Schola Latina Europæa and Universalis
avitus.alcuinus.net

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86 points

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Tomte

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3 days ago

58 comments

alexey-salmin ・ 3 days ago

The only way I made progress in latin was when I bought a few books and started reading, beginning from (modern) children fairy tales. This actually gave me a lasting knowledge which up to this date allows me to read a simple latin text or guess a meaning of a word in English or French (neither language is native to me).

Speaking latin of course takes it way further but I think the direction is the same: learn it as a living language not as as a dead one. Starting from declensions and cases gets you nowhere, judging from my friends who learned it in school for years with zero results. Instead, start using the language, if only for reading. Then you can return to grammar later if you ever want to become proficient.

I also recommend this guy [1] who not only shares the same approach but apparently have fully dedicated himself to it. He has books, ebooks, audiobooks, a mobile app and a youtube podcast, all in latin. I can't cease to be impressed by the effort and the quality of the content. In comparison the Duolingo latin course is a complete disappointment.

[1] https://latinitium.com/legentibus/

  • AntoniusBlock ・ 3 days ago

    I started with LLPSI along with Oerberg's companion books (Colloquia Personarum, Fabellae Latinae, Fabulae Syrae). After that I read Hyginus' Fabulae and then Commentarii de Bello Gallico by Caesar. Since then I've read more Caesar, Nepos, Apuleius, Seneca, some Livy, some Catullus, some Cicero, and I'm currently reading Ovid. I did this by reading Latin for at least 1 hour every day since the first COVID lockdown in 2020, even if I was sick or not feeling it I made sure to get my Latin reading in. I did do a lot of grammar drills in the beginning, and I made an Anki deck for vocab. Grammar drills definitely help big time, along with jumping in head first with a book like LLPSI and reading from the get go is the way to go IMO.

    • fdgjgbdfhgb ・ 3 days ago

      Did you ever read Roma Aeterna? Or did you go straight into literature?

      • AntoniusBlock ・ 3 days ago

        I just looked at my backlog book and apparently I did read the first half of LLPSI 2. I don't recall much from it though. I think after a certain point in the book, I found it too difficult straight after LLPSI 1, which is why.

      • AntoniusBlock ・ 3 days ago

        I went straight into Hyginus and Caesar. Hyginus is not difficult at all. After LLPSI, you should be able to read this: https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/hyginus/hyginus5.shtml

        Caesar is not too difficult either. The biggest problem I had with Caesar was that he used indirect speech a lot and LLPSI doesn't really prepare you too well for that, but you get used to it.

  • gone35 ・ 3 days ago

    Very good yes. Such is my experience, not only with Latin. Received language instruction may have it exactly backwards.

michaelsbradley ・ 3 days ago 

   In any case, the demise of the use of Latin in the church…
It’s actually making a comeback in the Catholic Church with the growing popularity of the traditional Latin Mass, which is celebrated around the world by various communities, much to the chagrin of some persons presently of influence and/or in leadership.

https://www.latinmass.live/

It’s much rarer to encounter the reformed Mass (missal of 1969-latest, i.e. reforms following Vatican II) offered in Latin, but it is done in some places. The communities offering the traditional Latin Mass use the 1962 edition or a 20th Century edition predating the changes to Holy Week in 1955.

  • TheFreim ・ 2 days ago

    I'm not sure the recent revival of interest in the Latin mass has much bearing on the number of people who are actually learning the language.

    Most people I know who participate at Mass in Latin don't know the language and make little, if any, attempts to learn it. There is often a complete reliance on translations where prayers are recited in Latin but then still need to be read in the English side of the missal to be understood.

    There is also an odd, yet quite outspoken (online), contingent of people who promote the Latin Mass while simultaneously downplaying the importance of learning Latin for having a fuller view of history and the science of theology.

    • michaelsbradley ・ 2 days ago

      Many of the TLM-attending families I’ve spoken to have Latin studies in their home/school curriculum.

      I’ve not encountered the online contingent you mentioned so can’t really comment on them.

      The long tradition in the Roman Rite is for laity and others not celebrating or in choir to cultivate mental prayer that is centered on the Eucharistic sacrifice and informed by the themes of the season and/or feast. It’s nice to have a hand missal/ette to review the day’s readings and prayers before or after Mass, but following along with the printed word can actually be a distraction from prayer during Mass. However, what’s most conducive to a spirit of prayer and interior participation can vary by person, i.e. there’s no “one best way”.

  • froh ・ 3 days ago

    > growing popularity of the traditional Latin Mass

    there is no such thing as a "growing popularity" of the mass in latin.

    because, surprise, the spells work just fine in any language. because, surprise again, Jesus spoke Aramaic. and the educated spoke Greek.

