6 ms·

Schola Latina Europæa and Universalis

87 points by Tomte 2y ago

asdffdasy 2y ago
any language with Synalœpha deserves to remain a dead language. looking at you next french.
psychoslave 2y ago
Also, no one to mention Perligata already??! https://metacpan.org/dist/Lingua-Romana-Perligata/view/lib/Lingua/Romana/Perligata.pm https://metacpan.org/dist/Lingua-Romana-Perligata/view/lib/L...
adlpz 2y ago
This is lovely. And it's great to have it both in English and Spanish because it makes it much easier to guess the sounds from the explanations as you can compare. New life goal unlocked: live in a farm away from any computers and learn latin.
AndrewDucker 2y ago
The history of how we know what Latin sounded like is fascinating. Reminds me this video on what Shakespeare's original pronunciation sounded like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
- tgv 2y ago
  We don't know. What's mentioned is informative, but certainly not decisive. Language is way too noisy for simple conclusions. E.g., spelling errors aren't exclusively based on phonetic similarity, and even if they were, their absence proves little.
  - ryao 2y ago
    Latin followed the alphabetic principle with few exceptions (U and J were later invented to fix the main exceptions). We know almost exactly how it was pronunced because of that and remarks contemporaries recorded on how speech sounded. For example, R was called the littera canina because of the trill. It is especially noticeable when you have two of them together like in terra. The main thing we do not know is how regnum was pronounced. We know it was either of two options for interpreting gn and a third choice is that both were acceptable. People are also unsure how 4 of the short vowels sounded. Some say that they have slightly different sounds while others say that they are just short versions of the long vowels like the other two (A and Y). It is possible both variations co-existed. We also know that western Romans often mispronounced Y as I since they had trouble rounding their lips for Y. Y had been introduced for transliteration of Greek loanwords, so it was not a native sound for the western Romans.
    - usrnm 2y ago
      There is more to a language than knowing how to pronounce each individual letter. You can easily see it if you take any modern language, write a text in it down in IPA and ask a linguist unfamiliar with the language itself read it. It will still sound very alien to a native speaker. And this is with a live language we have full knowledge of.
      - int_19h 2y ago
        The result of this exercise depends largely on how accurate your IPA transcription is, because that is very much a scale. More often than not, what you see is a phonemic transcription rather than a phonetic one, which then does indeed require knowing how the actual phonemes are pronounced in a particular language. But with phonemic translation using the entire assortment of IPA diacritics, if your linguist is familiar with other languages that happen to have the same sounds, they could do a fairly decent take.
    - MLR 2y ago
      Do you know if there have been any of these kinds of recreations done on contemporary languages/dialects/accents, or I guess even created ones, to test the accuracy of these methods? It sounds like something that should obviously have been done, but my naive googling isn't getting me anywhere so far.
- defrost 2y ago
  The bardcore crowd have endless fun with various theories of pronunciation, eg: Boulevard of Broken Dreams in Classical Latin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mip30YF1iuo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mip30YF1iuo
dghf 2y ago
Schola Latina Europæa et Universalis, surely? (Actual page title includes an ampersand, which I'm guessing HN doesn't like.)
- ryao 2y ago
  Illa est quam putavi.
niemandhier 2y ago
It’s a pity we stopped using Latin in favour of scientific pidgin English as universal language in scientific communications. Gauss still wrote in Latin 1801, his Disquisitiones Arithmeticae are a marvel. Up until a few years back my university would still have accepted PHD thesis in Latin, they ditched it after no one had done it for almost a century.
- ryao 2y ago
  Ego adhuc latine scribam, si roges.
- jhbadger 2y ago
  The mathematician Giuseppe Peano even suggested a simplified Latin without declensions as a scientific/mathematical language in 1903. He even wrote several of his works in it, although not many others adopted it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latino_sine_flexione https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latino_sine_flexione
- pbmonster 2y ago
  > It’s a pity we stopped using Latin in favour of scientific pidgin English as universal language in scientific communications As an ESL speaker and scientific writer: why? For people fluent in several languages, which of those languages is chosen to communicate makes little difference. I'd argue all (sufficiently mature) languages work equally well for transmitting information to other people fluent in that language. So choosing the language most people you want to communicate with are fluent in makes sense. If you favor Latin simply for aesthetic reasons, I recommend choosing a more widespread modern language, that has non-pidgin characteristics. French or German (the latter might require a puritan style guide to go with it) would work well.
  - niemandhier 2y ago
    When using a language none of us speaks we can truly be equals. Discussing with e.g people who are the product of English boarding schools, they always have the home field advantage.
