B16 recently gave a speech in Latin encourating people to learn (of all things) Latin.
Maybe he gave it in Latin so that people would have to learn Latin to find out he was encouraging them to learn Latin.
Anyhoo . . . he also encouraged the teaching of Latin through new techniques, which I AM ALL FOR. The pedagogy in many Latin books (like Collins’s AWFUL Primer of Ecclesiastical Latin) is horribly out of date and seems designed to make learning the language hard on students.
I’d love to see a Latin textbook modelled off of Bill Mounce’s (excellent) Basics of Biblical Greek or an audio course for Latin based on the Pimsleur method.
Unfortunately, none of those things exist.
I’ve noodled around with writing a Latin textbook, but thus far it hasn’t come together for me. I’ve been able to simplify a lot of Latin instruction using a largely inductive method of teaching, but the Latin noun endings system is such a bear to try to teach in that fashion (or any fashion) that I’m not satisfied with the results yet.
Hopefully the pope’s impetus for better Latin pedagogical methods will serve as the impetus for better Latin pedagogical methods.
To go along with new teching methods there are also a lot of new Latin words to be taught. One of the things that
THIS ARTICLE ON THE POPE’S SPEECH
notes is that the group he was talking to
has also published a dictionary, the Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis, containing more than 15,000 neologisms translated into Latin.
For those who ever wondered about the Latin equivalent for "computer," "terrorist" or "cowboy," there are now answers.
"Instrumentum computatorium" is the way the Latinitas Foundation refers to computers.
Those who sow violence and terror are called "tromocrates (-ae)"; while characters in Westerns are called "armentarius."
Some of the words of the Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis can be consulted on the foundation’s Web page.
CHECK OUT THE LIST
(Thanks to the reader who e-mailed.)
Ooh! I don’t even know Latin, but I figgered out your headline!
I am a Willie Nelson fan.
I think people will learn Latin in order to figure out all the Latin blog titles.
In case anyone didn’t know, having a Latin title automatically makes a blog cool. Too bad Jimmy changed his. 😛
Also, I agree about the Collins book. Languages are relatively easy for me, but that thing is like wading through molasses. Until you get to verbs. Then it’s like wading through a brick wall.
I had an awsome Latin teacher in High School- she came out of retirement to teach us. She was fluent, converstaional- and when she got mad at us she’d switch to latin and only speak in that! All her AP students always passed with flying colors, she was amazing. She played around with writing a textbook- we didn’t use one, she wrote her own cirriculums. Now, if she, or someone in the Church, is able to write a textbookl like she taught that would be AWSOME.
P.S. If I had posted this, I would have titled it “Scalae Ad Caelum.”
(I think.)
I would be more impressed with B16 if he would end the Vatican gobbledygook of encyclicals etc. so us “pew sitters” and contributors can understand the message.
Momma don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys,
Don’t let em pick guitars and drive in old trucks,
Make em be doctors and lawyers and such
brilliant!
Say he gives that speach in a common language. Say it’s in his native German, or Italian, the common language of the city in which he now resides.
Someone’s still going to have to translate it into english, or you’re going to have to go to babelfish and type in the text for a semi-literal and always bad translation…
In the end it really doesn’t matter. Some schmuck has to sit there and translate it for whoever doesn’t speak that language. However, if we all make even the most remote effort to learn latin, we’ll be making the effort to have a common language with which to communicate with other catholics, and with which to understand our faith.
Personally, I’m horrible with foriegn languages. I only passed German 3 because I wrote the vocabulary words on my legs and wore skirts on the days of quizzes. It may have been the bad textbook and the poor teacher, I may just be a language idiot. I don’t know.
However, I get a little frustrated with people who are opposed to latin on some silly principle that it may actually require some sort of effort on their part to activly participate in something. Mentioning that you’d like a little more latin at mass gets people more shook up that talking about politics now days. It’s only scary and frightening and mysterious if you let it be. I’ve never sung a piece that didn’t have an english translation under it, nor have I ever been to a latin mass that didn’t have a missle available that contained the english translation next to the latin text.
