Latin Isn't Dead! To Those

[Laudate_Dominum]

[quote name='cmotherofpirl' date='Mar 5 2004, 08:06 AM'] One thing I really enjoyed about the[i] Passion[/i] was listening to the LAtin conversations. [/quote]
Me too, that was so cool. I wish more movies were in Latin.

[Adeodatus]

There's a Latin news programme from Finland here: [url="http://www.yleradio1.fi/zgo.php?z=20031213131686314670"]Nuntii Latini[/url]

I love Latin. I just wish I was better at it! I had 2 years of one-on-one coaching in Latin when I first joined the Dominicans. It's a good way to learn.... no one to hide behind, so you learn really quickly. The best bit was reading St Augustine's Confessions in Latin. That alone has to be worth learning the language for.

[Laudate_Dominum]

[quote name='Adeodatus' date='Mar 5 2004, 08:49 AM'] There's a Latin news programme from Finland here: [url="http://www.yleradio1.fi/zgo.php?z=20031213131686314670"]Nuntii Latini[/url]

I love Latin. I just wish I was better at it! I had 2 years of one-on-one coaching in Latin when I first joined the Dominicans. It's a good way to learn.... no one to hide behind, so you learn really quickly. The best bit was reading St Augustine's Confessions in Latin. That alone has to be worth learning the language for. [/quote]
Oh man, reading Augustine in the original has always been a dream of mine. My problem is that I don't stick with things. I'm sure I've read more books half way through in my life than books that I have actually finished. I've also never persevered with Latin enough to be that good. I'll get side tracked with Greek or something, or a musical instrument.
Life is too short I think... I guess in Heaven we'll be able to hang out with St. Augustine so it's no big deal afterall.

[cmotherofpirl]

[quote name='Adeodatus' date='Mar 5 2004, 10:49 AM'] There's a Latin news programme from Finland here: [url="http://www.yleradio1.fi/zgo.php?z=20031213131686314670"]Nuntii Latini[/url]

I love Latin. I just wish I was better at it! I had 2 years of one-on-one coaching in Latin when I first joined the Dominicans. It's a good way to learn.... no one to hide behind, so you learn really quickly. The best bit was reading St Augustine's Confessions in Latin. That alone has to be worth learning the language for. [/quote]
I think that is it. I knew it was from a northern country.!!

[the_rev]

Well I'm glad a few people people agreed with me!


Kyrie eleison

[Seatbelt Blue]

Latin LACKS AN ACTIVE LITERARY LIFE - there is not a school of authors who write novels in latin. Plays are not generally written in latin. Movies are not generally written in Latin. Even The Passion was written in English and then _translated_.

Church documents don't count as a literary life. The language is not being _engaged_ or _expanded_.

Latin lacks a linguistic community - there are not whole communities that depend on latin for commerce or business; there are not regions that use latin as the vernacular. The popular usage of Latin is restricted to its existence as an ecclesial and scholarly language.

Compare latin to, say, English.

English 400 years ago is quite different from English today. Latin 400 years ago is IDENTICAL to Latin today. English 800 years ago is VASTLY different from English today. Latin from 800 years ago is, again, identical.

Language changes so much so quickly that, within forty years of Hebrew being reintroduced in Israel, it was considered a seperate language from the original tongue. My college offers both Hebrew and Modern Hebrew. There is no course in Modern Latin.

Romanian is not particularly close to Latin. For example, take the latin "father" - [i]pater[/i].

In Spanish and Italian, the least transformed, it is "padre."
In French, it is "pere."
In Portuguese, it is "pai."
In Romanian, it is "tata."

Romanian was heavily Slavicized until it was Latinized from the top-down in the mid-19th century, using a large number of _french_ loan words, making Romanian slightly intelligible to a native Latin speaker, but the intelligibility between Romanian and Latin would be even less than that between French and Latin, which is already quite low. Consider:

The French for Bishop - evêque - is quite different from the Latin episcopus. The "p" transformed into a "b" in Middle French which became a "v." Middle French, written, used "ê" for "es," but this was eventually lost, and now, the "s" is gone. The final syllable was simply dropped entirely. Hence, episcopus becomes evêque.

Romanian, borrowing from French, is thus a bizarre mixture of Romance and Slavonic, and hardly qualifies as some form of modern "Latin."