emblaegh 2y ago
Funny how the use of the acute accent instead of the macron for long vowels completely changes the “feel” of the written language to me. Makes it look less classy.
- ale42 2y ago
  Being used to the more traditional "ā"/... for long vowels, I found it very weird when opening the page, I was first wondering if it was actual Latin or an artificial language based on it.
- Vox_Leone 2y ago
  Please don't take it as pedantic, but iirc the acute accent is modern and not a standard feature of classical Latin. While "Európæa" might be used in some modern contexts or to reflect contemporary pronunciation, it wouldn't be common in strict classical Latin texts.
  - yorwba 2y ago
    To appear pendantic, you would need at least a link to an external source, like Wikipedia or something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_(diacritic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_(diacritic)
Bairfhionn 2y ago
I had Latin in school for seven years but we never learned to use it in a conversation. It was mostly vocabulary, grammar and translation of texts into my native language and interpreting/discussing them. It did help to have an easier access to learn other languages. But in hindsight I would have loved to be able to talk in Latin.
- ryao 2y ago
  Adhuc tu discere potes. :)
alexey-salmin 2y ago
The only way I made progress in latin was when I bought a few books and started reading, beginning from (modern) children fairy tales. This actually gave me a lasting knowledge which up to this date allows me to read a simple latin text or guess a meaning of a word in English or French (neither language is native to me). Speaking latin of course takes it way further but I think the direction is the same: learn it as a living language not as as a dead one. Starting from declensions and cases gets you nowhere, judging from my friends who learned it in school for years with zero results. Instead, start using the language, if only for reading. Then you can return to grammar later if you ever want to become proficient. I also recommend this guy [1] who not only shares the same approach but apparently have fully dedicated himself to it. He has books, ebooks, audiobooks, a mobile app and a youtube podcast, all in latin. I can't cease to be impressed by the effort and the quality of the content. In comparison the Duolingo latin course is a complete disappointment. [1] https://latinitium.com/legentibus/ https://latinitium.com/legentibus/
- AntoniusBlock 2y ago
  I started with LLPSI along with Oerberg's companion books (Colloquia Personarum, Fabellae Latinae, Fabulae Syrae). After that I read Hyginus' Fabulae and then Commentarii de Bello Gallico by Caesar. Since then I've read more Caesar, Nepos, Apuleius, Seneca, some Livy, some Catullus, some Cicero, and I'm currently reading Ovid. I did this by reading Latin for at least 1 hour every day since the first COVID lockdown in 2020, even if I was sick or not feeling it I made sure to get my Latin reading in. I did do a lot of grammar drills in the beginning, and I made an Anki deck for vocab. Grammar drills definitely help big time, along with jumping in head first with a book like LLPSI and reading from the get go is the way to go IMO.
  - fdgjgbdfhgb 2y ago
    Did you ever read Roma Aeterna? Or did you go straight into literature?
    - AntoniusBlock 2y ago
psychoslave 2y ago
Since the text mention difference between educated, less educated and uneducated people (though not illiterate, in that time?!), it would be fair to mention that maybe not everyone in the Latinophonie would pronounce words the same way. Nice to see a old-fashioned webpage by the way.
leoc 2y ago
Warning: I'm not an expert on this or on anything. W. Sidney Allen's old Vox Latina https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/vox-latina/0D460CEF06E5B2210ABA29EDB6AB5F2A https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/vox-latina/0D460CEF06E5... is apparently still the standard starting reference for classical Latin pronunciation, at least for English-speakers. (Many nineteenth-century German philologists died to bring us this information, of course.) People such as Luke Ranieri on YouTube use a version of Allen's system, though a number of people including Ranieri claim that there should be five vowel qualities rather than the seven described by Allen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH8E5RKq31I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH8E5RKq31I . Note that if you want to speak Latin that's roughly faithful to how it was spoken up to (but not necessarily including) late antiquity, pronunciation is actually less important than quantity: basically, using clearly distinguishable short and long vowels in the right places (plus not running together double consonants in some places). I suppose it's similarly important to get the stress right, but at least that's generally agreed to be pretty easy. Classical Latin quantity feels weird and unnatural to English-speakers, and to Romance-language speakers, German-speakers ... : words often include one or two or three unstressed long vowels before getting to the stressed syllable, which might or might not itself have a long vowel. Even people who advocate for (classically-)correct quantity often don't consistently get it right. (And yes, Allen also did publish a Vox Graeca https://www.cambridge.org/ie/universitypress/subjects/classical-studies/classical-languages/vox-graeca-pronunciation-classical-greek-3rd-edition https://www.cambridge.org/ie/universitypress/subjects/classi... , too, but be careful: the pronunciation of Ancient Greek is a question that might actually get you into a fistfight https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BybLbHPU7Qc&list=PLQQL5IeNgck0hFZ5oEfTV1Zhp_xksAgCz&index=9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BybLbHPU7Qc&list=PLQQL5IeNgc... .)
