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The Vatican's Latinist
- scop 9y agoI have read many articles across different blogs all highlighting Foster's amazing career. I studied Latin in high school and regret that I was not more engaged at the time. I am thrilled to learn of the publishing of 'Ossa Latinitatis Sola' and will take it as an opportunity to give Latin another, more purposeful, go in the near future.
- _spoonman 9y agoAny advice for someone like me who has never taken Latin but would like to learn?
- nyi 9y agoLabor omnia vincit!
- petertotleben 9y agoLingua Latina by Hans Orberg. https://www.hackettpublishing.com/lingua-latina-per-se-illustrata-series https://www.hackettpublishing.com/lingua-latina-per-se-illus...
- scop 9y agoGo for it! Here is a good quote from the article from Fr. Foster: "Latin is the best thing that ever happened to humanity. It leaves you zero room for nonsense. You don’t have to be a genius. But it requires laser-sharp concentration and total maturity. If you don’t know what time of day it is, or what your name is, or where you are, don’t try Latin because it will smear you on the wall like an oil spot."
- jhbadger 9y agoI have a fondness for Latin myself, but this is absurd. There are lots of languages with a similar case-driven grammar and nobody makes such claims about those. Russian is about as case-driven as Latin and non-indo-european languages like Finnish and Estonian actually have more cases.
- throwaway7645 9y agoWould love to hear details on why this is true compared to other languages.
- kawera 9y agoMy suggestion would be Hans Ørberg's Lingua Latina per se Illustrata series, it's brilliant and you can start from zero. https://www.hackettpublishing.com/lingua-latina-per-se-illustrata-series https://www.hackettpublishing.com/lingua-latina-per-se-illus... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_%C3%98rberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_%C3%98rberg
- tardo99 9y agoThumbs up for this suggestion.
- bshimmin 9y agoMy advice would be to have reasonable expectations. Latin isn't easy to learn - you can't practise talking to real people, it has plentiful grammar, there isn't so much vocabulary (relatively) but many words have a vast variety of meanings depending on context, and sentence structure is entirely alien to English speakers. It is, essentially, quite hard (though easier than Classical Greek). I studied Latin to degree level a decade-and-mumble years ago, and to my great shame have not kept it up at all. On the rare occasions that I am required to translate some Latin - an inscription in a church, for instance - I try my best, but I am usually a far cry from Indiana Jones. (I do have a moderately extensive selection of pretentious phrases in Latin that I can deploy when necessary.) We used Kennedy's Revised Latin Primer and The Cambridge Latin Course at school; I think the latter starts pretty much from the basics, and the former covers probably all of the grammar you'd ever need to know. I think you can get some of the Harry Potter books in Latin, if that sort of thing takes your fancy. Once you've acquired a moderate mastery, you will find something like Caesar's Gallic Wars to be quite an easy read (though stylistically he ain't much cop).
- InitialLastName 9y agoTo add to that, the grammar (and thus the meaning) is sometimes driven by the meter, which is a concept pretty much entirely foreign to many familiar with English prose.
- bshimmin 9y agoQuite. Though, if by any chance you have reached a sufficient mastery of English prosody to understand the iambic pentameter, the dactylic hexameter really isn't such a stretch, notwithstanding one being based on stress and the other weight.
- InitialLastName 9y agoI so enjoyed the pattern-matching puzzle that I found preparing for the AP Latin (Virgil) exam to be.
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- jkingsbery 9y agoI took Latin in college (having not taken it in high school), and found the Wheelock text book pretty helpful (https://www.amazon.com/Wheelocks-Latin-7th/dp/0061997226 https://www.amazon.com/Wheelocks-Latin-7th/dp/0061997226 ). If you're looking for Latin texts, check out the Perseus Project (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/ http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/) and the Latin Library (http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/ http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/). If you get stuck on something, swing by the Latin StackExchange (https://latin.stackexchange.com/ https://latin.stackexchange.com/).
- jamesash 9y agoCurrent Latin learner here. I found the Great Courses Introduction to Latin by Hans-Friedrich Mueller to be helpful. 35 audio lectures, plus 35 chapters of exercises. It's a good introduction that covers all the basics, and has set me up quite well for working through selections from The Gallic Wars.
- JoeDaDude 9y agoThis is a stretch but there is a cottage industry that churns out translations of children's books into Latin. Search for "Winnie Ille Puh" or "Cattus Patasatus" and that will lead to several others. This was likely started by Charles Schulz and company who had a Latin version of the Peanuts Philosophy published, a version which is now a rare collector's item. [1] [1] https://www.amazon.com/Peanuts-Philosophers-Latin-version-2-book/dp/B003850S7E/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1500143768&sr=1-1&keywords=peanuts+philosophy+latin https://www.amazon.com/Peanuts-Philosophers-Latin-version-2-...
