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Learning to SPEAK Latin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| jae Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5667 days ago 206 posts - 239 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Latin Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, French | Message 1 of 20 12 March 2010 at 6:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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I can already read/translate Latin pretty well, but I was wondering if anyone has tips for somebody who's looking to actually speak Latin. Personally, although I can read/translate I don't really feel that I have much spontaneous speaking/conversation skill, since that's not how Latin is normally taught. Any suggestions? Any other people who have personally done this? Thanks!
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| duschan Bilingual Triglot Newbie Australia Joined 6086 days ago 18 posts - 22 votes Speaks: Bulgarian*, Macedonian*, English | Message 2 of 20 13 March 2010 at 1:56am | IP Logged | ||
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We cannot reconstruct spoken Latin, because we do not have any records of spoken Latin
(obviously not only recordings, but even texts - no original Latin text contains the colloquial language). The only hints we get about spoken Latin is from surviving graffiti and similar artefacts. Latin scholars generally do not speak Latin, because speaking Latin is at best an educated conjecture. Even the way it's pronounced today is merely based on hypotheses. Even the most confident Latin scholars will tell you that if you put them in a time machine and take them back in Roman times they know as a fact that they would be lost with the language and they might not be able even to survive with their speaking skills and their erudite knowledge of Latin. The texts we have in Latin were meant for reading and reciting, are extremely formal, usually highly stylistic or poetic, and were not meant to reflect or record the colloquial, the spoken language in any way. So all we know about the spoken language is indirect knowledge, not more than a set of theories. That's why most distinguished Latin scholars refuse to speak Latin - Latin studies do not lead to speaking Latin. Of course, there are seminars for speaking Latin where students of Latin actually are encouraged to speak Latin, but they are not very common (only very few universities have them and they are highly experimental), and even people who attend them know that, again, if you could take a Roman, say from the Octavian period, and bring him to one of those seminars, he would be better off understanding Italian or Spanish, rather than the way spoken Latin is reconstructed in those seminars. Spoken Latin is forever lost for us, and speaking Latin is only a very very marginal field in Latin studies. As cool as it might be to actually be able to speak Latin as it was once spoken in Rome, it's impossible unless we master time travel one day. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Johntm Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5425 days ago 616 posts - 725 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 20 13 March 2010 at 4:10am | IP Logged | ||
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I would love to do this if I knew other people that could do it.
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| yenome Hexaglot Newbie United States Joined 5377 days ago 37 posts - 45 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, French, Persian Studies: Thai, Arabic (Iraqi), Mandarin | Message 4 of 20 13 March 2010 at 4:57am | IP Logged | ||
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Some Latin teachers speak Latin in the classroom and require the same of their students. While no one is pretending that what you get there is equivalent to the colloquial Latin of the Romans, it is very helpful for learning the language and is fun. Also, one might note that Latin is still used as a spoken language in the Catholic Church: at ecumenical councils, Latin is the only language which every bishop is guaranteed to know.
If you can't find anyone who has a desire to practice speaking Latin with you, just talk to yourself all day. I did that with Russian and found it useful. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| morganie Newbie United States Joined 5427 days ago 31 posts - 41 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 5 of 20 13 March 2010 at 4:58am | IP Logged | ||
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How about the Latin they still speak in Catholic masses and in the Vatican? I feel like the Catholic authorities would have attempted to preserve the Latin pronunciation as well as possible...
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| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6473 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 6 of 20 13 March 2010 at 9:16am | IP Logged | ||
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By far not every bishop can speak Latin! It's a big problem at church meetings.
Also, almost all parts of the Catholic church have abolished Latin at mass in favour of a language that the faithful can understand. Only a very small, very traditional branch of Christians still endeavour to use Latin in church. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| animos Tetraglot Newbie Canada Joined 5380 days ago 8 posts - 15 votes Speaks: English*, Latin, Ancient Greek, French Studies: Ancient Egyptian, Sanskrit, Italian, Mandarin | Message 7 of 20 13 March 2010 at 4:09pm | IP Logged | ||
Indeed they did, but by the time the Church got its hands firmly on Latin, the pronunciation had started to change in comparison with Classical Latin. The most notable change is the pronunciation of 'c' before a high vowel ('e' or 'i'): in Classical Latin it was pronounced as a velar 'k', but in Medieval Latin it came to be palatalized and was pronounced like the English 'ch'. It's also fairly clear that doubled consonant weren't pronounced in the Middle Ages on the basis of spelling: Classical Latin 'oppidum' was routinely spelled as 'opidum', for example, which indicates that doubled consonants didn't mean anything to "speakers" of Latin in the Middle Ages in beyond. The situation may have been different in Italy, since Italians pronounce doubled consonants, but in France and Germany, etc, this was certainly the case. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6706 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 20 13 March 2010 at 6:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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I am somewhat puzzled by the resigned tone of this thread. It is NOT impossible to learn to speak Latin, but there are several factors that work against it: the low probability of meeting somebody else to speak to back home, the lack of a country brimming with natives eager to speak to you, but also something that is peculiar to Latin, namely a pedagogical tradition that exclusively has focused on passive skills. Jae (who started this thread) is a case in point, being able to read and translate (from Latin or both ways?), but not to speak. But as you can see in the other recent Latin thread, the one about the number of persons who speak it, there are a few places where you actually can hear and even use the language, and there are actually a number of persons who can write and speak Latin (more or less well, of course). So of course it can be done.
So the first obstacle to surmount is the false idea that it is impossible, the second is the very real perception that you may not really have any reason to do it. IF you decide against your better judgment that you want to do it then the next step is to start thinking /writing/speaking to yourself in Latin, because with very limited audio sources the only Latin you will hear on a regular basis will be your own voice and the voice speaking inside your own head. And that voice may not speak like any historical native speaker, but there are enough evidence about the way Latin was pronounced in different times and places to give you a starting point. And without such a 'daimon' I would personally find it impossible to learn any language actively, but others may have other experiences with this. However with a language you hardly ever hear it must be a great help to have such an inner voice babbling along. There are several ways of pronouncing Latin: the 'classical' way (the one with hard c's: cæsar = /Kaisar/), the surviving Roman Catholic traditions etc., but these are not more bothersome than the variations in the way living languages are pronounced. You just choose your own Latin profile and off you go. Edited by Iversen on 13 March 2010 at 6:23pm 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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