, but only one of them
translated one page.

I don't think there's a way to do what you're asking using only client-side
JavaScript. I would need a server to generate an audio file for you.
Unfortunately, I don't have the money for that. The most I could do would be
to generate an M3U playlist file, which you could then save and navigate using
the chapter feature of your music player.

~~~
mncharity
> get the existing documentation translated to Chinese

[http://opennmt.net/](http://opennmt.net/) links to a "Live system" with a
Chinese option. Discussed on infoworld[1].

FWIW, its translation of "This is a test." was at least recognized by google
translate.

> audio [...] using only client-side JavaScript

It looks like the audio starts out as small mp3 files, which are then
concatenated? There are WebAudio-based libraries both for playing one file
after another, and for concatenating them for download.[2] For the mp4
subtitles, hmm, well, even if nothing else, there's ffmpeg.js[3] (but fonts
might be an issue?).

Thanks for your work. :)

[1] [http://www.infoworld.com/article/3152050/artificial-
intellig...](http://www.infoworld.com/article/3152050/artificial-
intelligence/open-source-challenger-takes-on-google-translate.html) [2] For
example (merely the first one I saw):
[https://github.com/jackedgson/crunker](https://github.com/jackedgson/crunker)
[3] [https://github.com/Kagami/ffmpeg.js](https://github.com/Kagami/ffmpeg.js)

------
0xCMP
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.

~~~
emmelaich
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.

~~~
Bromskloss
> 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?

~~~
emmelaich
Yes and no.

Yes, because there were probably priests who shouldn't have been.

No, because there's still a lot of people in the world to convert.

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

~~~
bshimmin
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).

~~~
InitialLastName
To add to that, the grammar (and thus the meaning) is sometimes driven by the
meter, which is a concept pretty much entirely foreign to many familiar with
English prose.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> the grammar (and thus the meaning) is sometimes driven by the meter

What do you mean by this? The closest I can come to making sense of it is that
some Latin words obligatorily appear as the second word in the sentence, but
it seems like you must mean something different?

~~~
InitialLastName
I'm pulling from my studies of ~10 years ago, but IIRC there are points (noun
and adjective endings?) where diacritical marks can change the meaning of the
sentence. Unlike, say, Spanish, these marks are not written, and frequently
have to be interpreted from language cues, including the meter.

~~~
thaumasiotes
That's basically correct -- some case endings differ only by vowel length and
are therefore not distinguished in standard Latin writing, which doesn't
indicate vowel length in any way. (Old Latin writing sometimes did.) "Via", in
nominative case, meaning "the road" as the subject of a sentence, is written
identically to "via", in ablative case, meaning "by the road", but the 'a' of
the ablative case ending is longer.

However, you can't describe this as "the meter driving the grammar". The
grammar requires the same cases and vowel lengths regardless of the meter
you're trying to achieve. Rather, we modern-day people reading Latin poetry
can use the meter to help us determine what was originally written. All of the
causal influence is from grammar to meter, not the other way around.

~~~
InitialLastName
That's pretty much what I meant... A naturally fluent reader of Latin poetry
would have had to follow the same process of inferences (drawing from a far
more intuitive and internalized model of the meter, of course).

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACJDtJ0UDzA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACJDtJ0UDzA)

------
tdumitrescu
Previous discussion when first published a few months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13789097](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13789097)

------
Bromskloss
> 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?

------
hyperdunc
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy1lPOzDvs4)

------
eru
> 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?

------
mncharity
> 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.

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

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

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

