I suspect many Latin teachers might be uncomfortable with their students getting into Latin that enthusiastically.
Many high school Latin teachers are actually not very proficient in Latin, they are merely capable of teaching from a syllabus that is usually quite modest. Except for some elite schools, Latin is taught just to give students a taste of the language and expand their vocabulary in their native language by recognizing Latin borrowings. The pupils aren’t intended to actually master the language and read non-set texts comfortably, let alone follow Neo-Latin materials or practice spoken Latin. If the students surpass the syllabus, that makes things difficult for the teachers. If a student has taken up the language so enthusiastically, the teacher may simply demand that he/she simply test out of the course instead of continuing to come to class.
> I took 8 years of Latin through Catholic school.
This just proves my point. Catholic schools in the US are private institutions, and one that would teach Latin with vigor is a rare case. However:
> we were required to read history texts written in Latin.
It is common for Caesar’s Gallic War to be assigned early on, but students working through it with the support of a tailor-made glossary and commentary is not a particularly impressive achievement. De bello gallico (like Xenophon’s Anabasis in Greek) is assigned precisely because it is an extremely easy text, and it is not very representative of Latin literature in general.
If your school expected you to read Livy, or even Tacitus, that definitely puts it into the “elite” category.
Livy, Seneca, Cicero, Virgil also featured in my Latin classes. I'm not sure of the relative difficulty levels anymore, though. All of these were fascinating for different reasons: Livy for the narrative, Seneca for the wisdom (see also Montaigne who heavily quotes Seneca in his essays), Cicero for his personal involvement in Caesarian politics and Virgil for his role as Augustus' propagandist and continuation of the Homeric tradition.
I should read more of these texts, I remember being really fond of Latin classes.
Edit: to concur with GP, Caesar's writings (de bello Gallico) were somewhere in the first half of the curriculum and were definitely regarded as relatively easy.
This is a remarkably uncharitable view of teachers’ motivations and abilities!
You’re not wrong that most Latin classes have somewhat different goals than modern language classes, but that doesn’t necessarily make them less rigorous, as you seem to be suggesting. Deprioritizing speaking, for example, makes sense for s language where students are...unlikely...to encounter a native speaker in the wild. We did eventually get there when doing poetry and other stuff meant to be heard, rather than read.
I also can’t imagine many teachers getting upset or uncomfortable with interested students. All of mine would have been over the moon if they discovered us studying more outside of class. I think this especially true for Latin, since it is such a niche field that people are certainly not in for the money!
Source: 3 years of Latin at a public high school, followed by a linguistics and CS degree.
Oh man, I would've watched the HELL out of this show in highschool. Pity, I didn't even know it existed! I had a beloved Latin teacher back then (regrettably, he passed years ago) who would've been all over this too.
The vowels of English are pronounced as narrow diphthongs. This really sets English apart from the pronunciation of modern European languages, and also from Latin as reconstructed. Finns certainly have a distinct accent in many foreign languages, but they do less violence to Latin than people from the USA or UK.
It's possible for Americans to do the correct vowels, though. We have most of them elsewhere in the language. I started learning Romance languages fairly young and at my peak fluency [a little rusty these days] I had people telling me I sounded near-native in Spanish.
Personally the thing that bothers me most about American accents with these languages is failure to make diphthongs out of adjacent vowels. An American accent will stretch a Romance diphthong out into lengthy syllables. For example in this audio link above, the speaker says hodie has "HOE-dee-ay". I speculate someone more used to speaking a Romance language would say /'hodje/, two syllables. (I note English wiktionary has it as 3 syllables. Not sure what an ancient Roman would do.)
In any case I think a lot of the confusion is orthographic in nature. An English speaker is used to an <e> being /i/. It's not that they can't do an /e/ sound if they tried. A lot of people in the US also have very little real exposure, eg. we have language classes in school where making a real attempt to drop our accents and interact on a level plane with natives is never even seriously considered, it's just a place to hold you in a desk and fill out worksheets.
