[mmooss]

> Striking contrast with the most well known classicist in the UK being unable, by their own admission, to comfortably read Latin text basically at all.

That's hard to believe. A friend was a Latin teacher; high school students read actual Roman Latin in their second year.

I've heard that few can speak Latin 'correctly', because the skill is almost useless - you can't talk to Romans or almost anyone else; it's all written. (I don't know about the Catholic or other churches, but I do recall that 'church Latin' differs from classical Latin.)

[akshayshah]

Second-year high school students do read actual Roman texts, but they typically do so very slowly and laboriously - a day’s homework might be translating a single paragraph.

I studied Latin from 7th grade through my early undergraduate years (1990s to early 00s), and that dynamic didn’t change as much as you might expect - the focus remains on deeply reading a few texts, rather than building the fluency required to quickly read and understand new texts on unfamiliar subjects. The corpus of texts for standardized exams is also relatively small and well-known - I didn’t see a single unfamiliar passage on either AP Latin exam.

Perhaps some classics professors read Latin as fluently as the average Spanish literature professor reads a Madrid newspaper, but I certainly never met any outside Reginaldus’s orbit.

[Symbiote]

The Latin teacher at my school and my French teacher would discuss private matters in Latin, confident that us 13 year olds wouldn't understand.

I've no proof, but my assumption is there are students of Latin casually speaking the language to show off at places like Cambridge University.

[BitwiseFool]

Did the Latin students have a rivalry with the goth kids and the vandals?

[ptsneves]

So good!

[mmooss]

How could you not gain that fluency after years? Every human naturally learns languages; you don't need a Ph.D. at all.

[dkarl]

I think it's because it's "classics." Your first couple of years excepted, everyone hears about a text years before they read it. By the time they read it, they already know a lot about it, and they read it closely and systematically to get a deep understanding of it.

There isn't a firehose of new text being created in Latin, and you never (or very rarely) scan over something to find out what it's about, extract a quick fact from it, or decide if it's worth reading. You know what's in it, you know the standard take-away from it, there's a good chance you've read the highlights in translation already, you may even know one or two hair-splitting academic controversies about it, and you are sitting down for a good hour or several hours with it. It's a completely different kind of reading from scanning a web site or a newspaper to find something worth reading more closely, looking for the answer to a concrete question, or scanning something to decide if you can afford to not really read it.

[akshayshah]

It’s certainly possible to gain that fluency, as Reginaldus demonstrated. But it seemed to me that fluency reading unfamiliar texts simply wasn't the goal of my Latin education; instead, we were studying to know Catullus, Ovid, Horace, Cicero, and Vergil, with a small smattering of other Roman authors. It was an education in classics, not the Latin language. We just weren’t asked to extract information from large volumes of text, speak extemporaneously, or comprehend casual conversation.

The best analogy I can give is this: imagine taking Spanish from grades 7-12, culminating in a full year reading and understanding selections of Don Quixote. The entire curriculum builds towards this capstone year, and other areas of inquiry get very short shrift. Nobody cares if you can live comfortably in a Spanish-speaking country or watch Spanish-language TV. Nobody cares about modern idiom, or any more recent works of literature, or technical writing. s/Don Quixote/Aeneid + a small corpus of Roman poems/g and you have the bulk of my Latin education.

This sounds negative - we weren’t fluent in Latin! But for a teenager, it was a wonderfully deep exploration of Rome’s greatest hits. I loved it.

[pinkmuffinere]

>Foster was basically the rallying point for people opposed to the grammarian methods of teaching languages that started in Classics but ended up taking over how foreign language is taught in most schools and contexts

Humans naturally learn languages when they are immersed in the language. It sounds like Latin instruction was more focused on rules, and didn't provide that immersion before Foster. I can attest that many other foreign language classes also don't provide enough immersion to really learn the language, although being limited to ~10 hours a week makes that virtually impossible.

[mmooss]

Ph.D.'s are rather immersed. Imagine how much time you spend staring at Latin texts over many years.