    PP Francis is putting the whole misguided "Jesus sacrifice" liturgy and it's backwards thinking back to where it belongs: history books.

    • michaelsbradley ・ 3 days ago

      Tell that to the 1000+ seating traditional Latin Mass churches around the world where families pack the pews along with hundreds of babies in the arms of parents and older siblings at Mass on Sundays and major feast days.

      It is true that some in leadership presently, including Pope Francis, don't care for the movement and have been hampering it in various ways in recent years, but at this point its growth is unstoppable. Even if Francis dropped an even harder ban hammer (he won't for various reasons), it would just lead to immediate explosive growth of the SSPX because affected families and clergy-religious would never go back to the Novus Ordo Missae.

      Anyway, we can have that discussion in another context if you wish. Mainly I wanted to point out that "Latin in the church" is alive and well and only more so in recent years.

      > PP Francis is putting the whole misguided "Jesus sacrifice" liturgy and it's backwards thinking back to where it belongs: history books.

      I'm not sure what information sources inform your thinking on this matter, but regardless it's an extremely distorted take on Catholic theology of the Eucharist. Again, that's getting far afield of the OP and my original comment, so can discuss elsewhere, but you can check the 1997 Catechism:

      http://scborromeo.org/ccc/p2s2c1a3.htm#V

      • froh ・ 2 days ago
        ・ 2 more

        I prefer to check the current catechism

        https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P41.HTM

        the key difference between the pre Vatican II and the current missal is that is a focus on sacrifice vs a focus of communion.

        St Augustine so sweetly reminds us:

        receive what you _are_: body of Christ

        and

        become what you have received: body of Christ

        does your practice make you a more loving person? or a more righteous one? do you feel those not celebrating a specific rite are less Christian? less worthy? does it matter on judgement day if you went to tridentine mass? if you had a choice? do you look down to those not doing it?

        that's what matters.

        the Jesus chips are as magic in English as they are in latin.

        much love ;-)

        • michaelsbradley ・ 2 days ago

          We linked to the same Catechism, just two different websites, good grief.

          Actually, the one you linked to, the IntraText version on the Vatican’s website, seems to be the 1992 edition, which is out of date. The edition promulgated in 1997 is the definitive-official one, and that’s the edition that happens to be hosted by scborromeo, though the Vatican’s site might eventually get updated, after all it’s only been almost 30 years since the 1997 edition was published:

          http://scborromeo.org/ccc/aposletr.htm

          The 1997 edition is also available here:

          https://usccb.cld.bz/Catechism-of-the-Catholic-Church

          > the Jesus chips are as magic in English as they are in latin.

          Characterizing the Eucharist as "Jesus chips" and "magic" is both offensive and sacrilegious, but hey, it's the Internet, so go figure.

          Finally, the teachings in JP2's 1997 Catechism and the Catechism of Trent regarding the Eucharist are harmonious, in no way in contradiction with one another. Anyone who wishes can read and compare for themselves:

          https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015038914233&vi...

          Comparing the 1969+ liturgical reforms with the Tridentine Missal is another matter.

          This will be my last reply in this HN thread, there are more appropriate forums to discuss these matters.

      • int_19h ・ 3 days ago
        ・ 2 more

        What is the proportion of Latin Mass churches to all the rest?

        • michaelsbradley ・ 2 days ago

          Very small in relation to worldwide numbers, but with young members that on average are having large-ish numbers of children. Also, the traditional Latin Mass religious communities (FSSP, ICKSP, et al.) are attracting lots of young men and women to the priesthood and religious life, so their numbers of priestly ordinations are "way up" relative to others.

niemandhier ・ 3 days ago

It’s a pity we stopped using Latin in favour of scientific pidgin English as universal language in scientific communications.

Gauss still wrote in Latin 1801, his Disquisitiones Arithmeticae are a marvel.

Up until a few years back my university would still have accepted PHD thesis in Latin, they ditched it after no one had done it for almost a century.

  • pbmonster ・ 3 days ago

    > It’s a pity we stopped using Latin in favour of scientific pidgin English as universal language in scientific communications

    As an ESL speaker and scientific writer: why?

    For people fluent in several languages, which of those languages is chosen to communicate makes little difference. I'd argue all (sufficiently mature) languages work equally well for transmitting information to other people fluent in that language.

    So choosing the language most people you want to communicate with are fluent in makes sense.

    If you favor Latin simply for aesthetic reasons, I recommend choosing a more widespread modern language, that has non-pidgin characteristics. French or German (the latter might require a puritan style guide to go with it) would work well.

