[schoen]

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').

[nerdsniper]

Nice video of a contemporary latin-speaking community: https://youtu.be/sfWMgWnSQUw

[schoen]

I 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.

[jjtheblunt]

"latine" with an e on the end is ablative, first declension?

[amelung]

This ‑e is an adverb ending. The belonging adjective is «latinus» ‹Latin›.

[jjtheblunt]

that makes more sense to me, because i asked thinking it was a typo on ablative with implicit lingua

[schoen]

Yes, 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]

yep 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.