- favorited 9y agoDitto. I totally wasted the years I had to sit in a Latin classroom... I've bought a book of Latin stories that we used in school, and I'm looking forward to diving back in. If my 13-year-old self knew that, he'd be horrified.
- Ascetik 9y agoOne of my best friends studied under him in Rome, he had some amazing stories to tell.
- 0xCMP 9y agoThe industry we do I think we are well suited to appreciating the devotion you can give to a craft or knowing something well. It's pretty inspiring and also shocking how someone could be so devoted to something for so long and how little it gave him other than what he intrinsically got from it. We should be thankful that we live in a perfect time for those of us who want to devote ourselves to engineering and computer science can also reap rewards which let us have the freedom to live the lives we want. Just because what we do is useful or hard doesn't mean it needs to be financially fulfilling.
- scop 9y ago"If you don’t know Latin, you know nothing! I had my first experience of Latin forty years ago, and I have not been bored by Latin for ten minutes in these forty years. Latin is one of the greatest things that ever happened in human history." -- Renigald Foster
- emmelaich 9y agoAn uncle of mine was a priest who more or less fluent in English, Latin and Italian. Also Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinean Pidgin English) for that matter from when he was a missionary. He spent quite a lot of time in the Vatican and may well have been one of Foster's students. I sometimes think whether his great talents were wasted as a priest* but stories like this help me think they were not. * there were expectations of you going into the priesthood if you were the eldest son in an Irish Catholic family.
- Bromskloss 9y ago> there were expectations of you going into the priesthood if you were the eldest son in an Irish Catholic family. Doesn't that make for an overabundance of priests?
- emmelaich 9y agoYes and no. Yes, because there were probably priests who shouldn't have been. No, because there's still a lot of people in the world to convert.
- pmoriarty 9y agoAnyone interested in this might enjoy reading about Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti[1] and other "hyperpolyglots" in Michael Erard's Babel No More.[2] An excerpt from the Introduction: "...Mezofanti liked to quip that he knew 'fifty languages and Bolognese.' During his lifetime, he put enough of those on display -- among them Arabic and Hebrew (biblical and Rabbinic), Chaldean, Coptic, Persian, Turkish, Albanian, Maltese, certainly Latin and Bolognese, but also Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, and English, as well as Polish, Hungarian, Chinese, Syrian, Amharic, Hindustani, Gujarati, Basque, and Romanian -- that he frequently appeared in rapturous accounts of visitors to Bologna and Rome. Some compared him to Mithradates, the ancient Persian king who could speak the language of each of the twenty-two territories he governed. The poet Lord Byron, who once lost a multilingual cursing contest with Mezzofanti, called him 'a monster of languages, the Briareus of parts of speech, a walking polyglott, and more, -- who ought to have existed at the time of the Tower of Babel, as universal interpreter.' ... "On one occasion, Pope Gregory XVI (1765-1846), a friend of Mezzofanti, arranged for dozens of international students to surprise him. When the signal was given, the students knelt before Mezzofanti and then rose quickly, talking to him 'each in his own tongue, with such an abundance of words and such a volubility of tone, that, in the jargon of dialects, it was almost impossible to hear, much less to understand them.' Mezzofanti didn't flinch but 'took them up singly, and replied to each in his own language.' The pope declared the cardinal to be victorious. Mezzofanti could not be bested." [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezzofanti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezzofanti [2] - https://www.amazon.com/Babel-No-More-Extraordinary-Language/dp/1451628250/ https://www.amazon.com/Babel-No-More-Extraordinary-Language/...
- brianwawok 9y agoAt what point do you cross from polyglot to hyperglot? I would enjoy being a programming hyperglot I think...
- duxup 9y agoI assume at then Gregory turned to some other Cardinal and handed over a handful of scudo saying "I was sure we had him this time..."
- kingofpandora 9y ago
- GnarfGnarf 9y agoI wish I had had a teacher like that when Latin was being shoved down my throat. I so rebelled, I knew less Latin in my sixth year than I did in my fourth. The wasted hours of rosa, rosam, rosae, rosa. However, it did enable me to become fluent in Spanish in two months. Fluent enough to teach high school physics, in Spanish, at the Instituto Americano of La Paz.
- dkarl 9y agoI wish I did, too, but I think instruction in all the other languages was even worse, at least in my school. While my class was memorizing charts like -r -ris -tur, -mur -mini -ntur the students taking Spanish and French were learning the "better" way, but their results were worse. Language instruction in the U.S. is just shit all around. (I remember one of the smartest kids in my school took four years of Spanish, and by his senior year, he was the only kid taking Spanish who wasn't a native Spanish speaker. So the teacher spoke English with him and Spanish with the rest of the kids....)