euroderf 2y ago
OT but... modern Icelandic is close enough to Old Norse that a reasoned mashup of Icelandic and Latin (sans inflections?) might start to resemble contemporary English. It would be a fun exercise anyways.
Insanity 2y ago
I enjoy learning about languages and their histories, and this was a fun read. One thing I would say though is that stating a certain pronunciation is "correct" never sits well with me. Language is incredibly fluid, and typically when a certain pronunciation is deemed 'correct' it's related to people in power and how they pronounce(d) it. There are of course regional variation where claiming one is more 'correct' than the other doesn't hold up well (north USA vs south USA), but even further I'm sure most would take offense at the idea that everyone in the US mispronounces words where they differ from British pronunciation. (I know, both languages evolved independently since the countries split, but you get my point).
- Timwi 2y ago
  The article only uses the word “correct” twice: once in the context of aspiration (_per_ should not be pronounced as _pher_) and once when talking about the Latin _r_, which is markedly different from English _r_. In the rest of the article, they seem to prefer saying that certain pronunciations “should be avoided” or that the speaker should pay attention to a specific distinction (such as vowel lengths or syllable boundaries). It doesn't strike me as elitist or gatekeeping. It's making an honest effort to communicate the information you need to sound as authentically Latin as possible and to avoid speaking with an English accent.
- stonesthrowaway 2y ago
  > One thing I would say though is that stating a certain pronunciation is "correct" never sits well with me. Who cares how it sits with you? There is a "correct" way in every aspect of language - accent, spelling, etc. > Language is incredibly fluid, and typically when a certain pronunciation is deemed 'correct' it's related to people in power and how they pronounce(d) it. Probably. But somebody has to set the standard. > There are of course regional variation where claiming one is more 'correct' than the other doesn't hold up well (north USA vs south USA), Bad example. There is most definitely a "correct" american pronunciation. It's why much of news/media has a neutral american accent. Most americans, from whatever region, can speak it to some degree or another. > but even further I'm sure most would take offense at the idea that everyone in the US mispronounces words where they differ from British pronunciation. Who would take offense? Not me. Not anybody I know. Especially since american english is the dominant form of english and probably will be the standard around the world. > but you get my point). You have no point. Just misinformed silly gripes. All languages standardize in some form or another whether it be accents, pronunciation, spelling, script, etc.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
michaelsbradley 2y ago
In any case, the demise of the use of Latin in the church… It’s actually making a comeback in the Catholic Church with the growing popularity of the traditional Latin Mass, which is celebrated around the world by various communities, much to the chagrin of some persons presently of influence and/or in leadership. https://www.latinmass.live/ https://www.latinmass.live/ It’s much rarer to encounter the reformed Mass (missal of 1969-latest, i.e. reforms following Vatican II) offered in Latin, but it is done in some places. The communities offering the traditional Latin Mass use the 1962 edition or a 20th Century edition predating the changes to Holy Week in 1955.
- TheFreim 2y ago
  I'm not sure the recent revival of interest in the Latin mass has much bearing on the number of people who are actually learning the language. Most people I know who participate at Mass in Latin don't know the language and make little, if any, attempts to learn it. There is often a complete reliance on translations where prayers are recited in Latin but then still need to be read in the English side of the missal to be understood. There is also an odd, yet quite outspoken (online), contingent of people who promote the Latin Mass while simultaneously downplaying the importance of learning Latin for having a fuller view of history and the science of theology.
  - michaelsbradley 2y ago
    Many of the TLM-attending families I’ve spoken to have Latin studies in their home/school curriculum. I’ve not encountered the online contingent you mentioned so can’t really comment on them. The long tradition in the Roman Rite is for laity and others not celebrating or in choir to cultivate mental prayer that is centered on the Eucharistic sacrifice and informed by the themes of the season and/or feast. It’s nice to have a hand missal/ette to review the day’s readings and prayers before or after Mass, but following along with the printed word can actually be a distraction from prayer during Mass. However, what’s most conducive to a spirit of prayer and interior participation can vary by person, i.e. there’s no “one best way”.
- froh 2y ago