I’m sorry if I sound like my witts end, but I am. I’m tired of people being so offended in general. I’m offended that other people are offended, at this point. It’s like people not even wanting to hear the word Christian, much less see symbols of christianity, etc. because somehow those symbols are going to burn their flesh or something (they might, some of those folks are hedonistic wampires). I’m tired of people being offended that there’s even a desire for there to be a movement towards infusing some of our latin heritage back into our latin-rite church. Like the hearing of those latin words is somehow going to pop eardrums and make eyes boil. It’s just latin.
Not sure how armentarius is “shepherds of cows”
pastoralis bos?
Please write a premseluer-like Hellenistic Greek instruction course? Please?
Tammy, it is just the vulgar language that the Bible and liturgy were translated into for the local congregations who spoke that language. Greek was the language of the Church. And of the oldest extant Biblical texts, both LXX and NT..
Personally, I would root for Quenya, but I don’t think that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Liturgy would take that seriously 😉
I’m all for learning Latin because it’s good to have a common language. Some people like to pretend that English is the universal language, but it’s not – and I’m sure not ready to learn Mandarin, which appears to have the most native speakers. Latin makes so much sense, not only because it’s the “native” language of the Church, but also because, if revived, it’s practical. For example, Chinese Christians have taken the trouble to learn Latin so they can communicate with Rome (and, let’s face it, to confound their persecutors). From all accounts, their letters to Rome have been very clear and correct in Latin. Because Latin doesn’t change (despite the additions of “computer” etc), the user avoids the pitfalls of a living language. English, for example, is chock full of colloquialisms, changes in usage, etc. Not to mention differences in regional vocabulary; e.g. “May I please borrow a rubber?” is a perfectly legitimate question for a schoolboy to ask a teacher in the UK. In the US, he’d be sent to the office.
Once I attended a Mass on the island of Cyprus, which was in Greek.
Because it was in Greek, which is not totally alien to English speakers, I was able to keep up to some extent. I was also able to identify the saints depicted on the walls.
Along with the structure of the Mass itself, I was able to feel at home, despite being in a totally foreign country. It gave me a strong sense of being a part of something that truly transcends boundaries of both time and space.
For these reasons, I am all for more Latin in the Mass.
Sursum Corda!
Puzzled: I would. 🙂
(the ‘I would’ was for the Quenya comment..)
No. We should discourage the learning of Latin while requiring that the mass be said in Latin. That way priests won’t be able to make up their own “meaningfuller” words to the ordinary of the mass.
A lot of homeschoolers, particularly the ones of Catholic, classical bent, teach Latin to their children for many reasons. On a superficial level, Latin is an extremely logical language in structure. This helps to develop a “logical structure” in the children’s minds, if you will. It also reinforces traditional roles, with “feminine” nouns for “feminine things” and “masculine” nouns for “masculine things”, farmer for example. Learning Latin also helps students to learn other Romance languages, eases their learning of biological vocabulary, and finally, what a lot of public high schools are learning, helps with those pesky vocabulary scores on the SATs.
LOL Arthur… I like that idea.
Yes yes yes, scriptures were originally in hebrew and greek, bla bla bla… but we kinda had a good thing going there with the Latin. If you’re a universal church, it’s nice to have some commonality.
Jimmy, isn’t your word order all wrong for this post title?
I never took Latin composition myself, but it definitely wouldn’t mirror English word order so conveniently.
(/pedantry)
I’ve never used Mounce’s popular book but I’ve looked at it, and I worry that he might go a little bit too far with the way he presents morphology — he tries to explain all the “irregular” Greek paradigms using regular sound change rules, which seems good, but the danger is that it’s not clear (to me) which of those changes were part of the evolution of Koine and which were actually learned by Koine speakers. If the former, then making students learn them and apply them when reading and writing Greek could prevent them from gaining real fluency.
Anyway, the Latin verb system is more regular the Greek verb system so maybe it is moot.
I thought Wheelock’s Latin was pretty good.
I loved wheelock when I took latin. We had trouble in the greek department because there wasn’t anything nearly as good as wheelock so they changed texts yearly looking for something good. I can hardly speak english now.
Jimmy, isn’t your word order all wrong for this post title?
I never took Latin composition myself, but it definitely wouldn’t mirror English word order so conveniently.