- coldcode 9y agoMy favorite teacher ever was my high school latin teacher. I took latin for 3 years, each class was packed as everyone loved being there. In a public US high school at that. Today I doubt there is a single public high school in the US teaching latin.
- dhosek 9y agoNorthside College Prep in Chicago has Latin (and my nephews actually took it at the K-8 level in public schools as well). If you read the story, you'll find that many of Foster's former students are teaching Latin, and Santa Monica High School (another public school) is given as an example of where his graduates teach. My local public high school also offers Latin (as does the Catholic high school half a mile down the street). There's been a bit of a renaissance of Latin in the schools of late.
- tzs 9y agoOne of New York's special public schools not only teaches latin, they require everyone to take four years of it: Brooklyn Latin School [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Latin_School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Latin_School
- pmoriarty 9y agoHere's a video of Foster teaching a letter of Cicero: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACJDtJ0UDzA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACJDtJ0UDzA
- sumobob 9y agoI took latin in High School and loved it, thanks for posting this, it reminds me to get back into it
- DrScump 9y agoMy favorite quote: About this method he said, “You don’t need a hydrology course to learn to swim. You don’t point at the water and say, ‘This is water, this is how water works.’ you just throw the babies in.”
- peterburkimsher 9y agoI agree completely. Language is alive, and learning words is much easier for me if they're in context. I'm not learning Latin, but I am learning Chinese. I wrote http://pingtype.github.io http://pingtype.github.io to put spaces between words, colours for tones, pinyin romanisation, and a literal translation on the line below. I could probably do the same for Latin. First I'm doing English-to-Chinese (the other way), then I might try Taiwanese and Japanese, but the structure of the program is all the same. I just have to gather the data for each new language. Comment if you're interested, and I'll let you know when I finally get around to working on it. There have been a few Latin/Greek posts on HN that get upvoted a lot, so I think there's some demand.
- mncharity 9y agoNifty. I went looking for google translate style audio, and found the Advanced > Audio button, and hit a bug. Page load; for Chinese input, enter "中文 輸入"; Translate; Audio; surprised by English input and Chinese spaced having cat and ffmpeg command lines. Feature idea: permit repeatedly playing the audio for just a part of the phrase. Often when using ggl translate, I want to rehear just a syllable or word I'm unsure of, or am having trouble with. Google makes you rehear the whole thing, which is simple, but discourages double-checks, and impairs iteration.
- peterburkimsher 9y agoSorry! Thank you for exploring the Advanced features, I put a lot of effort into those, but they need more explaining. I'm pleased that you actually looked at it though :). The audio feature doesn't actually play audio. It's supposed to generate input commands to put into ffmpeg. I would write more documentation, but my priority is to get the existing documentation translated to Chinese. I asked 4 friends over the past 3 months, all have promised to do it, but only one of them translated one page. I don't think there's a way to do what you're asking using only client-side JavaScript. I would need a server to generate an audio file for you. Unfortunately, I don't have the money for that. The most I could do would be to generate an M3U playlist file, which you could then save and navigate using the chapter feature of your music player.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mncharity 9y ago> What the book cannot give, of course, is the experience of [...] strolling through the streets of Rome with him. For that we will need his like—or to wait for the Reginaldians to start writing memoirs. Shouldn't someone point these folks at VR headsets and livestreaming stabilized 360deg video? It doesn't matter that he can't walk and is stuck in the US. With someone to be his walking and conversation companion in Rome, and to hold his eyes, he could walk Rome every morning, telling stories, and recording it for posterity.
- mncharity 9y agoMorning-after edit: streamed phone video, or even just a conversation with photos, would be much easier.
- tdumitrescu 9y agoPrevious discussion when first published a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13789097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13789097
- hyperdunc 9y agoBill Maher called this guy Father Maverick when he interviewed him for the movie Religulous. The interview is quite amusing and can be found on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy1lPOzDvs4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy1lPOzDvs4
- eru 9y ago> Foster’s model has proven to be imitable (though his energy and expertise is not—Paideia last year used six teachers to cover what Reginaldus would do alone). I wonder if that can be ported to eg math education?
- Bromskloss 9y ago> Sundays were not off days but day-long excursions into the countryside with twenty-page packets of Latin texts: to Cicero’s birthplace, Tiberius’s cave at Sperlonga, Horace’s villa in the Sabine mountains, and many other locations. The course was free and no one received any official credit for taking it—Foster wanted only people who loved Latin for its own sake. “Summer school” became a kind of legend in Rome, particularly within the American expatriate community (it was taught in English and attracted mostly Americans). Does he still do this course?
- osullivj 9y agoI believe Latin is a language option on Vatican City ATMs.