The Vatican's Website in Latin
vatican.va
vatican.va
We've also toyed with the idea of learning it as a living language, which seems to be an increasingly-popular method among autodidacts these days.
Source: I did the whole thing before I learned Latin from a different course. Duolingo's is unfinished.
I've found it fairly useful for picking up other alphabets, as opposed to languages.
Duolingo it got me just enough Spanish (with zero prior knowledge) to get around, communicate basic needs (like a caveman, sure) and understand simple instructions, all without putting serious effort to learn language properly (putting serious effort into it) but only casually, as a side task.
On one hand, it is really short. There are very few words assembled into very few phrases, and they are not even particularly popular words. (New Latin for “New York”? I mean, I guess, but was that really the best you could do?..)
On the other hand, for how short it is, it confronts you with quite a bit of grammar. As is customary for Duolingo, you’ll have to infer that grammar from the examples—except, per the previous point, you won’t get nearly enough examples. (It’s cute that some usages of the Latin verb “studeo” correspond to the English verb “study”, but the Latin one governs an unusual case, which depending on declension looks exactly like one of the other cases, so perhaps having it be one of the first verbs is unwise, especially when a lot of your target audience ostensibly has no concept of “govern”, “case”, or “declension”.)
On the gripping hand, because of how short it is, there is a lot of grammar that it does not even hint at. Including parts that any classical text will hit you in the face with within the first paragraph, and that will completely befuddle you unless you’re aware of them. (Like the quaint custom of plopping the preposition in the middle of its complement, as in “qua de causa” lit. “which for reason” i.e. “for which reason” i.e. “therefore”, or for that matter “magna cum laude” lit. “great with praise” i.e. “with great praise”.)
By comparison, Ørberg excels at this to a downright supernatural extent. It’s like La Disparition except instead of writing a (pretty natural-sounding) novel without using the most popular letter of the language he wrote a third of a (pretty natural-sounding) textbook without using the most popular category of nouns and adjectives in the language, and his version is actually useful. And it’s like this for any grammar concept he wants to defer. His way does take quite a bit of time, though, I’ll give you that.
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1. Disci latíne quando cathólica eram quia melius Missam ac Offícium légere volébam. Nunc non christiána, neque Missa assísto nec Breviárium canto, sed multas antiphónas pulchras (et verba pauca!) iam mémini.
Most other grammatical structures are also directly comparable.
So you can make your life easier by studying a Slavic (or a Baltic) language first.
(mwahaha!)
Slovene is a bit simpler in its grammar and lacks some of the tongue-twisting phonemes of Czech (albeit with lj being a challenge for learners).
I don’t really know much of any other Slavic languages beyond the ability to occasionally decipher Polish or Ukrainian billboards via cognates. Bulgarian apparently has abandoned nearly all inflections in its nouns other than the genitive which perhaps makes it one of the easier languages to learn.
For those who want to learn Ancient Greek, in my limited experience, I’ve found Biblical Greek instructional texts easier to work with than Attic Greek (the grammatical differences are not that great with the biggest differences being more in vocabulary than grammar—it seems a smaller shift than between, say Elizabethan English and contemporary English).
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1. I grew up in an essentially vanished American subculture where ethnic diversity meant that there were a handful of Italians amongst the Czechs and Poles. The Czech population of Chicago, which once was the majority population of the West side of Chicago has since dispersed and assimilated to the point where there are only a couple Czech restaurants left in the whole Chicago area where even twenty years ago they were fairly common. The Poles, having a still-active immigration pipeline and larger population to begin with² have not suffered the same fate.
2. While there were a large number of Poles on the West side of Chicago, the larger center of the Polish population was, and still is more Northwest side.
3. Technically, Latin has six, but the vocative case only differs from the nominative in the second declension singular and so is generally omitted from declension tables.
That pipeline has since dried up as well, especially since 2004 when immigration began to shift toward the EU. And since then, we see the reversal of that process, with far more Poles returning home from abroad.
So, Polish immigration has effectively ended. Old Polish neighborhoods are in the process of being displaced by new immigrant groups and yuppies.
(Curiously, even under foreign occupation, a good deal of Polish immigration was intended to be short-term. Poles would move to places like the US to earn some money and return home. Naturally, immigration is “sticky”, so a good number stayed behind and assimilated.)
It's very popular online, but it's methodologically bunk.