87 points by Tomte 2y ago

any language with Synalœpha deserves to remain a dead language. looking at you next french.

Also, no one to mention Perligata already??! https://metacpan.org/dist/Lingua-Romana-Perligata/view/lib/Lingua/Romana/Perligata.pm https://metacpan.org/dist/Lingua-Romana-Perligata/view/lib/L...

adlpz 2y ago

This is lovely. And it's great to have it both in English and Spanish because it makes it much easier to guess the sounds from the explanations as you can compare. New life goal unlocked: live in a farm away from any computers and learn latin.

AndrewDucker 2y ago

The history of how we know what Latin sounded like is fascinating. Reminds me this video on what Shakespeare's original pronunciation sounded like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s

tgv 2y ago
We don't know. What's mentioned is informative, but certainly not decisive. Language is way too noisy for simple conclusions. E.g., spelling errors aren't exclusively based on phonetic similarity, and even if they were, their absence proves little.
- ryao 2y ago
  Latin followed the alphabetic principle with few exceptions (U and J were later invented to fix the main exceptions). We know almost exactly how it was pronunced because of that and remarks contemporaries recorded on how speech sounded. For example, R was called the littera canina because of the trill. It is especially noticeable when you have two of them together like in terra. The main thing we do not know is how regnum was pronounced. We know it was either of two options for interpreting gn and a third choice is that both were acceptable. People are also unsure how 4 of the short vowels sounded. Some say that they have slightly different sounds while others say that they are just short versions of the long vowels like the other two (A and Y). It is possible both variations co-existed. We also know that western Romans often mispronounced Y as I since they had trouble rounding their lips for Y. Y had been introduced for transliteration of Greek loanwords, so it was not a native sound for the western Romans.
  - usrnm 2y ago
    There is more to a language than knowing how to pronounce each individual letter. You can easily see it if you take any modern language, write a text in it down in IPA and ask a linguist unfamiliar with the language itself read it. It will still sound very alien to a native speaker. And this is with a live language we have full knowledge of.
    - int_19h 2y ago
      The result of this exercise depends largely on how accurate your IPA transcription is, because that is very much a scale. More often than not, what you see is a phonemic transcription rather than a phonetic one, which then does indeed require knowing how the actual phonemes are pronounced in a particular language. But with phonemic translation using the entire assortment of IPA diacritics, if your linguist is familiar with other languages that happen to have the same sounds, they could do a fairly decent take.
  - MLR 2y ago
    Do you know if there have been any of these kinds of recreations done on contemporary languages/dialects/accents, or I guess even created ones, to test the accuracy of these methods? It sounds like something that should obviously have been done, but my naive googling isn't getting me anywhere so far.
defrost 2y ago
The bardcore crowd have endless fun with various theories of pronunciation, eg: Boulevard of Broken Dreams in Classical Latin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mip30YF1iuo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mip30YF1iuo

dghf 2y ago

Schola Latina Europæa et Universalis, surely? (Actual page title includes an ampersand, which I'm guessing HN doesn't like.)

ryao 2y ago
Illa est quam putavi.

niemandhier 2y ago

It’s a pity we stopped using Latin in favour of scientific pidgin English as universal language in scientific communications. Gauss still wrote in Latin 1801, his Disquisitiones Arithmeticae are a marvel. Up until a few years back my university would still have accepted PHD thesis in Latin, they ditched it after no one had done it for almost a century.

ryao 2y ago
Ego adhuc latine scribam, si roges.
jhbadger 2y ago
The mathematician Giuseppe Peano even suggested a simplified Latin without declensions as a scientific/mathematical language in 1903. He even wrote several of his works in it, although not many others adopted it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latino_sine_flexione https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latino_sine_flexione
pbmonster 2y ago
> It’s a pity we stopped using Latin in favour of scientific pidgin English as universal language in scientific communications As an ESL speaker and scientific writer: why? For people fluent in several languages, which of those languages is chosen to communicate makes little difference. I'd argue all (sufficiently mature) languages work equally well for transmitting information to other people fluent in that language. So choosing the language most people you want to communicate with are fluent in makes sense. If you favor Latin simply for aesthetic reasons, I recommend choosing a more widespread modern language, that has non-pidgin characteristics. French or German (the latter might require a puritan style guide to go with it) would work well.
- niemandhier 2y ago
  When using a language none of us speaks we can truly be equals. Discussing with e.g people who are the product of English boarding schools, they always have the home field advantage.

