Fascinating article! I wish a similar change had come over Ancient Greek studies, too. My experience was that intro classes was an impatient way to half-read Platon. I once asked our instructor, a TA who was wrapping up his PhD in Classics, how to say “It’s raining” in A. Greek and he didn’t have a clue, such a question never occurred to him. And studying later texts, such as the Souda was not even considered.
If you asked someone who specialized in the Eleusinian mysteries, which involved the command "rain!" given to the sky by the participants, they would have had no trouble telling you how to say "it's raining". If you asked someone who had been reading the Iliad, they'd be able to tell you all kinds of words for spears, fighting, armor, walls, and viscera, but rain might not come up as frequently.
I didn't know this exists. Funny how reading all this Latin instills a feeling of home. Have I been a Roman in a previous life? But then, I'm not a believer in reincarnation.
I've always wanted to get into Latin, and my current plan is getting through "Lingua Latina"[1], a book written in Latin and heavily recommended by others.
I do wonder about a "global Latin community", though. My personal experience with Latin "speakers" has been tinged by an atmosphere of Elitism. Not just about knowing the language, but the whole curriculum of literature. A bit like when you're thrown into a club of people quoting Star Wars all the time, just a bit more high-falutin'. Comes with centuries of "classical education" being a hallmark of upper class schooling. Compare that with the basic concept of languages like Esperanto...
I'm on chapter 20 of Lingua Latina. I think it is very well done. I did study latin in school formally for four years, so it's more of a refresher, but it teaches some concepts I hadn't encountered before.
That said, it can be difficult at times, especially around Chapter 16. I would recommend picking up a copy of Wheelock's* as well, which is much more focused on grammar and structure. You might want to either go through Wheelock's and LL together, or tackle Wheelock's first and then LL second.
The mention of the Catholic Church's use of Latin made we wonder: if you're going to resurrect Latin as an international language, which pronunciation are you going to use -- the reconstructed classical pronunciation of Cicero et al., or the Italian-influenced pronunciation of Church Latin? For example, Caesar's veni, vidi, vici would be pronounced something like "wainey, weedy, weeky" in the former but "vainy, veedy, veechy" in the latter.
And then there's the traditional English pronunciation, which assumes that Latin is pronounced more or less the same as English: e.g., mater is made to rhyme with "later".
Church Latin is curiously silent. There are a lot of Tridentine Masses out there: but one doesn't really hear a lot of the prayers in them, does one? In the Novus Ordo Masses, the prayers are audible, and the congregation takes part, but there aren't many such celebrated, that I know of.
That is due to a shift in 1962 (although some irredentists, primarily in Europe, do still perform services in Latin).
Church latin was the working language of the catholic church. Services switched to Latin (from Greek) around 200, but as the church spread through Europe and the middle east, services were often in vernacular. Since this led to a lot of local interpretation and variance (many -- perhaps most? -- priests were illiterate at the time) by 1000, I believe, the popes started insisting that the priests use Latin and turn their back on the audience.
Since about 1988, after the publication of Ecclesia Dei, the Tridentine Mass has made a considerable comeback. In the Archdiocese of Washington, there are three parishes that offer a Tridentine Mass, but only the cathedral has a Novus Ordo Mass.
> the popes started insisting that the priests … turn their back on the audience.
I don't think that's true: priests' backs aren't turned towards the congregation, but rather priests' and the congregation's faces are turned together towards the sanctuary.
Indeed that is how it is framed. But IIRC (it's been years since I learned these things) the real "problem" addressed was that, particularly in the christianization of the scandinavians and goths, if you defeated them in battle they were happy to add Jesus to their stable of gods to call upon, as that one had been handy for the other side. In addition, as I mentioned, local priests were relying on faulty memory and taking local custom into account when discussing matters ecclesiastical. i'd think that wouldn't be at all bad in a religion, but I can see how it is destructive to corporate structure. It appears that the point was to infuse additional magic into the ritual and remove a large chunk of autonomy from the local providers.
That still wouldn't make sense, since the exact same set-up was common in the Eastern Roman Empire, which had been thoroughly Christian for almost half a millennium by that point in time.
Honestly, it sounds a bit like a just-so story. Wikipedia indicates at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_orientem indicates that pre-Christian sects like the Essenes practised it, and that Origen (second & third centuries) & Clement of Alexandria (second century) both mention it.
> Since this led to a lot of local interpretation and variance (many -- perhaps most? -- priests were illiterate at the time) by 1000, I believe, the popes started insisting that the priests use Latin and turn their back on the audience.