If they're measured by traditional academic metrics (parsing, recalling declension tables, translating into English), then Wheelock's grammar-first approach really does optimize for that. On the other hand Ørberg optimizes more for reading fluency and intuitive comprehension, which is harder to measure on a standard Latin exam.
I learned English with the direct method (the teacher was an old Esperantist free to do his own thing) and German with the traditional grammar memorization way, and I wouldn't be able to write this post in German.
If done well, the grammar-centered approach leaves a lot of blanks, but the blanks are more or less “just add vocabulary”. So assuming you’ve retained whan you were taught (!), once you want to read any classical text, you can take a dictionary and work through it. Do that enough times over a few years and eventually you’ll be able to get rid of the dictionary. Again, you see why one would choose to do this when one needs to equip their students for any text to the greatest possible extent in a limited time; but that’s a different goal from having them read some texts as soon as possible. And it’s not always done well either, of course.
The fastest that I've learned a language was by buying a grammar and spending hours on end doing grammar exercises. It doesn't just work by "traditional academic metrics", it works and fast. That's because it's faster to learn something if you're explicitly shown the pattern and then you do repetition, than if you just do the repetition.
Of course you need to do grammar exercises, the interesting question is whether it's good to avoid your native language when exercising, as Lingua Latina per se Illustrata does but most language training materials don't.
Like, outcome of language classes you describe are people who cant watch movies, cant listen to podcasts, cant talk with natives ... but are decent in solving grammar exercises. And to add insult to injury, the whole process so massively sux, that you are likely to conclude that learning languages is not for you.
Medieval Latin is influenced by the modern European languages, so it uses a similar word order and similar methods for expressing various things.
On the other hand for Classic Latin, e.g. for works written during the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, a thorough knowledge of Latin grammar is absolutely essential for understanding the texts.
The order of words can be very different from what a modern European expects, and frequently you cannot understand which is the syntactic role of some word without being able to recognize precisely various grammatical markers for case, mood, time etc.
Understanding Latin grammar in isolation is more difficult than when you also know at least some things about the historical evolution of the Latin grammar and its correspondences with Ancient Greek grammar and Proto-Indo-European grammar.
For learning any language, in my opinion it is less important to use textbooks, than to start as early as possible to try to understand something that you are interested in, for example a movie spoken in the target language or a book written in it. For Latin obviously you must start by reading some books, since it is a dead language. An example of a relatively easy book is Caesar's book about the Gallic Wars. Another easy choice is the Natural History of Pliny the Elder. The simplest way is to use bilingual editions, like those of the Loeb Library, and to consult a grammar and a dictionary whenever you do not understand yet something (because in a bilingual edition you may look at the English page to get the general meaning, which can guide you, allowing to avoid too frequent interrupts for searching a dictionary, but that does not have a word-to-word correspondence with the Latin sentence that you must understand).
There is a good Latin dictionary that is online:
https://www.prima-elementa.fr/Gaffiot/Gaffiot-dico.html
but it is a Latin-French dictionary, so you must know French (or you may use Google translate or an LLM for French, which are far more reliable for translating French to English than when translating Latin to English). A dictionary provides additional essential information not normally available in automatic translations, like which vowels are long, related grammatical forms and a long list of possible meanings with examples of usage.
A large number of Latin books are online at:
[1] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext...
[2] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext...
[3] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/opensource/download
There are more Christian and Medieval works on TheLatinLibrary though.
I can recommend the Lewis&Short that is Latin-English.
But latin is a dead language. What you describe is what it is used for. It is a grammar exercise.
Also, you're much better off reading The Hobbit in English. The Latin translation is known to be less than superb.
has a delightful answer in the AI section, and the two top results are in this thread.
Since the AI section does not trigger, here is mine
"AI Overview
Minime, gratias tibi. Ranae socolatae non mihi placent!
(No, thank you. I do not like chocolate frogs!)
Note: This is a phrase from conversational Latin exercises, sometimes appearing in materials like Rosetta Stone.
"For me, the takeaway was that finding the Ørberg book later in life made me WANT to go out and read some latin texts. The Latin instruction in grammar school did absolutely NOTHING in this regard, sad to say.
I feel pretty strongly that treating Latin as a living language would have enabled me to go much farther, without necessarily spending more time on it.
As an aside - we probably agree more than we disagree, but I feel talking about the importance of drilling grammar just recalls the Monty Python sketch from Life of Brian, and not in a good way :)
If you're interested in a tutoring Latin remotely, please let me know. If not, no worries.
