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Reginald Foster, a great Latin expert whom I once got to study with, emphasized that Latin isn't inherently difficult as a spoken language, as evidenced by the
by schoen 6mo ago
Reginald Foster, a great Latin expert whom I once got to study with, emphasized that Latin isn't inherently difficult as a spoken language, as evidenced by the fact that it used to be lots of people's native language and used for all kinds of ordinary daily purposes.
One of his slogans for this was "in Roma antiqua, etiam canes Latine locuti sunt" ('in ancient Rome, even the dogs spoke Latin').
- jjtheblunt 6mo ago"latine" with an e on the end is ablative, first declension?
- amelung 6mo agoThis ‑e is an adverb ending. The belonging adjective is «latinus» ‹Latin›.
- jjtheblunt 6mo agothat makes more sense to me, because i asked thinking it was a typo on ablative with implicit lingua
- schoen 6mo agoYes, one way of referring to Latin is "lingua Latina" or just "Latina", but there's an old custom of using adverbs to refer to use of languages. So Latine is "in Latin" or "Latinly" (and there are similar adverbs available for other languages). Interestingly, the language adverbs are also used in a construction with scire (to know) or intellegere: "Latine scit" (he or she knows Latin), "Graece intellegit" (he or she understands Greek). In English we would definitely think of this as needing a direct object, but Latin allows it as an adverb, to understand "in a Greek way" (perhaps it would make sense to think of it as something like "in a Greek manner" or "from a Greek perspective").
- jjtheblunt 6mo agoyep totally understand, had four years of latin in the 80s, some Greek, and many more. it's interesting to see how an idea gets phrased slightly differently across even related languages, i have to admit.
- nerdsniper 6mo agoNice video of a contemporary latin-speaking community: https://youtu.be/sfWMgWnSQUw https://youtu.be/sfWMgWnSQUw
- schoen 6mo agoI had heard about that lecture, but I hadn't seen the video before. The Latin is quite easy for me to follow, but I'm still impressed by Luke Ranieri's fluency (really on par with some of the most skilled Latin speakers I've met, well beyond my level even when I was regularly participating in spoken Latin events). Hopefully I'll get to meet him and speak Latin with him some day.