[pedantry] No, the word order is fine. I put the modifier “vestri” *after* “infantis,” where English word order would have had it before.
I could have put the verb in the last slot, but didn’t (a) because I thought it might confuse people about “infantis” (an accusative noun that looks genitive) and think it was modifing “Matres” and (b) because word order in Latin is quite flexible since the language is so highly inflected and (c) because the first and last slots in the sentence are the ones that receive emphasis in Latin, and the two words that most need to be stressed in this sentences are “Matres” and “armentarii” and (d) I didn’t want to make it too hard for the non-Latinists to figure out what I was saying.
Hope that clarifies. [/pedantry]
TPRS-Total Physical Response Storytelling–it’s the fastest and easiest way to learn a language.
Hmm… Shoudn’t it be vestros and armentarios? Enfantis is the object of permittite, isn’t it?
vestrum is used partitively and would give the sense “the babies of each one of y’all,” which doesn’t seem to me to be the nuance Willie is after. He seems to mean “you” more generically, so I used vos instead of vestrum, in which case it has to go into the genitive rather than the accusative.
Infantis is the object of permittite, so it is in the accusative (even though it looks genitive), but it struck me that “armentarii” *isn’t* modifying or in apposition to infantis. If it were then it would have to go into the accusative, but in this sentence armentarii is the object of an *infinitive* (esse) and hence the reversion to the nominative.
At least that was my reasoning at the time. I could be wrong since I didn’t do exhaustive checking, figuring hey–it’s only a blog headline and I don’t want to spend a lot of time pouring through big huge grammars to quintuple check myself.
Actually, I misspoke: armentarii is *modifying* an infinitive, not serving as its object. “to be cowboys” is a state of being and so armentarii is part of an infinitival phrase. Hence the reversion to the nominative.
Armentarii should be accusative, should it not? As you have it, armentarius being second declension, it is nominative. Armentarios would be correct.
Also, is it really idiomatic to negate an imperative with non? I though the way it was done (or the more common way) was to use noli (or in this case nolite) + the infinitive or else ne + second person present subjunctive, hence noli permittere or ne permittatis.
Sorry if I’m quite wrong: I’m tired and my Latin is rather rusty.
Actually, I misspoke: armentarii is *modifying* an infinitive, not serving as its object. “to be cowboys” is a state of being and so armentarii is part of an infinitival phrase. Hence the reversion to the nominative.
Never mind the first part of my previous post. The double infinitives are confusing.
semper ubi sub ubi.
You are right that it shouldn’t be vestrum. If enfantis is accusive, the accusative adjective vestros should be used. And since cowboys is a predicate of babies, I think it should be accusative too, to match babies: armentarios.
“It also reinforces traditional roles, with “feminine” nouns for “feminine things” and “masculine” nouns for “masculine things”, farmer for example.”
Uhhh…just for the record, farmer (“agricola”), like sailor (“nauta”) and poet (“poeta”), is feminine in construction although masculine in gender…
The replies regarding Latin grammar just reinforces why we do not need another language.
[Please forgive the pedantic Classicist. I fought the impulse, but since the Latin pedantry ball has already started rolling, I just couldn’t help myself….]
Puzzled: armentum is a common word for a cow in agricultural language, and can also be applied to other large farm animals. (It is from the verb arare, “to plough”, and so originally meant “the thing that ploughs”). Thus, armentarius is a cowherd (“neatherd” in ye olde tyme English) or, in the American West, a cowboy.
Jimmy: as you say, “vos” has two genitives – “vestrum” more for partitive function (i.e., “infantes vestrum” would mean “those among you who are infants”), “vestri” more for the other uses of the Genitive. But Rob is right on both the use of the possessive adjective and on the accusative predicate complement following the accusative subject in the infinitive phrase.
Publius: you’re right about negative commands.
Also, “permittere” takes the Dative + ut + subjunctive, not Accusative + Infinitive. And “esse” is a little off here after “adolescere” – Latin does not like to use infinitives for purpose/result – so perhaps in + Accusative would be better (though the parallels I can think of aren’t exact).
So it should be something like: Nolite permittere, o matres, infantibus vestris ut adolescant in armentarios.
