
Who speaks Latin these days? - quasque
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21412604
======
grellas
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
_Repetitio is mater studiorum_

"Is"? :-)

~~~
eric_bullington
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.

~~~
grellas
Now corrected. Thank you both for pointing this out. Just asleep at the
switch, since I hope I know at least _that_ much after years of studying this
stuff.

------
chrisacky
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.

------
tokenadult
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-Words-Latin-Greek-
Elements/dp/0816508992/learninfreed)

[http://www.amazon.com/English-Vocabulary-Elements-Keith-
Denn...](http://www.amazon.com/English-Vocabulary-Elements-Keith-
Denning/dp/0195168038/learninfreed)

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.

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

~~~
gamegoblin
IIRC Vietnamese has the highest syllabic information density of any natural
language. Chinese being a close second (about 94% that of Vietnamese).

Edit: found that article
[http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.ht...](http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.html)

------
Kurtz79
This is golden :

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

Latin enabled ATM in the Vatican.

~~~
alex-g
The combination of Latin and Comic Sans is really weird.

------
fusiongyro
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
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.

~~~
fusiongyro
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.

------
toyg
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.

~~~
teilo
"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.

~~~
tragomaskhalos
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.

~~~
teilo
Actually, when koine Greek was first being critically examined, it was
theorized that it was hardly Greek at all, but more of a hellenization of
Aramaic. That was, of course, found not to be the case.

Yes, it is true that there is much structure in common between Koine and
Classical, use of conjunctions, general grammar constructs. But for any real
use of the language you quickly get into vocabulary domains that just do not
intersect, or where they do intersect, the usage is quite different.

------
antirez
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.

------
lists
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.

~~~
cafard
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.

------
cafard
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
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?

~~~
pjungwir
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/>

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

~~~
fusiongyro
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.

------
ybaumes
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 ! .. :-)

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

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

~~~
icebraining
I don't believe that's true anymore:
[http://www.dges.mctes.pt/NR/rdonlyres/D10976FF-C05F-4BF0-B57...](http://www.dges.mctes.pt/NR/rdonlyres/D10976FF-C05F-4BF0-B571-86A560D416E7/5299/GuiaProvasIngresso2011121303.pdf)

~~~
pjmlp
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.

~~~
psykotic
When I went to high school in Denmark in the late 90s, Latin was still a
mandatory first-year course for students on the language track (the other
being the science track).

------
bitwize
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".

------
Yhippa
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_rider
>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.

------
ihaveajob
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
Same here.

------
gus_massa
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.

------
oscardelben
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.

------
pjungwir
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. :-)

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

------
meerita
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
:)

------
diego
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.

------
easy_rider
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?:)

------
protomyth
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.

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

------
pavelpadovan
ego

------
grahamjl
nemo

------
squozzer
Latinos? Having a Dan Quayle moment.