    • niemandhier ・ 3 days ago

      When using a language none of us speaks we can truly be equals.

      Discussing with e.g people who are the product of English boarding schools, they always have the home field advantage.

      • leoc ・ 3 days ago

        Latin does give a significant advantage to Romance-language speakers, and anyway trying to make everyone equally bad at the common language is a bit procrustean. The big disadvantage to the decline of Latin (which is probably mostly something that took place in the eighteenth century) is that it fragmented western Europe's academic writing. So without Latin you can't read Thomas Aquinas or Thomas Hobbes' De cive or John Napier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjIwCOevUew in the original; or often at all, as a great deal has never been translated while some translations aren't of the best quality. And even with Latin and English you can't read the enormous amount of important material which has been published in (particularly) French and German, especially up to about WWII.

      • dlisboa ・ 3 days ago

        > When using a language none of us speaks we can truly be equals.

        It's the opposite: having a preferred "high language" for science means it's gatekept by people who have the means to learn it. Those people will have the home field advantage, much like it was for much of history.

        Plus it's just a bad idea. Firstly, it'll take more time for young students to learn to read a scientific paper. Second, you significanly diminish the pool of thinkers and therefore scientists, you're basically making 99% of the population illiterate. Finally there will always be more people willing to communicate in the "vulgar" language and it's where all new vocabulary will be created, which is why every single high language has pretty much died off except in cerimonial contexts.

        English is just the language du jour, before that it was French, German in some fields, Arabic, Latin, Greek, etc.

      • woodruffw ・ 3 days ago

        Being equally bad at speaking Latin seems like a strictly worse outcome than having a mix of L1 and L2 speakers.

        (I studied Latin for about a decade.)

    • marginalia_nu ・ 3 days ago

      The argument for sticking with Latin is that it's a relatively unchanging language, and the virtue of that is that it gives you first hand access to historical knowledge in a way most are locked away from today.

      If we conduct science in Latin, it gives all scientists first hand access to sources from classical works, a thousand years of papal edicts, the works of Duns Scotus, Isaac Newton and Erasmus; and extended to the future, future scientists will have the same access but access to what we produce today, without having to learn 21st century English or having to rely on 23rd century translations.

      • woodruffw ・ 3 days ago
        ・ 7 more

        > The argument for sticking with Latin is that it's a relatively unchanging language

        This is as much of an argument against Latin, given that there's no way to say "transistor" or "x-ray" without falling back on pidgin. Translation is part of the scientific process, insofar as science itself isn't static and can't be expressed throughout the ages with a single vocabulary.

        (Besides, why stop there? How can we expect today's scientists to truly grasp Plotinus's the One without mastering Koine Greek?)

        • marginalia_nu ・ 2 days ago
          ・ 2 more

          Latin has been extended with new concepts before, e.g. Newton didn't write classical latin like Cicero, but a post-renaissance latin with extended vocabulary. Koine greek would be another option, being another dead language, but Latin has the benefit of already having a large heritage of scientific writing.

          Carefully extending a dead language does have the strong benefit that you can keep it understandible across time. Even mid 19th century English is noticeably more difficult to read, and that's saying nothing about the 16th century English of Shakespeare.

          Here's a microcosm of what a waste this is: Benjamin Jowett has translated the complete works of Plato to English, and they're public domain! Great! Free Plato for everyone! ... except this was written in the 19th century, and they're written in an archaic prose that contemporary readers struggle to read, so everyone who wants to read Plato still has to get a modern translation. We're still translating texts that have been readily accessible for half a milennium. Sure there may have been a new insight or a better phrasing here and there, but primarily it's to get it into a language that is accessible to the contemporary reader.

          Sticking with English we're losing access to generational talents of the past because we can no longer understand what they're saying.

          • woodruffw ・ 2 days ago

            > Even mid 19th century English is noticeably more difficult to read, and that's saying nothing about the 16th century English of Shakespeare.

            You perceive this because you read modern English; you don’t perceive similar differences in Latin because (I presume) you’re not fluent in Latin. I studied mostly Classical Latin, which yields pretty much the same experience when reading Ecclesiastical or Old Latin as modern English speakers have when reading Shakespearean English.

            Or in other words: there are foundational shifts that only become legible once the language itself is legible. The fact that I could retcon “x-ray” into Latin today does not make the version of Latin that Livy spoke uniquely valuable to science.

            All in all, I’d give us a better chance of preserving the sum total of human knowledge, including all versions of Latin, in fastidiously translating them into today’s dominant languages. This will be true of English too, whenever English stops being the lingua franca.