Why we don’t have time to learn Latin:(Or languages where the money is)
1957 FORTRAN
1958 ALGOL
1960 LISP
1960 COBOL
1962 APL
1962 SIMULA
1964 BASIC
1964 PL/I
1966 ISWIM
1970 Prolog
1972 C
1975 Pascal
1975 Scheme
1977 OPS5
1978 CSP
1978 FP
1980 dBASE II
1983 Smalltalk-80
1983 Ada
1983 Parlog
1984 Standard ML
1986 C++
1986 CLP(R)
1986 Eiffel
1988 CLOS
1988 Mathematica
1988 Oberon
1989 HTML
1990 Haskell
Realist-
Your against a Latin revival? I’m shocked…
SHOCKED!
Anybody else see the “Our Sunday Visitor” article a couple weeks ago about the revival of interest in Latin in the Church? The article was accompanied by a big, artsy graphic … of the words to the Kyrie. Oops, wrong ancient language. I was amused.
Tim J,
How are you recovering? You could buy a surge protector to prevent overloads while you read some if not all of Crossan’s fourteen books .
Sorry, Realist…
I find Calvin and Hobbes much deeper and more worthwhile.
But thanks for your concern.
Tim J,
I do believe that there are surge protectors also for believers in Calvin and Hobbes.
Realist —
Human languages are the highest forms of human technology. They are roughly compatible with each other, but each contains features which are unique to it and cannot fully be replicated in others. Languages, however, never can be superseded. When they are lost, something is lost from the heritage of all humans in all times.
Latin is not only the native tongue of huge chunks of the world’s best and most literature; it is also uniquely beautiful, sonorous, strong, and exact. This is highly useful to our Church. That’s why it’s stuck around.
We are creatures made to learn and use language. Even babies can do this.
Latin is one of those things which would be a lot easier to learn if more people were learning it. I look forward to its revival.
Maureen,
“Latin is not only the native tongue of huge chunks of the world’s best and most literature; it is also uniquely beautiful, sonorous, strong, and exact. This is highly useful to our Church. That’s why it’s stuck around.”
The French, English, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Greeks, Egyptians, Persians and Indians from India would disagree with your conclusions.
Latin to me represents the slavery imposed by the Romans to include the enslavement of the Israelites. In some respects, it also represents the enslavement by our Church of many not so willing natives especially those in South America and Africa.
And the computer languages noted previously to include Java are being used to convert any language to any language of your choosing either from text or from speech. Enjoy!!!
Mom of 5,
I’ll start off by saying I don’t know about Latin, but I do have knowledge of Latin-family languages and Germanic family languages, and the masculinity and femininity of nouns has nothing to do with traditional masculinity or femininity.
I don’t really know how we came to give different “attributes” to different nouns, but it seems random, and it seems that only later did we come up with the labels “masculine” and “feminine” and “neuter”.
Take for example, German. Think about which gender would you give these nouns: Logic. Strength. Manliness. Mathematics. Pipe (smoking pipe). Career. Work.
They are feminine.
How about: Uterus. Babysitter. Emotion. They are actually masculine except for Emotion (Gefühl) which is neutral .
I could go on and on, but there is really no discovered rhyme or reason as to why “Wall” is feminine, “Beer” is neutral, “Dress” is neutral, “Skirt” is masculine, or “Girl” (Mädchen) is neutral. And a male virgin is also referred to as a “Jungfrau“.
Any noun form of an adjective is by default feminine. Beautiful > Beauty = Schönheit and all -heit and -keit words are by default, feminine. So even “manliness” (Männlichkeit) will be feminine!
The closest you get to where it might seem to follow what “masculine” and “feminine” really mean, would be words for physical features of a human’s gender (different sex organs, beards and moustaches), but as you see, even Uterus is masculine.
Interesting, isn’t it. I think they decided to categorize what they had by “gender” after the fact, just for something to name the categories, for lack of anything else to go by.
Who knows enough to tell us about if this is also so, with Latin?
Realist, I’m rather amused at the idea that I’ve finally met someone who harbours resentment against the Roman Empire.
There is a audio course (Assimil method) to speak latin just like any other language: http://www.multilingualbooks.com/tlstore/assimfor.html