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The Vatican's Latinist

newcriterion.com

148 pointsjthnews61 comments

Anyone interested in this might enjoy reading about Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti[1] and other "hyperpolyglots" in Michael Erard's Babel No More.[2]

An excerpt from the Introduction:

"...Mezofanti liked to quip that he knew 'fifty languages and Bolognese.' During his lifetime, he put enough of those on display -- among them Arabic and Hebrew (biblical and Rabbinic), Chaldean, Coptic, Persian, Turkish, Albanian, Maltese, certainly Latin and Bolognese, but also Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, and English, as well as Polish, Hungarian, Chinese, Syrian, Amharic, Hindustani, Gujarati, Basque, and Romanian -- that he frequently appeared in rapturous accounts of visitors to Bologna and Rome. Some compared him to Mithradates, the ancient Persian king who could speak the language of each of the twenty-two territories he governed. The poet Lord Byron, who once lost a multilingual cursing contest with Mezzofanti, called him 'a monster of languages, the Briareus of parts of speech, a walking polyglott, and more, -- who ought to have existed at the time of the Tower of Babel, as universal interpreter.' ...

"On one occasion, Pope Gregory XVI (1765-1846), a friend of Mezzofanti, arranged for dozens of international students to surprise him. When the signal was given, the students knelt before Mezzofanti and then rose quickly, talking to him 'each in his own tongue, with such an abundance of words and such a volubility of tone, that, in the jargon of dialects, it was almost impossible to hear, much less to understand them.' Mezzofanti didn't flinch but 'took them up singly, and replied to each in his own language.' The pope declared the cardinal to be victorious. Mezzofanti could not be bested."

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezzofanti

[2] - https://www.amazon.com/Babel-No-More-Extraordinary-Language/...

At what point do you cross from polyglot to hyperglot?

I would enjoy being a programming hyperglot I think...

I assume at then Gregory turned to some other Cardinal and handed over a handful of scudo saying "I was sure we had him this time..."

For those thinking "what the heck is Syrian?", I'm guessing the author meant Syriac.

I wish I had had a teacher like that when Latin was being shoved down my throat. I so rebelled, I knew less Latin in my sixth year than I did in my fourth. The wasted hours of rosa, rosam, rosae, rosa.

However, it did enable me to become fluent in Spanish in two months. Fluent enough to teach high school physics, in Spanish, at the Instituto Americano of La Paz.

I wish I did, too, but I think instruction in all the other languages was even worse, at least in my school. While my class was memorizing charts like -r -ris -tur, -mur -mini -ntur the students taking Spanish and French were learning the "better" way, but their results were worse. Language instruction in the U.S. is just shit all around.

(I remember one of the smartest kids in my school took four years of Spanish, and by his senior year, he was the only kid taking Spanish who wasn't a native Spanish speaker. So the teacher spoke English with him and Spanish with the rest of the kids....)

My favorite teacher ever was my high school latin teacher. I took latin for 3 years, each class was packed as everyone loved being there. In a public US high school at that. Today I doubt there is a single public high school in the US teaching latin.

Northside College Prep in Chicago has Latin (and my nephews actually took it at the K-8 level in public schools as well). If you read the story, you'll find that many of Foster's former students are teaching Latin, and Santa Monica High School (another public school) is given as an example of where his graduates teach. My local public high school also offers Latin (as does the Catholic high school half a mile down the street). There's been a bit of a renaissance of Latin in the schools of late.

One of New York's special public schools not only teaches latin, they require everyone to take four years of it: Brooklyn Latin School [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Latin_School

It's increasingly rare. I had 4 years of Latin in HS, in public school (N.B. tax-funded government sponsored school for you non-American readers). I think I was the last student in the school district to do that, because after the teacher retired, who was exceptional, they cut the program from the curriculum.

We had it in Wheaton, Illinois, in public school. Sort of just depends on the school district.

Latin is a lot more fun if you don't focus on the grammar, and perhaps ironically, you may pick it up faster.

Unfortunately, grammar is super easy to test.

no te creo que lograste fluencia en dos meses incluso con el conocimiento de latin...

My favorite quote:

About this method he said, “You don’t need a hydrology course to learn to swim. You don’t point at the water and say, ‘This is water, this is how water works.’ you just throw the babies in.”

I agree completely. Language is alive, and learning words is much easier for me if they're in context.

