Can Italians Understand Latin? | Hacker News Reader

Can Italians Understand Latin?

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An older friend of ours from California had a brother who was a fluent Latinist from grad school, and when his brother went to Rome for the first time, he didn't know any Italian.

He figured, what the heck, and ordered a meal in Latin.

The waiter, without missing a beat, said "You must have been gone a long time."

True story...

Oh this one's a whammy. I'll be passing this around :) nice one, I love it!

He should have said he’s Cinncinatus returned to revive the glory of the senate and people of Rome

Short answer: no. Except maybe for picking up a word here and there. Reading Latin is somewhat easier, except for poetry, where the word order is completely hopeless. Source: I am Italian.

Edit: most Italians study Latin in high school, but the curriculum is focused on grammar and literary works, not casual conversation, and very little of writing down your own essays, or God forbid speaking it.

At the end of high school, you can almost - I mean almost - read Caesar's texts fluently, and then it quickly fades away due to lack of practice. The only remaining use is to read some historical plaques in city centers, and even that is quite difficult since they often contain strange abbreviations, made-up grammar from the middle ages, or missing pieces.

> the curriculum is focused on grammar and literary works, not casual conversation, and very little of writing down your own essays, or God forbid speaking it.

I took two years of Latin in college. I had the same experience.

That's pretty much how Latin is taught in the US (where it is offered at all) as well. There is a movement called "living Latin" that aims to teach Latin as a spoken language, but only a very few institutions offer it.

As an Italian I've studied Latin at school and was quite good at it. Some 45 years later I still can read and translate on the fly very simple texts, but the two languages are two planets apart; different structure aside, they share some common terms but Italian adopted others from foreign languages, to the point that some Latin terms are still present in English but were eliminated from Italian. A couple examples: the Italian for "paper", "carta", in latin was a quite similar "papirus", while "charta" was used only for government documents and the like. Also, the Italian for "cheese", "formaggio", is more similar to the french "fromage" than the also Latin but rarely used "formaticum", while the most used term in Latin was "caseum".

Yes, but we almost always have the latin derived form in close meaning other uses.

In your example, "caseum" is not transferred in common italian, but the "cheese industry" is "industria casearia", so - generally speaking - you can get most times the meaning.

The real issues come when there are "false friends", in the old times there was the famous (I believe fabricated) example "I VITELLI DEI ROMANI SONO BELLI", which is valid both in Italian and in Latin, but in the former language it means "Romans' calves are beautiful" while in the latter one it means "Go, Vitellio, to the sound of the Roman god's war".

> I VITELLI DEI ROMANI SONO BELLI

This is hilarious, thanks for sharing.

I studied Italian in high school and during quarantine decided to try and learn Latin. I was really surprised how many common words were not cognates. Normally if I dug into it, there was a related Italian word, but with a different connotation

Can French understand French from the Middle Ages or even later? No. And this is likely the case for all languages.

I am French and have a soft spot for French Middle Ages history and culture (completely amateur interest, and very shallow).

I tried to read MA texts. It is really difficult, and gets a tiny bit easier when you understand the calligraphy. As for the meaning, this is basically a foreign language.

When you know what the text is about, you can work out some words and the meaning of some sentences. But only some, and this some is rather small.

I heard spoken MA French and it is not understandable at all.

Languages change much more than we expect it. My son texted me a moment ago "Oe ptdr g vu". Kudos if you guessed that this is teenage French, and congrats to you understood what he meant (when you are not French and a parent of teenagers:))

Seems to be a homophone of "Oui <BLANK> j'ai vu" -> Yes <BLANK> I've seen [it].

Anyone has an insight on what "ptdr" might mean?

Pété de rire.

In English, somewhere between LOL and ROFL.

I've had no trouble reading 16th-century Spanish works. As I understand it, Don Quixote is really no problem for modern Spanish speakers either. Perhaps French has moved on since then, but Spanish seems to have been quite stable.

Icelandic kids can read the sagas too.

This is an example of a XVI century French text: https://transcriptions-actes.pagesperso-orange.fr/16eme_siec...

Reading the original is close to impossible (but, hey, I think the same of my children's and mother's handwriting so this is not a good argument :))

The transcript si very, very difficult to read. Both the vocabulary and the grammar are significantly different from contemporary French. It is possible by carefully analyzing the text to understand the general ideas (having learned latin and liking etymology helps).

The texts from the XVI-XVIII centuries we learn at school are basically translated (some words are left to pretend that the text is close to the original).

It depends. If you know enough English and a modern Romance language or two you can almost understand the medieval Latin of Aquinas. Whereas Caesar using native Latin made heavy use of declensions to indicate grammatical function so you really can’t rely on a modern sense of word order without getting lost. The second language Latin users seem to speak a kind of Latin-lite with their native language shining through.