emblaegh 2y ago

Funny how the use of the acute accent instead of the macron for long vowels completely changes the “feel” of the written language to me. Makes it look less classy.

ale42 2y ago
Being used to the more traditional "ā"/... for long vowels, I found it very weird when opening the page, I was first wondering if it was actual Latin or an artificial language based on it.
Vox_Leone 2y ago
Please don't take it as pedantic, but iirc the acute accent is modern and not a standard feature of classical Latin. While "Európæa" might be used in some modern contexts or to reflect contemporary pronunciation, it wouldn't be common in strict classical Latin texts.
- yorwba 2y ago
  To appear pendantic, you would need at least a link to an external source, like Wikipedia or something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_(diacritic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_(diacritic)

Bairfhionn 2y ago

I had Latin in school for seven years but we never learned to use it in a conversation. It was mostly vocabulary, grammar and translation of texts into my native language and interpreting/discussing them. It did help to have an easier access to learn other languages. But in hindsight I would have loved to be able to talk in Latin.

ryao 2y ago
Adhuc tu discere potes. :)

alexey-salmin 2y ago

The only way I made progress in latin was when I bought a few books and started reading, beginning from (modern) children fairy tales. This actually gave me a lasting knowledge which up to this date allows me to read a simple latin text or guess a meaning of a word in English or French (neither language is native to me). Speaking latin of course takes it way further but I think the direction is the same: learn it as a living language not as as a dead one. Starting from declensions and cases gets you nowhere, judging from my friends who learned it in school for years with zero results. Instead, start using the language, if only for reading. Then you can return to grammar later if you ever want to become proficient. I also recommend this guy [1] who not only shares the same approach but apparently have fully dedicated himself to it. He has books, ebooks, audiobooks, a mobile app and a youtube podcast, all in latin. I can't cease to be impressed by the effort and the quality of the content. In comparison the Duolingo latin course is a complete disappointment. [1] https://latinitium.com/legentibus/ https://latinitium.com/legentibus/

AntoniusBlock 2y ago
I started with LLPSI along with Oerberg's companion books (Colloquia Personarum, Fabellae Latinae, Fabulae Syrae). After that I read Hyginus' Fabulae and then Commentarii de Bello Gallico by Caesar. Since then I've read more Caesar, Nepos, Apuleius, Seneca, some Livy, some Catullus, some Cicero, and I'm currently reading Ovid. I did this by reading Latin for at least 1 hour every day since the first COVID lockdown in 2020, even if I was sick or not feeling it I made sure to get my Latin reading in. I did do a lot of grammar drills in the beginning, and I made an Anki deck for vocab. Grammar drills definitely help big time, along with jumping in head first with a book like LLPSI and reading from the get go is the way to go IMO.
- fdgjgbdfhgb 2y ago
  Did you ever read Roma Aeterna? Or did you go straight into literature?
  - AntoniusBlock 2y ago

psychoslave 2y ago

Since the text mention difference between educated, less educated and uneducated people (though not illiterate, in that time?!), it would be fair to mention that maybe not everyone in the Latinophonie would pronounce words the same way. Nice to see a old-fashioned webpage by the way.

leoc 2y ago

Warning: I'm not an expert on this or on anything. W. Sidney Allen's old Vox Latina https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/vox-latina/0D460CEF06E5B2210ABA29EDB6AB5F2A https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/vox-latina/0D460CEF06E5... is apparently still the standard starting reference for classical Latin pronunciation, at least for English-speakers. (Many nineteenth-century German philologists died to bring us this information, of course.) People such as Luke Ranieri on YouTube use a version of Allen's system, though a number of people including Ranieri claim that there should be five vowel qualities rather than the seven described by Allen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH8E5RKq31I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH8E5RKq31I . Note that if you want to speak Latin that's roughly faithful to how it was spoken up to (but not necessarily including) late antiquity, pronunciation is actually less important than quantity: basically, using clearly distinguishable short and long vowels in the right places (plus not running together double consonants in some places). I suppose it's similarly important to get the stress right, but at least that's generally agreed to be pretty easy. Classical Latin quantity feels weird and unnatural to English-speakers, and to Romance-language speakers, German-speakers ... : words often include one or two or three unstressed long vowels before getting to the stressed syllable, which might or might not itself have a long vowel. Even people who advocate for (classically-)correct quantity often don't consistently get it right. (And yes, Allen also did publish a Vox Graeca https://www.cambridge.org/ie/universitypress/subjects/classical-studies/classical-languages/vox-graeca-pronunciation-classical-greek-3rd-edition https://www.cambridge.org/ie/universitypress/subjects/classi... , too, but be careful: the pronunciation of Ancient Greek is a question that might actually get you into a fistfight https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BybLbHPU7Qc&list=PLQQL5IeNgck0hFZ5oEfTV1Zhp_xksAgCz&index=9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BybLbHPU7Qc&list=PLQQL5IeNgc... .)

euroderf 2y ago

OT but... modern Icelandic is close enough to Old Norse that a reasoned mashup of Icelandic and Latin (sans inflections?) might start to resemble contemporary English. It would be a fun exercise anyways.