I'm not learning Latin, but I am learning Chinese. I wrote http://pingtype.github.io to put spaces between words, colours for tones, pinyin romanisation, and a literal translation on the line below.

I could probably do the same for Latin. First I'm doing English-to-Chinese (the other way), then I might try Taiwanese and Japanese, but the structure of the program is all the same. I just have to gather the data for each new language.

Comment if you're interested, and I'll let you know when I finally get around to working on it. There have been a few Latin/Greek posts on HN that get upvoted a lot, so I think there's some demand.

Nifty.

I went looking for google translate style audio, and found the Advanced > Audio button, and hit a bug. Page load; for Chinese input, enter "中文輸入"; Translate; Audio; surprised by English input and Chinese spaced having cat and ffmpeg command lines.

Feature idea: permit repeatedly playing the audio for just a part of the phrase. Often when using ggl translate, I want to rehear just a syllable or word I'm unsure of, or am having trouble with. Google makes you rehear the whole thing, which is simple, but discourages double-checks, and impairs iteration.

Sorry! Thank you for exploring the Advanced features, I put a lot of effort into those, but they need more explaining. I'm pleased that you actually looked at it though :).

The audio feature doesn't actually play audio. It's supposed to generate input commands to put into ffmpeg. I would write more documentation, but my priority is to get the existing documentation translated to Chinese. I asked 4 friends over the past 3 months, all have promised to do it, but only one of them translated one page.

I don't think there's a way to do what you're asking using only client-side JavaScript. I would need a server to generate an audio file for you. Unfortunately, I don't have the money for that. The most I could do would be to generate an M3U playlist file, which you could then save and navigate using the chapter feature of your music player.

> get the existing documentation translated to Chinese

http://opennmt.net/ links to a "Live system" with a Chinese option. Discussed on infoworld[1].

FWIW, its translation of "This is a test." was at least recognized by google translate.

> audio [...] using only client-side JavaScript

It looks like the audio starts out as small mp3 files, which are then concatenated? There are WebAudio-based libraries both for playing one file after another, and for concatenating them for download.[2] For the mp4 subtitles, hmm, well, even if nothing else, there's ffmpeg.js[3] (but fonts might be an issue?).

Thanks for your work. :)

[1] http://www.infoworld.com/article/3152050/artificial-intellig... [2] For example (merely the first one I saw): https://github.com/jackedgson/crunker [3] https://github.com/Kagami/ffmpeg.js

I'd be interested in a Latin version. Your description sounds exactly like what I need.

Thank you for doing the excerpt! I'd not have read the OP otherwise. And it turned out to provide additional perspective on describing a current project in science and engineering education transformation.

Like Rome, the physical world has science and engineering stories that are highly connected, richly interwoven, and best taught that way. By exploring in conversation with one who is familiar with them. Like the "hydrology" example, hydrodynamics is best taught by swimming (in VR/AR) - sure there's a Reynolds number order-of-magnitude scale and slider on the side, and length and time, and a live Navier-Stokes on the wall, but that's all in service to playfully messing around in/with fluids. In K-4. Like Latin, the way science is taught doesn't work, doesn't inspire, and leaves out lots of accessible engaging stories. Like Latin, perhaps there's hope for change. Unlike the instruction, you really need an conversation system with eye tracking, to notice your interests, answer questions, and mentor understanding. An expert and teacher to walk with. Anyway, my thanks.

The industry we do I think we are well suited to appreciating the devotion you can give to a craft or knowing something well.

It's pretty inspiring and also shocking how someone could be so devoted to something for so long and how little it gave him other than what he intrinsically got from it.

We should be thankful that we live in a perfect time for those of us who want to devote ourselves to engineering and computer science can also reap rewards which let us have the freedom to live the lives we want. Just because what we do is useful or hard doesn't mean it needs to be financially fulfilling.

"If you don’t know Latin, you know nothing! I had my first experience of Latin forty years ago, and I have not been bored by Latin for ten minutes in these forty years. Latin is one of the greatest things that ever happened in human history." -- Renigald Foster

An uncle of mine was a priest who more or less fluent in English, Latin and Italian. Also Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinean Pidgin English) for that matter from when he was a missionary.

He spent quite a lot of time in the Vatican and may well have been one of Foster's students.

I sometimes think whether his great talents were wasted as a priest* but stories like this help me think they were not.