The person in this video did quite a good job, I thought, of speaking with free word order and using Latin constructions elegantly. I think he did try to make himself more intelligible (focusing on proper nouns that are easier for Italian speakers to pick up on) later on, but initially he was fire (imo.)

I know English and Italian and studied latin in high school, but I can't understand it all. To be fair, it was my bane in high school

No. And the guy in Rome is correctly asking "wtf are you saying" lol.

Of you want to speak latin, go inside Vatican, you'll find somebody that understands you

Actally he did that. Turns out even in the Vatican, most clergy aren't completely comfortable in conversational Latin. Even though the church official docs are still in Latin, Vatican residents speak Italian and English in daily life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDhEzP0b-Wo

Speaking is not mandatory since 1960 in Vatican from the video.

Until recently, the Vatican web site would display in Latin if "Accept-Laguage: la" appeared in the request headers, but now the language has to be manually selected. Google will display in Latin if the header is set (though it seems like Italian to me). Wikipedia has many pages translated to Latin, but it also doesn't seem to use the Accept-Language header.

https://www.vatican.va/latin/popes_latin/franciscus/latin_hf...

https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicipaedia

It also turns out that most official Church documents are not authored in Latin at all. Often, the "reference language" for Papal documents will be Italian, or another common language. Spanish is quite popular, of course, with the (ethnic Italian) Argentinian Pope Francis. It was, of course, quite fitting that Pope Pius XI should write Mit brennender Sorge entirely in German, considering his audience at the time.

However, there are two very important holdouts in this regard, and those are the sacred liturgy and Canon Law. The only definitive editions of the Roman Missal and the Code of Canon Law are the originals in Latin. Every other edition is translated from these master editions. It's a very important thing to remember for canonists attempting to interpret the law, that they should keep in mind Latin words, phrasing, and the implied meanings, not whatever sloppy English has been applied for a mass-market publication.

I watched this guy’s other videos as well and I would understand probably 90% and get the rest by context. I would have NO IDEA how to reply except for maybe mimicking him a bit. Not the average Italian though: I speak English, German, French, Spanish and a bit of Portuguese. To me he speaks something that feels like interlingua. In some accents he sounds even Rumanian.

What I find from what's left of my Latin (and as a daily French speaker, though it's not my native language) is that if I pick up an Italian newspaper I can tantalizingly almost get the gist: there was a bank robbery, the robbers fled in a car and were pursued by the police. But were they caught or did they escape? Was anyone hurt? Basically I miss out on the interesting part.

Another possibility is Dunning-Kruger: I understand so poorly that it wasn't even an article about a bank robbery.

Can speak Italian. Can understand Latin, but involves translating two times. Good knowledge of English helps, as you can see the actual roots and derivations of our current languages.

Related: Can Greek understand ancient Greek?

probably reasonably well, except for some poetry. There are some significant dialect shifts in (apologies, no greek IME installed on my phone ATM) katharevousa vs standard dimotiki vs ancient koine (i.e. there is no tha' ), but I think quite a lot of the vocabulary has remained stable, in contrast to the tectonic shifts that taken place between Old English, middle english, early modern and Modern English. Greeks who go to church (assuming it's Greek Orthodox), are thereby exposed to a narrow corpus of Hellenistic Greek, which is a middle stage between the greek of homer and the modern version.

I think they're much closed compared to Italian and Latin.

A friend of mine had rather a crush on a Greek girl, so spent a couple of weeks learning Greek to impress her. When he put his plan into action she laughed at him, apologised and explained that the ancient Greek sound funny, and she has a boyfriend already. Later in the pub, he said to me mournfully "I wondered why everyone in the book was wearing a toga"

Can Americans understand Old English?

Can Americans understand Old American? /s

Try for yourself! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH-_GwoO4xI

If you want a trip, try listening to Scots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le3cBRlWSE8

Ok after listening to the old English maybe I ought to try Middle English first

I'm not a Yank, but I know Old English is too different, so haven't bothered to listen/

Middle English is a lot easier, but still awkward in some places. We had to read The Canterbury Tales at school, and I remember getting the gist without having to make to much use of the references for obsolete words.

As to David Campbell's piece, I only missed a few words of the Doric section followed the tale of the pious / holly fellow who went out in the fishing boat, and only really missed the (possibly implied) stealing of the bucket (rather than the literal loss of the fellow overboard while baling).

I'm not a Scot, and in many respects Doric is a difficult dialect of Scots to follow. Now if that had been a conversation in a pub, or on the street (rather than the presented story), I imagine I'd have had more trouble.

Part of the problem with Old English is it isn't just the usual linguistic evolution over time like in most languages. English changed dramatically after 1066 and the Norman Conquest. In modern English there are more words of Romance origin than of the original Germanic origin. Hence people like Poul Anderson and his famous "Uncleftish Beholding".

Let me save some time for you: No, they can't.

Can Anglophones read Anglo-Saxon?

Can English-speakers understand Beowulf? In terms of time, if not linguistic distance, it's much closer!

Video:(

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