Recently I was wondering if I should work on a modernization of the concept (using audio and a more interactive medium). If anyone has thoughts on this topic, I'd be happy to discuss more.
When we wanted to marry in the country of my partner, both our (catholic) churches needed to sync. They did so in their common language: Latin.
That was a fun surprise.
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1. This is one of two significant cases that impact some of the two-church parishes that are part of the last decade of reorganization in the Archdiocese of Chicago. Sacramental records will be kept at only one of the churches. The other situation reflects Holy Thursday and Easter Vigil Masses. A parish is only allowed to have one Mass on Holy Thursday and on Easter Vigil, so the two-church parishes will only celebrate at one of the churches even if they had sufficient clergy to have those Masses at both locations.
The Catholic Church keeps pretty good records, for the most part. In New England, Quebec, and maritime Canada, many people can trace their ancestry back to at least the 1500s based on these records.
Interesting fact that I (as a Catholic) was not aware of, though I've observed it happening in practice when preparing to marry my wife, who did get all the relevant records from her home parish in a different part of Austria from where we were living at the time.
I'm curious about two things though, if you happen to know them: first is this "offical keeper" thing a Church-wide policy in all countries, not just a de facto tradition in some, and if so is it stated anywhere e.g. in Canon law as a universal practice? Secondly, how does the policy apply to those who were baptized in a non-Catholic church and later converted? Obviously an Anglican (or whatever) parish isn't going to take on the duty of being the official record-keeper for any Catholic sacramental requirements.
The church works like DNS in that regard. (Without the caching. ;)
While it was always decentralised, the standardisation of the documents was with the Council of Trent ~1550 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Trent
For those baptized in a different church but received into the Catholic church, they will go through a ceremony at the Easter Vigil Mass (where they will typically receive confirmation and first communion) and that church will be their official keeper of records. They will have a copy of whatever proof of baptism the person had. In rare cases where a person was baptized, but there is absolutely no written record (things like an inscription in a family Bible count as written record), they will receive conditional baptism where the person doing the baptism (usually a priest, but not necessarily) will preface the words of the baptism with the phrase, “if you are able to be baptized.” This was the normative practice for those baptized outside the Catholic church before Vatican II. As mentioned in a sibling comment, the baptismal and sacramental records of the church are a key source of genealogical data for many researchers.
This is no different than hundreds of years ago, and it works well. Thanks to Latin, the church's _lingua franca_.
This passage especially stood out to me:
> At the application level, AI in the strict sense raises questions about the reliability of data and the criteria by which programmers process it so as to make it available. It is unclear what biases or power systems influence the work. In particular, serious doubts arise regarding automated, AI-based decision-making processes in sensitive areas of human life: when deciding whether to provide medical care or grant loans or mortgages or insurance, or when prosecuting criminal cases in court or assessing the conduct of prisoners and the likelihood of reoffending with a view to reducing sentences, or when deciding on military attacks or law enforcement interventions.
It is funny because this almost feels like a complete summary of recent Hacker News debates in a single paragraph.
Encountering Artificial Intelligence (https://jmt.scholasticahq.com/article/91230-encountering-art...)
Reclaiming Human Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (https://jmt.scholasticahq.com/article/154545-reclaiming-huma...)
The writing is genuinely excellent.
In tech communities, we often talk about how many times productivity will increase, or whether AI has consciousness. But in religious documents, the focus is often on how the problems of the vulnerable and the community will change.
That is interesting to me. The worldview is Western and religious, so it feels somewhat unfamiliar, but at the same time, it seems useful as a way to rediscover values that we may have forgotten.
See specifically perhaps the encyclical Rerum novarum (Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor) from 1891:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_social_teaching
Various others over the decades.
Even after that shift, the Catholic Church continued to be a fundamentally reactionary force in the realm of social policies, all the way through the second world war.
The care for workers was a thing long before Marx. Rerum novarum (¶20) quotes scripture on the topic:
> To defraud any one of wages that are his due is a great crime which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven. "Behold, the hire of the laborers... which by fraud has been kept back by you, crieth; and the cry of them hath entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth."(6)
Jesus himself was a tradesman, often translated as "carpenter":
* https://uscatholic.org/articles/202205/was-jesus-a-carpenter...
Marx's caring for the downtrodden and weak is itself a Christian concept; in contrast, Nietzsche hated weakness and Christianity for its support of those that are (he was not a fan of the Sermon on the Mount).