        • psychoslave ・ 2 days ago
          ・ 2 more

          Let’s not underestimate the power of human whims:

          https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistrum

          https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roentgeniani_radii

          • woodruffw ・ 2 days ago

            Note the latinitas dubia on the first: we can calque anything between languages; that doesn't make Latin uniquely suitable for scientific conversation.

            (It also doesn't make it uniquely unsuitable: what makes it unsuitable is the fact that the only people who speak it are the pope, a handful of bishops, and a bunch of dorks.)

        • Amezarak ・ 2 days ago
          ・ 2 more

          Transistor is a portmanteau of "transfer" (from the Latin transferre) and resistor (from the Latin resistere), I think it still works. ;)

          (I think even resistor may be OK Latin according to the etymology I'm looking at, but I don't have enough faith in my Latin grammar to say so.)

          • woodruffw ・ 2 days ago

            Yes, that’s what I meant by pidgin :-). English is full of Latin cognates.

  • ryao ・ 3 days ago

    Ego adhuc latine scribam, si roges.

  • kensai ・ 3 days ago

    Which uni was that?

AndrewDucker ・ 3 days ago

The history of how we know what Latin sounded like is fascinating.

Reminds me this video on what Shakespeare's original pronunciation sounded like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s

  • tgv ・ 3 days ago

    We don't know. What's mentioned is informative, but certainly not decisive. Language is way too noisy for simple conclusions. E.g., spelling errors aren't exclusively based on phonetic similarity, and even if they were, their absence proves little.

    • ryao ・ 3 days ago

      Latin followed the alphabetic principle with few exceptions (U and J were later invented to fix the main exceptions). We know almost exactly how it was pronunced because of that and remarks contemporaries recorded on how speech sounded. For example, R was called the littera canina because of the trill. It is especially noticeable when you have two of them together like in terra.

      The main thing we do not know is how regnum was pronounced. We know it was either of two options for interpreting gn and a third choice is that both were acceptable. People are also unsure how 4 of the short vowels sounded. Some say that they have slightly different sounds while others say that they are just short versions of the long vowels like the other two (A and Y). It is possible both variations co-existed.

      We also know that western Romans often mispronounced Y as I since they had trouble rounding their lips for Y. Y had been introduced for transliteration of Greek loanwords, so it was not a native sound for the western Romans.

      • usrnm ・ 3 days ago
        ・ 2 more

        There is more to a language than knowing how to pronounce each individual letter. You can easily see it if you take any modern language, write a text in it down in IPA and ask a linguist unfamiliar with the language itself read it. It will still sound very alien to a native speaker. And this is with a live language we have full knowledge of.

        • int_19h ・ 3 days ago

          The result of this exercise depends largely on how accurate your IPA transcription is, because that is very much a scale. More often than not, what you see is a phonemic transcription rather than a phonetic one, which then does indeed require knowing how the actual phonemes are pronounced in a particular language. But with phonemic translation using the entire assortment of IPA diacritics, if your linguist is familiar with other languages that happen to have the same sounds, they could do a fairly decent take.

      • MLR ・ 3 days ago

        Do you know if there have been any of these kinds of recreations done on contemporary languages/dialects/accents, or I guess even created ones, to test the accuracy of these methods?

        It sounds like something that should obviously have been done, but my naive googling isn't getting me anywhere so far.

dghf ・ 3 days ago

Schola Latina Europæa et Universalis, surely? (Actual page title includes an ampersand, which I'm guessing HN doesn't like.)

  • ryao ・ 3 days ago

    Illa est quam putavi.

psychoslave ・ 3 days ago

Since the text mention difference between educated, less educated and uneducated people (though not illiterate, in that time?!), it would be fair to mention that maybe not everyone in the Latinophonie would pronounce words the same way.

Nice to see a old-fashioned webpage by the way.

leoc ・ 3 days ago

Warning: I'm not an expert on this or on anything.

W. Sidney Allen's old Vox Latina https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/vox-latina/0D460CEF06E5... is apparently still the standard starting reference for classical Latin pronunciation, at least for English-speakers. (Many nineteenth-century German philologists died to bring us this information, of course.) People such as Luke Ranieri on YouTube use a version of Allen's system, though a number of people including Ranieri claim that there should be five vowel qualities rather than the seven described by Allen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH8E5RKq31I .