* there were expectations of you going into the priesthood if you were the eldest son in an Irish Catholic family.

> there were expectations of you going into the priesthood if you were the eldest son in an Irish Catholic family.

Doesn't that make for an overabundance of priests?

Yes and no.

Yes, because there were probably priests who shouldn't have been.

No, because there's still a lot of people in the world to convert.

I have read many articles across different blogs all highlighting Foster's amazing career. I studied Latin in high school and regret that I was not more engaged at the time. I am thrilled to learn of the publishing of 'Ossa Latinitatis Sola' and will take it as an opportunity to give Latin another, more purposeful, go in the near future.

Any advice for someone like me who has never taken Latin but would like to learn?

Labor omnia vincit!

Lingua Latina by Hans Orberg.

https://www.hackettpublishing.com/lingua-latina-per-se-illus...

Go for it! Here is a good quote from the article from Fr. Foster:

"Latin is the best thing that ever happened to humanity. It leaves you zero room for nonsense. You don’t have to be a genius. But it requires laser-sharp concentration and total maturity. If you don’t know what time of day it is, or what your name is, or where you are, don’t try Latin because it will smear you on the wall like an oil spot."

I have a fondness for Latin myself, but this is absurd. There are lots of languages with a similar case-driven grammar and nobody makes such claims about those. Russian is about as case-driven as Latin and non-indo-european languages like Finnish and Estonian actually have more cases.

Would love to hear details on why this is true compared to other languages.

My suggestion would be Hans Ørberg's Lingua Latina per se Illustrata series, it's brilliant and you can start from zero.

https://www.hackettpublishing.com/lingua-latina-per-se-illus...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_%C3%98rberg

Thumbs up for this suggestion.

My advice would be to have reasonable expectations. Latin isn't easy to learn - you can't practise talking to real people, it has plentiful grammar, there isn't so much vocabulary (relatively) but many words have a vast variety of meanings depending on context, and sentence structure is entirely alien to English speakers. It is, essentially, quite hard (though easier than Classical Greek).

I studied Latin to degree level a decade-and-mumble years ago, and to my great shame have not kept it up at all. On the rare occasions that I am required to translate some Latin - an inscription in a church, for instance - I try my best, but I am usually a far cry from Indiana Jones. (I do have a moderately extensive selection of pretentious phrases in Latin that I can deploy when necessary.)

We used Kennedy's Revised Latin Primer and The Cambridge Latin Course at school; I think the latter starts pretty much from the basics, and the former covers probably all of the grammar you'd ever need to know. I think you can get some of the Harry Potter books in Latin, if that sort of thing takes your fancy. Once you've acquired a moderate mastery, you will find something like Caesar's Gallic Wars to be quite an easy read (though stylistically he ain't much cop).

To add to that, the grammar (and thus the meaning) is sometimes driven by the meter, which is a concept pretty much entirely foreign to many familiar with English prose.

Quite. Though, if by any chance you have reached a sufficient mastery of English prosody to understand the iambic pentameter, the dactylic hexameter really isn't such a stretch, notwithstanding one being based on stress and the other weight.

I so enjoyed the pattern-matching puzzle that I found preparing for the AP Latin (Virgil) exam to be.

> the grammar (and thus the meaning) is sometimes driven by the meter

What do you mean by this? The closest I can come to making sense of it is that some Latin words obligatorily appear as the second word in the sentence, but it seems like you must mean something different?

I'm guessing that the issue is just that in poetry many authors are willing to use word orders and constructions that would otherwise be regarded as questionable or ungrammatical—"metri causa".

I'm pulling from my studies of ~10 years ago, but IIRC there are points (noun and adjective endings?) where diacritical marks can change the meaning of the sentence. Unlike, say, Spanish, these marks are not written, and frequently have to be interpreted from language cues, including the meter.

That's basically correct -- some case endings differ only by vowel length and are therefore not distinguished in standard Latin writing, which doesn't indicate vowel length in any way. (Old Latin writing sometimes did.) "Via", in nominative case, meaning "the road" as the subject of a sentence, is written identically to "via", in ablative case, meaning "by the road", but the 'a' of the ablative case ending is longer.

However, you can't describe this as "the meter driving the grammar". The grammar requires the same cases and vowel lengths regardless of the meter you're trying to achieve. Rather, we modern-day people reading Latin poetry can use the meter to help us determine what was originally written. All of the causal influence is from grammar to meter, not the other way around.