Insanity 2y ago

I enjoy learning about languages and their histories, and this was a fun read. One thing I would say though is that stating a certain pronunciation is "correct" never sits well with me. Language is incredibly fluid, and typically when a certain pronunciation is deemed 'correct' it's related to people in power and how they pronounce(d) it. There are of course regional variation where claiming one is more 'correct' than the other doesn't hold up well (north USA vs south USA), but even further I'm sure most would take offense at the idea that everyone in the US mispronounces words where they differ from British pronunciation. (I know, both languages evolved independently since the countries split, but you get my point).

Timwi 2y ago
The article only uses the word “correct” twice: once in the context of aspiration (_per_ should not be pronounced as _pher_) and once when talking about the Latin _r_, which is markedly different from English _r_. In the rest of the article, they seem to prefer saying that certain pronunciations “should be avoided” or that the speaker should pay attention to a specific distinction (such as vowel lengths or syllable boundaries). It doesn't strike me as elitist or gatekeeping. It's making an honest effort to communicate the information you need to sound as authentically Latin as possible and to avoid speaking with an English accent.
stonesthrowaway 2y ago
> One thing I would say though is that stating a certain pronunciation is "correct" never sits well with me. Who cares how it sits with you? There is a "correct" way in every aspect of language - accent, spelling, etc. > Language is incredibly fluid, and typically when a certain pronunciation is deemed 'correct' it's related to people in power and how they pronounce(d) it. Probably. But somebody has to set the standard. > There are of course regional variation where claiming one is more 'correct' than the other doesn't hold up well (north USA vs south USA), Bad example. There is most definitely a "correct" american pronunciation. It's why much of news/media has a neutral american accent. Most americans, from whatever region, can speak it to some degree or another. > but even further I'm sure most would take offense at the idea that everyone in the US mispronounces words where they differ from British pronunciation. Who would take offense? Not me. Not anybody I know. Especially since american english is the dominant form of english and probably will be the standard around the world. > but you get my point). You have no point. Just misinformed silly gripes. All languages standardize in some form or another whether it be accents, pronunciation, spelling, script, etc.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

michaelsbradley 2y ago

In any case, the demise of the use of Latin in the church… It’s actually making a comeback in the Catholic Church with the growing popularity of the traditional Latin Mass, which is celebrated around the world by various communities, much to the chagrin of some persons presently of influence and/or in leadership. https://www.latinmass.live/ https://www.latinmass.live/ It’s much rarer to encounter the reformed Mass (missal of 1969-latest, i.e. reforms following Vatican II) offered in Latin, but it is done in some places. The communities offering the traditional Latin Mass use the 1962 edition or a 20th Century edition predating the changes to Holy Week in 1955.

TheFreim 2y ago
I'm not sure the recent revival of interest in the Latin mass has much bearing on the number of people who are actually learning the language. Most people I know who participate at Mass in Latin don't know the language and make little, if any, attempts to learn it. There is often a complete reliance on translations where prayers are recited in Latin but then still need to be read in the English side of the missal to be understood. There is also an odd, yet quite outspoken (online), contingent of people who promote the Latin Mass while simultaneously downplaying the importance of learning Latin for having a fuller view of history and the science of theology.
- michaelsbradley 2y ago
  Many of the TLM-attending families I’ve spoken to have Latin studies in their home/school curriculum. I’ve not encountered the online contingent you mentioned so can’t really comment on them. The long tradition in the Roman Rite is for laity and others not celebrating or in choir to cultivate mental prayer that is centered on the Eucharistic sacrifice and informed by the themes of the season and/or feast. It’s nice to have a hand missal/ette to review the day’s readings and prayers before or after Mass, but following along with the printed word can actually be a distraction from prayer during Mass. However, what’s most conducive to a spirit of prayer and interior participation can vary by person, i.e. there’s no “one best way”.
froh 2y ago