It a congregation, not an audience, and in Roman practice before ~8th-9thC it was the audience whose back was to the priest. In both Eastern and Roman practice, services had both the priest and the worshippers facing East; in the East the priest was at the East end, facing the altar at far Eastern extremity, with the congregation facing the priest and altar. In Rome, the priest was at the far West, facing the altar and, beyond them, the congregation.) Later, the Eastern approach was adopted as the norm in Rome and the West (and eventually the invariable East-West orientation abandoned), but in neither were the priest and congregation facing each other as in the modern Roman mass
The universal adoption of Latin (and the Roman rite) in the West was, IIRC, driven more by Charlemagne and subsequent Emporers than the Popes.
> As soon as the nineteenth-century method of analyzing the languages without ever using them started to take over, Classics immediately started to die.
This sounds absurd. At my high school‡ Latin and Greek were living languages, and we studied them, as we studied French, as a way of reading literature and understanding a culture distant yet related to ours. Unless you were an actual linguist, what would be the point of studying a language without using it?
Surely cicero was capable of speaking demotic, and writing Katharevousa?
The implication that Shakspear spoke in meter feels false. Poets rhyme for amusement, but can also just "say" pass the salt and mean it non-ironically.
You can ask for the nearest coffee shop in Latin without using ciceronian style, and its good latin. Spending the mental energy to think it may be going beyond the pale.
I'm probably a little late in posting here. If any of you are in the Seattle area and interested, come check out the Latin meetup: https://www.meetup.com/eastside-latin/.
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[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 64.6 ms ] threadThis question is basically just "what's the verb for 'rain'?". The syntax is exactly what you'd expect.
As it happens, the word is very well documented ( http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... ), but it's not obvious that your TA should have been reading about rain. You know the words you use frequently.
If you asked someone who specialized in the Eleusinian mysteries, which involved the command "rain!" given to the sky by the participants, they would have had no trouble telling you how to say "it's raining". If you asked someone who had been reading the Iliad, they'd be able to tell you all kinds of words for spears, fighting, armor, walls, and viscera, but rain might not come up as frequently.
I didn't know this exists. Funny how reading all this Latin instills a feeling of home. Have I been a Roman in a previous life? But then, I'm not a believer in reincarnation.
I do wonder about a "global Latin community", though. My personal experience with Latin "speakers" has been tinged by an atmosphere of Elitism. Not just about knowing the language, but the whole curriculum of literature. A bit like when you're thrown into a club of people quoting Star Wars all the time, just a bit more high-falutin'. Comes with centuries of "classical education" being a hallmark of upper class schooling. Compare that with the basic concept of languages like Esperanto...
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia...
That said, it can be difficult at times, especially around Chapter 16. I would recommend picking up a copy of Wheelock's* as well, which is much more focused on grammar and structure. You might want to either go through Wheelock's and LL together, or tackle Wheelock's first and then LL second.
* https://www.amazon.de/Wheelocks-Latin-7th/dp/0061997226/
And then there's the traditional English pronunciation, which assumes that Latin is pronounced more or less the same as English: e.g., mater is made to rhyme with "later".
Church latin was the working language of the catholic church. Services switched to Latin (from Greek) around 200, but as the church spread through Europe and the middle east, services were often in vernacular. Since this led to a lot of local interpretation and variance (many -- perhaps most? -- priests were illiterate at the time) by 1000, I believe, the popes started insisting that the priests use Latin and turn their back on the audience.
I don't think that's true: priests' backs aren't turned towards the congregation, but rather priests' and the congregation's faces are turned together towards the sanctuary.
Honestly, it sounds a bit like a just-so story. Wikipedia indicates at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_orientem indicates that pre-Christian sects like the Essenes practised it, and that Origen (second & third centuries) & Clement of Alexandria (second century) both mention it.
It a congregation, not an audience, and in Roman practice before ~8th-9thC it was the audience whose back was to the priest. In both Eastern and Roman practice, services had both the priest and the worshippers facing East; in the East the priest was at the East end, facing the altar at far Eastern extremity, with the congregation facing the priest and altar. In Rome, the priest was at the far West, facing the altar and, beyond them, the congregation.) Later, the Eastern approach was adopted as the norm in Rome and the West (and eventually the invariable East-West orientation abandoned), but in neither were the priest and congregation facing each other as in the modern Roman mass
The universal adoption of Latin (and the Roman rite) in the West was, IIRC, driven more by Charlemagne and subsequent Emporers than the Popes.
This sounds absurd. At my high school‡ Latin and Greek were living languages, and we studied them, as we studied French, as a way of reading literature and understanding a culture distant yet related to ours. Unless you were an actual linguist, what would be the point of studying a language without using it?
‡ which was, I admit, a "Latin School"
The implication that Shakspear spoke in meter feels false. Poets rhyme for amusement, but can also just "say" pass the salt and mean it non-ironically.
You can ask for the nearest coffee shop in Latin without using ciceronian style, and its good latin. Spending the mental energy to think it may be going beyond the pale.