>it's just a place to hold you in a desk and fill out worksheets.
The US education system is incredibly diverse--as is the US as a whole. That may the case in some schools, but it's certainly not the case everywhere. My southern high school was suburbun/almost rural and had enough kids on free lunch to qualify as a low income, but my German classes were extremely intensive. The French and Spanish classes were no joke either.
And in much of the country almost everyone will interact with native Spanish speakers fairly often.
It depends on accent, and short vowels tend to be pure in all accents of English, to the extent they are in other languages. Long vowels can become diphthongs though. Here are the vowels in Received Pronunciation and General American (and one other accent): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set
Even RP has some pure long vowels (e.g. NURSE, THOUGHT, BATH).
FLEECE and GOOSE do tend to be realized as narrow diphthongs, though.
In my own accent (Scottish), except for the four diphthongs (PRICE, PRIZE, CHOICE, and MOUTH) of which the first two are allophones, all the other vowels are pure. I verified this while developing a formant speech synthesizer.
Accounts of phonetic properties of the italian orthography have been ... slightly exaggerated :-)
E.g. Italian has 5 written vowels, although (in many dialects, including standard Italian) if has 7 (the o in "corto" is not the same as in "cosa", and there are some words which would be allophones were it not for the different quality of the "e" vowel, like "pesca" which means peach with a phonetic ɛ/è vs fishery/inflection of the verb to fish, when with a phonetic e/é)
Sort of related: India's public broadcaster has had a daily 5 minute bulletin in Sanskrit for as long as I can remember. A weekly 30 minute news show too started a few years ago.
The EU has now expanded to countries – Bulgaria, Greece – where Latin did not play a major role historically. Even Romania, where the language is Romance, never employed Classical Latin as a language of learning (Greek and Church Slavonic were used instead). So, choosing Latin would seem unfair for the Orthodox world.
Latin did play a major role in Greece (which was ruled by Rome), though in a twist, as Adam Davidson of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast (a real treasure) notes, Rome adopted Greek as its language of scholarship and aristocracy rather than imposing Latin on the Greeks.
Nuntii Latini Radiophoniae Finnicae Generalis, qui inde ab anno millesimo nongentesimo undenonagesimo (1989) iam triginta annos septimanatim emittuntur, post hanc emissionem finiuntur et decreto moderatorum radiophonicorum post ferias aestivas non continuabuntur. Auscultatoribus, quorum grex ad omnes orbis continentes amplificatus est, propter fidelitatem gratias quam maximas agimus et valedicimus.
A translation (not idiomatic English, staying closer to the original, but better than Google...):
Latin News Terminated
Finnish General Radio's "Latin News", which have been transmitted from here since 1989 already 30 years weekly, will be terminated after this transmission and, by decree of the radio directors, not continued after the summer break. To the listeners, whose flock has grown to all continents of the earth, on account of their faithfulness we give the greatest possible thanks, and bid farewell.
37 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 90.5 ms ] threadhttps://areena.yle.fi/1-1931339
and Latin students worldwide do love it!
Many high school Latin teachers are actually not very proficient in Latin, they are merely capable of teaching from a syllabus that is usually quite modest. Except for some elite schools, Latin is taught just to give students a taste of the language and expand their vocabulary in their native language by recognizing Latin borrowings. The pupils aren’t intended to actually master the language and read non-set texts comfortably, let alone follow Neo-Latin materials or practice spoken Latin. If the students surpass the syllabus, that makes things difficult for the teachers. If a student has taken up the language so enthusiastically, the teacher may simply demand that he/she simply test out of the course instead of continuing to come to class.
This just proves my point. Catholic schools in the US are private institutions, and one that would teach Latin with vigor is a rare case. However:
> we were required to read history texts written in Latin.
It is common for Caesar’s Gallic War to be assigned early on, but students working through it with the support of a tailor-made glossary and commentary is not a particularly impressive achievement. De bello gallico (like Xenophon’s Anabasis in Greek) is assigned precisely because it is an extremely easy text, and it is not very representative of Latin literature in general.
