Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryao | Hacker News Reader

I had no idea anyone still used the term “mare nostrum”. I believe it began to be used during the Roman Empire when the Romans had conquered all lands surrounding the Mediterranean. Back then, the term meant the sea belonged to them and no one else. That meaning no longer applies in the modern day, so using it today would mean “we all share this” rather than the original meaning. His use of the term was a clever way to invoke shared history.

View on HN

It's not that weird a term: I was taught this as the Roman name for the Mediterranean in middle school history class in Spain, without having to take Latin. There's a boardgame and a video game with Mare Nostrum as the title. I's expect relatively well educated people in countries bordering the Mediterranean to understand what he meant with little trouble, especially if they are also speak a latin-derived language. For instance in Spanish, mare is just mar, nostrum would be nuestro, and mortuum is muerto. It'd all be trivial first guesses.

Don’t forget supercomputers! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MareNostrum

You are correct that most people do not use the term any more. But the Pope isn't like most people. It's an informal requirement that the Pope be able to speak Latin and Italian is commonly used in the Vatican (being surrounded by Italy probably has something to do with that). Even though Francis was not as fluent as his predecessors in Latin and Italian, he certainly understood it better than most and his speechwriters probably were probably proficient in Latin.

As the child of Italian immigrants to Argentina, Francis was quite fluent in Italian. He’s old enough that his formation would have included significant Latin instruction as well. I would guess that Benedict’s Latin skills were superior, but Francis was reasonably conversant in the language from what I understand.

The thing that I found interesting was during trump’s visit to the Vatican, he asked trump’s Slovenian wife if she was feeding him potica which indicated a surprising level of knowledge of the cuisine of a country which is largely insignificant on the world stage (as someone who’s half Slovene and has a loaf of potica on his kitchen counter, I think I can safely make that declaration).

Well of course Slovenia is Italy's neighbor, but I guess that's more surprising from a non-Italian.

I come from Croatia and have lived in Italy for a long time and it's very rare to find anybody who can barely place our countries on a map until fairly recently and let alone heard about foods or drinks. Not zero people of course, but very few

I doubt many Americans can name a single Canadian province or Mexican state.

just to be clear, mine was not a jab against the georgaphy or culture knowledge of the average Italian. They are likely to know more details about German, French or Spanish geographical or culinary features than something from the balkans despite sharing a border.

Indeed. I grew up in a cultural milieu that was overwhelmingly Slavic (Chicago suburbs, mostly Czech and Polish but smaller numbers of Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats and Serbs) and even within that, the lack of understanding of distinctions was surprising (so many people thought Slovak and Slovene were the same thing, which isn’t helped by the fact that the countries have very similar flags since independence and near-identical demonyms in their own languages) although I would note that the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs were all highly aware of the distinctions between themselves and even as cultural self-identification as specific Slavs in Chicago has faded, there’s still a low-level hostility between Slovenes/Croats and Serbs.

I don't know how large the Lithuanian community in Chicago is, but when I lived on the South Side in the late 90s there was an amazing Lithuanian restaurant called just "Healthy Food", a weird amalgam of traditional Lithuanian cuisine and hippie wheat germ and molasses-based fare. They also sold amber jewelry, as well as their own swag like "I ♥ Kugelis" T-shirts. Anyone remember that place?

It's the largest population of Lithuanians outside of Lithuania, for what it's worth.

I’d never been there, but there seem to at least be multiple Lithuanian restaurants in the Chicago area. Sadly, while there were literally dozens of Czech restaurants when I was a kid, now there are three.

Chicago has been shrinking for decades and it's tragic. Even in the 90s there were whole blocks on the South Side (I lived in Back of the Yards) that were just abandoned.

I suspect many Americans would have trouble identifying all the American states. I wouldn’t use Americans as a model of geographic awareness.

Even so, Francis lived most of his life in Argentina and could be excused for not knowing about the cuisine of a neighboring country. Certainly most of the press was ignorant, with many reporters thinking Francis said “pizza” and not “potica.”

> As the child of Italian immigrants to Argentina, Francis was quite fluent in Italian.

Actually he was more fluent in the Piedmontese dialect. His Italian was somewhat wobbly at the time of his election.

As an American, it’s always a bit startling to realize that “German,” “French,” “Italian,” etc. are in many ways hugely diverse language families with dialects that are often not intelligible by all speakers (as opposed to English where, with a few extreme exceptions, there’s not really a problem with mutual intelligibility and the written language elides most of those distinctions).

I don’t have enough broad knowledge of Spanish (Castellano) to comment on its intelligibility across dialects (although Argentine/Uruguayan Spanish is more of a challenge to my Mexican-Spanish trained brain than European Spanish).

He certainly spoke Italian and Latin, but he did not prefer it. It was kind of a sticking point early on when he would slip into Spanish when talking. It irritated some of the old guard who thought that he should stop speaking Spanish because he became Pope.

I don’t know about Pope Francis personally, but the quality of “Vatican Latin” has gone down significantly during his reign.

Part of it is the death and retirement of the last generation to be taught Latin from nursery to ordination.

But given the prominence and resources of the Vatican, they could find a few Latinists.

It was also the name of a major Italian naval operation to rescue migrants crossing the Mediterranean in 2013–2014, launched after a particularly tragic shipwreck near Lampedusa. The operation was shut down after just one year due to high costs and limited support from the EU, which left Italy largely on its own.

Definitely not surprising hearing a pope using it in a speech.

For "older generations" in Italy it is absolutely fine as a reference.

Not sure about Gen Z and younger people though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com