First, the Church isn't in the business of policy. The Church recognizes the distinction between secular and religious authority, and indeed, it is the origin of that distinction, from which the exaggerated liberal separation of Church and State comes from (you won't find this distinction outside of Christianity, and indeed it makes no sense outside of that context). The Church will advise or comment or respond to policies as a moral authority, but policy as such does not belong to its scope.
Second, Catholic Social Teaching didn't materialize out of thin air. It is a culmination and explicit formulation of millennia of teaching. The industrial, political, and economic upheavals of the modern era are what motivated this explicit formulation.
Third, I wonder what you consider as "reactionary" here. The term itself is an incredibly loaded and condescending progressive term and takes for granted the correctness of the progressive view. The Church has been consistent in its teaching. It does not adapt to what is fashionable or to ideological fallout (even if particular prelates may show signs of doing so).
Proceeds to argue that the Catholic Church is not in the business of policy, when it ran an actual, sizeable _nation state_ all the way to 1870 and in fact was extremely pissy when it was taken from them. And you call me distorting? Lol. They are in the business of policy, they've always been.
Dude, I'm from a city that was directly ruled by popes for centuries. We've dealt with all that rubbish over and over, Gelasius' swords etc etc. The reality is that the institution does what it does in order to survive and maintain as much power and influence as possible, by any means necessary. They will find ways to justify anything and its opposite, because theology is just a literary game.
Rerum novarum was an attempt to maintain power and influence in a situation where their power system was fundamentally challenged (or unmasked, some would say). It remained a niche and largely ignored effort all the way to Council II. For all the effort of some local clergy, most of the real powerbrokers in the Catholic Church still don't give two shits about redistribution and social justice, and never will.
Yes, there actually is a distinction between ecclesiastical authority and secular authority. The same person can hold both secular and ecclesiastical offices. The Church - the institution - wasn't deciding policy in the Papal States, and it is not deciding it in the Holy See today. It is simply nonsensical to claim that.
Of course, the Church does maintain that all states must conform their laws (ius civile/lex) to the natural and divine law, but that's a general moral claim. I think most sane people would reject positivist conceptions of law as crazy and tyrannical, and would agree that the civil law should be a determination of general moral principles according to particular circumstances within a jurisdiction, and not arbitrary. Policy thus properly belongs to the state which is guardian of the particular common good of its jurisdiction. So, yeah, I would expect someone holding both offices to enact policies that coherently agree with the teaching he is transmitting through his ecclesiastical office. But as I said, the Church already expects all secular authority to conform prudently to the natural law at the very least, and the fullness of the Church's teachings if they are a Catholic confessional state.
But more to the point, it is irrelevant, because even if the Church had been directly deciding policy in the Papal States, it wouldn't follow that the Church has the authority to enact policy just anywhere. Its authority rests above it, like a referee.
Airight, I see that for you white is black if you look at it the right way. Goodbye.
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...
ANTIQUA ET NOVA: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence. "Francis ... on 14 January 2025 ... approved this Note and ordered its publication."
via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750835, comment by jimmcslim on Pope Francis has died.
Catholic nuns were instrumental in the development of computers. A Catholic priest is fundamental to the Big Bang Theory†. Dozens of craters on the moon were named by and for Catholic clergy who discovered them.
Amongst scientific clergy, there’s also Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit who was part of the team which discovered the Peking Man fossils (although looking at the Wikipedia page, it appears his legacy is a bit more complicated than one can address in an HN comment).
Historically, however, this framing of opposition would have been incomprehensible to Catholics. Scholasticism itself provided the intellectual foundations for modern science. Historically, you won't find a sustained and fertile scientific enterprise anywhere but the Christian West. As Jaki puts it, everywhere else, it was stillborn.
This battle between Religion vs. Science is an ignorant myth repeated by the ignorant and by tendentious bigots.
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Maybe because a web site isn't holy Mass?
I've been to a Latin mass a couple of times, specifically a sung (aka high) Latin mass. I see why so many people prefer it. But the Novus Ordo can also be sung. Latin masses also tend to use incense, etc, which also used to be more common in the Norvus Ordo. The real division is between parishes and priests with the energy to put into the mass, versus those that fall into the habit of doing the bare minimum. The "Latin mass" just happens to be a convenient mechanism that bifurcates the two groups.