[tannhaeuser]

It's because you only ever translate but never speak or synthesize latin exept in a few church circles where it is or was used as Lingua Franca (such as depicted in Conclave last year). I understand the original post to be about the profound difference this makes in acquiring a language intuitively.

[umanwizard]

I'm skeptical how much speaking/synthesizing the language matters if you only care about reading.

I can read German moderately well (can get through newspaper articles pretty easily, and novels with some effort), but I have very little ability to synthesize it (it'd take me quite a lot of effort to construct a sentence in writing, and I can't really speak at all). But the lack of ability to produce the language doesn't seem to negatively impact my reading ability.

[jhbadger]

And this is the case for most scholars of ancient languages besides Latin and Ancient Greek. While those two big ones get the occasional translation of a modern work like Harry Potter or The Hobbit, nobody is writing new works in Sumerian or Middle Egyptian, although reading existing works is what these scholars do.

[nkrisc]

> Every human naturally learns languages

... in the first few years of life. Beyond that, it's an intentional, conscious and often challenging effort for many.

Some people, even as adults, are far more adept at learning new languages than others. For the rest of us, it typically requires devotion to the subject for years.

[adrianN]

Small children are devoted for years to learn the language. Being unable to communicate your basic needs is a strong motivator.

[nkrisc]

Yes, though what I meant (though neglected to specify) was devoted, conscious study. Young children do not learn language the way adults typically do.

[philsnow]

> I've heard that few can speak Latin 'correctly', because the skill is almost useless - you can't talk to Romans or almost anyone else; it's all written.

Because Latin has died out as a spoken language, it doesn't really change over time like modern languages do. If you find a sentence written 2000 years ago and another elsewhere written 1500 years ago, it's likely they mean the exact same thing.

"Latin is a dead language" is actually a positive statement about the continued use of Latin, especially in the church; so much of the writing of the early church and the church fathers was in Latin, and we can know that we're interpreting it faithfully (or at least as faithfully as we have done for centuries) because the language is static.

[adrian_b]

While Latin has indeed evolved very little after it stopped being a native language, its vocabulary had continuously expanded until 2 centuries ago.

Until around the beginning of the 19th century, Latin had remained the most important language for the publication of scientific works and for international correspondence between well-educated people, and during this time many words have been added for naming things unknown to the Romans.

Also the preference for various grammatical variants or for certain word orders has been strongly influenced by some features common to the evolution of European languages, so a Latin text written during the Middle Ages feels quite different from a text written during the Roman Empire.

[dhosek]

The use of it by the Catholic Church means its vocabulary continues to expand. After all, it’s necessary to speak of the modern world in church documents whose official version will be in Latin.

[mmooss]

> Latin had remained the most important language for the publication of scientific works and for international correspondence between well-educated people

... and important to the Catholic Church.

[adrian_b]

That is right, but while I have found it very useful even today to read in original the works of Georg Bauer, Newton, von Linné, Gauss and the like, there is much less interest in reading the many ecclesiastic documents that treated subjects with only a limited temporal relevance (unless you are a historian of that time period).

In general, I strongly recommend to read carefully in original the scientific literature of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, even if that requires the ability to read at least Latin, German, French and English, because by reading the original sources you can find frequently that the authors have said things quite different (and wiser) than what it is claimed that they have said in many university textbooks or popular science books.

In science and technology, there is very little that becomes truly obsolete, because the optimal solutions for solving practical problems often cycle through the space of solutions during the years, depending on how the balance between various advantages and disadvantages changes with the evolution of the available technologies. So those who believe that it is enough to read the up-to-date literature are typically wrong, because the miracle new solution of tomorrow is frequently again the same that was best 50 years ago, or even earlier, but which had become forgotten in recent years.

