Latin Speakers of West Virginia | Hacker News Reader

Latin Speakers of West Virginia

medium.com

55 pointsjthnews18 comments

Pedantic quibble (but why not be pedantic here?): "Mit Brennender Sorge" was not in Latin. Whether it was the first encyclical not to be in Latin, I can't say.

Also "Llewellyn is a professor at Wyoming Catholic College, and belongs to that select group of professors who consider themselves first and foremost teachers." It seems to me that such a field ought to make for that--there is always something to be gained by reexamining older texts, but it's not as if unknown books of Livy are flowing out of obscure libraries, as in Erasmus's day.

Victor Davis Hanson made a similar point in the book "Who Killed Classical Studies": every significant text has been analyzed in depth, and the remaining texts still being found are minor. (Even if a new play by Aeschylus or book by Livy turns up, it's not likely to change what we know very much.) The historical picture is pretty complete; and the archaeological details being found are mostly refining that picture, not overturning it.

Counterargument: the Antikythera mechanism. There could well be more archaeological surprises, or analyses that open up an entirely new aspect.

Yes, a lot of classical scholarship stands the test of time and, once done, need not be redone. On the other hand, a classicist's job has always involved more interpretation than discovery. A brief look at the classical scholarship from 100 years will probably convince you that interpretation is the kind of thing that needs to be updated from time to time.

Also, "Laudato si'" was eventually translated into Latin (but it was published without an official Latin translation at first).

According to Wikipedia, the first encyclical that was not written in Latin was "Non abbiamo bisogno", from 1931.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_abbiamo_bisogno

Both "Non abbiamo bisogno" and "Mit brennender Sorge" criticized (what were to be) Axis governments in their own languages. Maybe that was somehow thought to be a special case.

I think the sad part with latin is that although it has had such a massive influence on every western european language it has essentially completely died out (little usage in catholic church, no speakers, decline in educational system, etc), and it does seem that no one cares. But its not only Latin where this is the case, the majority (up to 90%) of the worlds languages will die out over the next century, lost forever, many undocumented.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endangered_language) That is what I find most troubling.

The author states this, but for a language to live you have to use it "People talking to people", but very few countries try to enpower their endangered language speakers to actually use their language on a daily basis. They dont seem to promote programs for radio/tv in those languages, etc.

However, it is great that people are actually using latin as it should be for oral communication, if this were the case in classrooms it would certainly be much easier on students to acquire the language (as attested to by foreign language learning methods).

First of all, Latin can not really "die" as it happens to some languages. A language dies when their last speakers die and nobody else knows how it sounds. Latin is in some sense still alive because lots of people can read and speak it, even if not fluently.

Consider the similar example of Hebrew. During centuries this was a language that was not spoken natively by anyone, but remained alive through its religious literature. With the creation of the state of Israel, hebrew is now a spoken language again.

Second, latin is not a natively spoken language for more than a thousand years already. The last people to speak latin natively were the educated people living in the Roman empire. Everybody else was using so-called vulgar latin that naturally evolved into some of the national languages of Europe. So, it is not a secret that latin has been "dead" and "alive" at the same time for several centuries, and this will probably not change for yet a few more centuries.

Aramaic is in a similar situation. It's dead as in no native speakers, but yet alive because it is still used (and spoken) daily in study by ordinary people not just specialized academics.

Sanskrit too, right?

Assyrians speak Aramaic. There aren't a lot of them, but I've known a few.

Some linguists seem to focus on the distinction between languages with a self-perpetuating native speaker community and languages without one, partly because of the idea that native speaker competence and native speaker language communities are qualitatively different from adult second language acquisition (for example native speakers' intuitions as native speakers are seen as extremely important and valuable, whereas non-native speakers' intuitions aren't given much regard).

Also, for language conservation efforts, it's worth noting that when most languages lose their native speaker community, they will immediately cease to be spoken because it's very unlikely that outsider enthusiasts (and/or non-speakers who see the language as part of their cultural heritage) will show up and revive the language, even though this has happened in a handful of cases and been proposed in other cases. In the scheme of languages that are threatened with extinction, revival that produces a new native speaker community virtually never happens; some people say it's only ever happened with Hebrew, and there's even a debate there about how much continuity modern Hebrew has with ancient and liturgical Hebrew.

As a Latin speaker I was always annoyed that people said that Latin was "dead" when it had obviously never ceased to be spoken or written and when I had personally used it to communicate with people (one time with one of the people mentioned in this article, an Italian who doesn't speak English!). Events like the Rusticationes show that you can use Latin as a medium of day-to-day communication, and people do, so that should hardly count as "dead", right?

On the other hand, very very few people have Nancy Llewelyn's level of fluency in Latin, even among people who regularly participate in spoken Latin events. I used to go the Cenae Latinae in Berkeley and, while it was super-fun and very satisfying, the majority of people there wouldn't be called "fluent" if we were applying the standards of a modern language.

I feel like linguists sometimes have a hard time dealing with phenomena like conlangs, liturgical languages, and ancient languages used for communication, because the paradigm of human language acquisition that you see in every single human society all day long is transmission in communities of native speakers, so the concept of something that is exclusively 2L but is in systematic use comes across as kind of weird and not quite "real". And you can find ways in which these languages are impoverished, but it feels pretty real when you understand them and communicate with them!

It's interesting to note that there have been some native Esperanto speakers (including George Soros) and some native post-classical Latin speakers (including Michel de Montaigne), as well as one native Klingon speaker. I'm pretty sure language acquisition specialists would still see this as qualitatively different than transmission within a native speaker community.

Another thing that changes this equation is the rise of the Internet. Nowadays it is much easier to create a community of people interested in a particular language, so it is not just a matter of a group of people in a geographical region speaking the language. It just takes a committed family of latin speakers to raise kids that have latin as their first language, and I don't think this is terribly difficult to do in the modern world.

Slightly off-topic gripe, but:

"It’s only sixty-five miles from here to the Capitol Building in D.C., and the area resembles Virginia or Maryland more than Appalachia."

That may well be because Charles Town is a half hour in either direction from Virginia and Maryland, and not really in Appalachia.

Yeah, the WV eastern panhandle is basically just commuter towns for people who work in DC/Baltimore/NoVA, and more properly "belongs" to that area than to the mountainous southern/western parts of the state.

Wow, this article makes me miss these people intensely. I went to a Rusticatio when it was in Petaluma, California, about a decade ago, and all the same people were there!

Praestantissimi estis, socii.

An interesting gathering with some commentary that rings true to my own experience: in the late 1990s I was a star Latin student in high school in Australia, though it took me ten years to get to Europe by which time I had forgotten all of it (despite or perhaps due to acquiring literacy in two language families in the mean time, including Chinese). Today - after perhaps a combined total of one year spent traveling on the European mainland - I still haven't been to Italy (the closest I've been is perhaps Tunisia or Nimes), and interest is at an all-time low.

How could this loss of interest have been prevented? It seems to me that there should be some easier way for far-flung peoples with an interest in Latin to get some support. Perhaps Italy could start an Alliance française or Goethe-Institut style network of supporting institutions?

It looks like Italy already does have such a network -- but they teach modern Italian, not Latin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istituto_Italiano_di_Cultura

I'm sure I'm not the only one who was momentarily confused by the fact that Charles Town, WV and Charleston, WV are two different municipalities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com