Note that if you want to speak Latin that's roughly faithful to how it was spoken up to (but not necessarily including) late antiquity, pronunciation is actually less important than quantity: basically, using clearly distinguishable short and long vowels in the right places (plus not running together double consonants in some places). I suppose it's similarly important to get the stress right, but at least that's generally agreed to be pretty easy. Classical Latin quantity feels weird and unnatural to English-speakers, and to Romance-language speakers, German-speakers ... : words often include one or two or three unstressed long vowels before getting to the stressed syllable, which might or might not itself have a long vowel. Even people who advocate for (classically-)correct quantity often don't consistently get it right.

(And yes, Allen also did publish a Vox Graeca https://www.cambridge.org/ie/universitypress/subjects/classi... , too, but be careful: the pronunciation of Ancient Greek is a question that might actually get you into a fistfight https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BybLbHPU7Qc&list=PLQQL5IeNgc... .)

adlpz ・ 3 days ago

This is lovely. And it's great to have it both in English and Spanish because it makes it much easier to guess the sounds from the explanations as you can compare.

New life goal unlocked: live in a farm away from any computers and learn latin.

euroderf ・ 3 days ago

OT but... modern Icelandic is close enough to Old Norse that a reasoned mashup of Icelandic and Latin (sans inflections?) might start to resemble contemporary English. It would be a fun exercise anyways.

emblaegh ・ 3 days ago

Funny how the use of the acute accent instead of the macron for long vowels completely changes the “feel” of the written language to me. Makes it look less classy.

  • ale42 ・ 3 days ago

    Being used to the more traditional "ā"/... for long vowels, I found it very weird when opening the page, I was first wondering if it was actual Latin or an artificial language based on it.

  • Vox_Leone ・ 3 days ago

    Please don't take it as pedantic, but iirc the acute accent is modern and not a standard feature of classical Latin. While "Európæa" might be used in some modern contexts or to reflect contemporary pronunciation, it wouldn't be common in strict classical Latin texts.

Bairfhionn ・ 3 days ago

I had Latin in school for seven years but we never learned to use it in a conversation. It was mostly vocabulary, grammar and translation of texts into my native language and interpreting/discussing them.

It did help to have an easier access to learn other languages. But in hindsight I would have loved to be able to talk in Latin.

  • ryao ・ 3 days ago

    Adhuc tu discere potes. :)

Insanity ・ 3 days ago

I enjoy learning about languages and their histories, and this was a fun read. One thing I would say though is that stating a certain pronunciation is "correct" never sits well with me. Language is incredibly fluid, and typically when a certain pronunciation is deemed 'correct' it's related to people in power and how they pronounce(d) it.

There are of course regional variation where claiming one is more 'correct' than the other doesn't hold up well (north USA vs south USA), but even further I'm sure most would take offense at the idea that everyone in the US mispronounces words where they differ from British pronunciation. (I know, both languages evolved independently since the countries split, but you get my point).

  • Timwi ・ 3 days ago

    The article only uses the word “correct” twice: once in the context of aspiration (_per_ should not be pronounced as _pher_) and once when talking about the Latin _r_, which is markedly different from English _r_.

    In the rest of the article, they seem to prefer saying that certain pronunciations “should be avoided” or that the speaker should pay attention to a specific distinction (such as vowel lengths or syllable boundaries).

    It doesn't strike me as elitist or gatekeeping. It's making an honest effort to communicate the information you need to sound as authentically Latin as possible and to avoid speaking with an English accent.

  • stonesthrowaway ・ 3 days ago

    > One thing I would say though is that stating a certain pronunciation is "correct" never sits well with me.

    Who cares how it sits with you? There is a "correct" way in every aspect of language - accent, spelling, etc.

    > Language is incredibly fluid, and typically when a certain pronunciation is deemed 'correct' it's related to people in power and how they pronounce(d) it.

    Probably. But somebody has to set the standard.

    > There are of course regional variation where claiming one is more 'correct' than the other doesn't hold up well (north USA vs south USA),

    Bad example. There is most definitely a "correct" american pronunciation. It's why much of news/media has a neutral american accent. Most americans, from whatever region, can speak it to some degree or another.

    > but even further I'm sure most would take offense at the idea that everyone in the US mispronounces words where they differ from British pronunciation.

    Who would take offense? Not me. Not anybody I know. Especially since american english is the dominant form of english and probably will be the standard around the world.

    > but you get my point).

    You have no point. Just misinformed silly gripes. All languages standardize in some form or another whether it be accents, pronunciation, spelling, script, etc.

    • int_19h ・ 3 days ago

      Language standardization is by and large a product of nation-states combined with widespread education. Applying it to a language such as Latin is anachronistic.

asdffdasy ・ 2 days ago

any language with Synalœpha deserves to remain a dead language. looking at you next french.