[lo_zamoyski]

> there is much less interest in reading the many ecclesiastic documents [...] In science and technology, there is very little that becomes truly obsolete

Documents that contain administrative minutiae or legal rulings or whatever may only have value for historical study, yes, but one major reason for the very existence and authority of the Catholic Church is to serve as guardian of her doctrines and their development, and to communicate them faithfully across generations. Meaning, the doctrines of the faith are never made obsolete, or else the faith, and certainly the authority of the Church, is undermined. The understanding of them can be deepened and expanded over time, but the doctrines themselves are fixed.

[mmooss]

That is great; thanks.

I think of it as reading the very best writing, e.g., Charles Darwin, and not just another paper or book. Wouldn't you love to have a conversation with Darwin? That's what you get when you engage with their writing.

[dhosek]

The Vatican publishes a newspaper which, among other things, has a sports page, written in Latin.

[mmooss]

To add a bit of detail: At least in English etymologies, there are significant differences between classical Latin and post-classical Latin.

But post-classical Latin unhelpfully covers Rome from ~200 CE into the 20th century, including the Catholic Church and all those scholars and scientists. I'm not sure what differences arose before or after the fall of Rome in 476 CE, which began the Middle Ages.

[dhosek]

There were shifts in the meaning of words as well as shifts in some grammatical structures. English has seen similar shifts in meaning, e.g., villain originally meant a person from a village.

[throw0101c]

> Because Latin has died out as a spoken language

It evolved into Italian, Spanish, etc:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages

[dhosek]

With an intermediate stage of “Vulgar Latin” of which little trace remains because it was predominantly a spoken language. Literate people, even if they might use Vulgar Latin themselves in conversation, generally chose to write in the more formal classical style. As I recall, most of what we have from Vulgar Latin is in the form of graffiti and other informal writing.

[Roscius]

> I've heard that few can speak Latin 'correctly', because the skill is almost useless

Not useless at all - speaking Latin helps you to better appreciate both prose and poetry. Understanding the sound of the language helps you to appreciate the word play and nuance. Also as children we learn language mostly by listening and speaking, not by reading, so it makes sense to learn Latin in that way.

There's been significant research on reconstructing classical pronunciation. But Latin was spoken as a primary language for over a thousand years, so the pronunciation naturally changed over that time and there were of course regional dialects - some of which evolved into Romance languages.

In reading Latin, it doesn't have a lot of silent letters (it does have some), so it's quite easy to read aloud a Latin sentence once you understand the basic phonetics. In classical times poems like the Aeneid were recited aloud, so doing so today makes sense.

Fluency is a somewhat subjective concept, but the growth of the internet has spawned a growing community of Latin speakers internationally. (I speak Latin at roughly a B2 level and am constantly improving).

[wisty]

I think it's a bit out of context. I think they are referring to Mary Beard, who is a classicist / historian who said her Latin wasn't that good, but may have been exaggerating because she was IIRC arguing against gatekeeping in history (like saying physicists don't need advanced math, because Einstein wasn't the best at math compared to a few other top theoretical physicists).

[graemep]

and her standard of "good" is probably quite high.

[cafard]

I guess that one would have to know what "comfortably" means and what sort of texts. At the speed of English? Caesar or Tacitus?

The essayist Sydney Smith, himself an Anglican clergyman, said something teasing about "false quantities" in Roman Catholic services. I can tell you that the pronunciation varies in church Latin: c and g can be "softened" when followed by e or i; v is v, not w.

You don't hear a great deal of Latin in Catholic services these days: in the Tridentine rite the congregation doesn't get much to say. The Novus Ordo Latin Mass is awfully rare.

[coolsunglasses]

>That's hard to believe.

I understand why you'd feel that way but classics departments aren't what they used to be. It's pretty common for even elite universities these days to not require grad students to understand the languages of the cultures they purportedly study across the board, let alone for Latin.

https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignor...

[aprilthird2021]

I was a high school student studying Latin. Like almost all high school language students, we could not read fluently. It took a long time and potentially many trips to the dictionary

[lolinder]

They're referring to this story from a few years back:

Latin as She is Spoke: How Classicists Tricked Themselves Jan 2022 (171 points, 191 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30124101