If your school expected you to read Livy, or even Tacitus, that definitely puts it into the “elite” category.
Yes to both :D
I should read more of these texts, I remember being really fond of Latin classes.
Edit: to concur with GP, Caesar's writings (de bello Gallico) were somewhere in the first half of the curriculum and were definitely regarded as relatively easy.
You’re not wrong that most Latin classes have somewhat different goals than modern language classes, but that doesn’t necessarily make them less rigorous, as you seem to be suggesting. Deprioritizing speaking, for example, makes sense for s language where students are...unlikely...to encounter a native speaker in the wild. We did eventually get there when doing poetry and other stuff meant to be heard, rather than read.
I also can’t imagine many teachers getting upset or uncomfortable with interested students. All of mine would have been over the moon if they discovered us studying more outside of class. I think this especially true for Latin, since it is such a niche field that people are certainly not in for the money!
Source: 3 years of Latin at a public high school, followed by a linguistics and CS degree.
https://nuntiilatini.com/
It's interesting to compare the accent of native English speakers and native Finnish speakers in Latin. :-)
Finnish has a phonemic orthography, almost. So it's quite easy to just read Latin the way it is written.
All of them?
Personally the thing that bothers me most about American accents with these languages is failure to make diphthongs out of adjacent vowels. An American accent will stretch a Romance diphthong out into lengthy syllables. For example in this audio link above, the speaker says hodie has "HOE-dee-ay". I speculate someone more used to speaking a Romance language would say /'hodje/, two syllables. (I note English wiktionary has it as 3 syllables. Not sure what an ancient Roman would do.)
In any case I think a lot of the confusion is orthographic in nature. An English speaker is used to an <e> being /i/. It's not that they can't do an /e/ sound if they tried. A lot of people in the US also have very little real exposure, eg. we have language classes in school where making a real attempt to drop our accents and interact on a level plane with natives is never even seriously considered, it's just a place to hold you in a desk and fill out worksheets.
The US education system is incredibly diverse--as is the US as a whole. That may the case in some schools, but it's certainly not the case everywhere. My southern high school was suburbun/almost rural and had enough kids on free lunch to qualify as a low income, but my German classes were extremely intensive. The French and Spanish classes were no joke either.
And in much of the country almost everyone will interact with native Spanish speakers fairly often.
Even RP has some pure long vowels (e.g. NURSE, THOUGHT, BATH). FLEECE and GOOSE do tend to be realized as narrow diphthongs, though.
In my own accent (Scottish), except for the four diphthongs (PRICE, PRIZE, CHOICE, and MOUTH) of which the first two are allophones, all the other vowels are pure. I verified this while developing a formant speech synthesizer.
Italian has almost phonemic orthography, as well, yet the Italian accent can be quite noticeable.
E.g. Italian has 5 written vowels, although (in many dialects, including standard Italian) if has 7 (the o in "corto" is not the same as in "cosa", and there are some words which would be allophones were it not for the different quality of the "e" vowel, like "pesca" which means peach with a phonetic ɛ/è vs fishery/inflection of the verb to fish, when with a phonetic e/é)
Nuntii Latini finiti
Nuntii Latini Radiophoniae Finnicae Generalis, qui inde ab anno millesimo nongentesimo undenonagesimo (1989) iam triginta annos septimanatim emittuntur, post hanc emissionem finiuntur et decreto moderatorum radiophonicorum post ferias aestivas non continuabuntur. Auscultatoribus, quorum grex ad omnes orbis continentes amplificatus est, propter fidelitatem gratias quam maximas agimus et valedicimus.
A translation (not idiomatic English, staying closer to the original, but better than Google...):
Latin News Terminated
Finnish General Radio's "Latin News", which have been transmitted from here since 1989 already 30 years weekly, will be terminated after this transmission and, by decree of the radio directors, not continued after the summer break. To the listeners, whose flock has grown to all continents of the earth, on account of their faithfulness we give the greatest possible thanks, and bid farewell.