That's pretty much what I meant... A naturally fluent reader of Latin poetry would have had to follow the same process of inferences (drawing from a far more intuitive and internalized model of the meter, of course).

Word order in general being at the whim of the writer is the bane of the modern learner, although we can be sure that this is a stylistic device and that the spoken word order would have been much more standardised. There's a wonderful line in "The Loom of Language" (wonderful book, wish I could find my copy) berating "the crossword puzzles of Cicero" vs the language he'd use to bawl out his slave.

If you are in the Seattle area, you can practice Latin, among others, at the ancient language Meetup. Latin is by far our biggest meetup (average 6 people ha). All skill levels welcome!

> you can't practise talking to real people

Not to native speakers, but to semifluent and (rarely) fluent 2L speakers, you can. While there's always an argument that the loss of native speakers radically impoverishes our sense of a language and its potential, and that what we can figure out from writing is just a portion of what the language used to consist of, you can definitely have fun practicing spoken Latin with experts and dramatically improve your understanding of the language.

There are several spoken Latin programs, some of which use immersion methods, mentioned in the article. I spent a week at one of Nancy Llewellyn's programs about a decade ago, and mehercule can she speak fluently and extemporaneously about anything she chooses in Latin. :-)

> you can't practise talking to real people

I have not tried this myself, but there is a skype channel used to converse in Latin [1]. I'm sure the quality varies widely, but it is there.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T9V04fDh6o

I took Latin in college (having not taken it in high school), and found the Wheelock text book pretty helpful (https://www.amazon.com/Wheelocks-Latin-7th/dp/0061997226 ). If you're looking for Latin texts, check out the Perseus Project (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/) and the Latin Library (http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/).

If you get stuck on something, swing by the Latin StackExchange (https://latin.stackexchange.com/).

Current Latin learner here. I found the Great Courses Introduction to Latin by Hans-Friedrich Mueller to be helpful. 35 audio lectures, plus 35 chapters of exercises. It's a good introduction that covers all the basics, and has set me up quite well for working through selections from The Gallic Wars.

This is a stretch but there is a cottage industry that churns out translations of children's books into Latin. Search for "Winnie Ille Puh" or "Cattus Patasatus" and that will lead to several others. This was likely started by Charles Schulz and company who had a Latin version of the Peanuts Philosophy published, a version which is now a rare collector's item. [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Peanuts-Philosophers-Latin-version-2-...

Ditto. I totally wasted the years I had to sit in a Latin classroom...

I've bought a book of Latin stories that we used in school, and I'm looking forward to diving back in. If my 13-year-old self knew that, he'd be horrified.

One of my best friends studied under him in Rome, he had some amazing stories to tell.

Here's a video of Foster teaching a letter of Cicero:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACJDtJ0UDzA

> Sundays were not off days but day-long excursions into the countryside with twenty-page packets of Latin texts: to Cicero’s birthplace, Tiberius’s cave at Sperlonga, Horace’s villa in the Sabine mountains, and many other locations. The course was free and no one received any official credit for taking it—Foster wanted only people who loved Latin for its own sake. “Summer school” became a kind of legend in Rome, particularly within the American expatriate community (it was taught in English and attracted mostly Americans).

Does he still do this course?

Bill Maher called this guy Father Maverick when he interviewed him for the movie Religulous. The interview is quite amusing and can be found on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy1lPOzDvs4

Previous discussion when first published a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13789097

> Foster’s model has proven to be imitable (though his energy and expertise is not—Paideia last year used six teachers to cover what Reginaldus would do alone).

I wonder if that can be ported to eg math education?

> What the book cannot give, of course, is the experience of [...] strolling through the streets of Rome with him. For that we will need his like—or to wait for the Reginaldians to start writing memoirs.

Shouldn't someone point these folks at VR headsets and livestreaming stabilized 360deg video? It doesn't matter that he can't walk and is stuck in the US. With someone to be his walking and conversation companion in Rome, and to hold his eyes, he could walk Rome every morning, telling stories, and recording it for posterity.

Morning-after edit: streamed phone video, or even just a conversation with photos, would be much easier.

I took latin in High School and loved it, thanks for posting this, it reminds me to get back into it

I believe Latin is a language option on Vatican City ATMs.

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