Relatedly, I read a argument somewhere that the current state can be traced back to the proliferation of Irish priests. In Ireland the low (unsung) Latin mass had apparently been for centuries the predominate form even on Sundays. I'm not sure how accurate that is, but reading various sources it does seem that in various parts of the world the sung mass had already been in a long decline at least since the 1800s. And I think the Norvus Ordo was intended to simplify things in the hopes of reviving the energy in the mass, but instead it just created a lower floor.
Regarding the Novus Ordo, I believe that the key document from Vatican II (Sacrosanctum Concilium) still preferred Latin as the dominant language in liturgy, while readings etc. stayed in the vernacular, but clearly that is not what happened.
There's been an uptick in numbers for Tridentine Rite, so tides might shift back as Catholics realize the wealth of their liturgical tradition.
https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2021/07/19/latin-mass-...
The hulabaloo about the Latin or so-called Tridentine Mass is a cultural issue that is mostly about shifting societal norms and only incidentally about it's being in Latin. This is evidenced by the fact that the current form of the Mass, the Novus Ordo, is written in Latin then translated into the vernacular, and it can still be validly performed in Latin without special dispensation from the Vatican.
Going to Mass isn't something you just do for yourself. You do it to give glory to God, in remembrance of Jesus, and participate in communion with the Holy Spirit.
The Tridentine Mass in Latin is a way to reconnect with the apostolic lineage of the Church, the saints and the generations who came before. I can say with certainty that even modern mass in vernacular is nothing more than a bunch of mumbled repeating sounds to most people in the pews who zone out while they attend once or twice a year for Christmas and Easter.
If you've been to an Assyrian Orthodox mass, you might hear part or all of it in Aramaic. It's quite the experience, especially with the icons of the saints surrounding the community, adding a bit of a transcendental nature that is sorely missing in more "modern" church experiences.
From that perspective, what you’re saying maybe makes sense and that people aren’t really there to internalize the message, but are there for a spectacle. When my parents were growing up until about the 1960s or 70s, I believe all masses all over the world in Catholic churches were all done in Latin.
Latin and Chinese are the only two that don't have the home page same design. Maybe they've laid-off some of their translators.
The Vatican has shown a persistent interest in Russia, and yes, there is a significant Russian speaking Catholic minority, as well as a potential convert base. If I remember rightly, Russia (or the USSR) gets a prominent mention in the Fatima narrative.
Russian has declined a lot in importance over the past thirty years, but it is still a major world language in terms of its spread. It is a surprising omission.
The Vatican cannot operate officially within the PRC, but I appreciate the real situation is more complex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_by_country
There's only 717,500 Catholics in Russia.
Although, careful with this table - it says there's 660,439 in Saudi Arabia - which must be foreign workers, ie not Arabic speakers.
A big one missing is Korean.
It doesn't have the prestige it once had, for reasons we know very well, but it is still a significant language, and one of the main official languages of the UN.
The Vatican has expressed interest in the region for some time and has tried to broker ecumenical deals with the Russian Orthodox Church not just missionary efforts. So yes, I am surprised not to see it there.
Yes, I agree about Korean. I could think of some other languages in Africa and Asia.
Still buying your way out of 666 with crypto.
Eternal scam, zero evolution.
If you squint enough you can see English as a barbarised form of Latin.
One very fun thing I discovered recently is that Dante (and presumably other people in the middle ages) thought that Latin was a constructed language designed to go over linguistic differences, and that's why it had a proper grammar, unlike romance languages :)
But I think the source is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_vulgari_eloquentia In the Italian Wiki page, the "constructed nature" of latin is hinted at; it doesn't seem to be present in the English wiki.
Update: It's indeed in the book, at the end of the 1st chapter of the 1st book:
3 There also exists another kind of language, at one remove from us, which the Romans called gramatica [grammar]. The Greeks and some - but not all - other peoples also have this secondary kind of language. Few, however, achieve complete fluency in it, since knowledge of its rules and theory can only be developed through dedication to a lengthy course of study
4 Of these two kinds of language, the more noble is the vernacular: first, because it was the language originally used by the human race; second, because the whole world employs it, though with different pronunciations and using different words; and third because it is natural to us, while the other is, in contrast, artificial.
Here, vernacular refers to "italian" or whatever dialect, while "gramatica" is latin - the artificial one :)
I always found designs worked better without lorem ipsum, for example, if building a website for a T-shirt company, you might as well use their existing descriptions to see if the content actually fits the layout. Plus you can model real world things, I remember many a lorem ipsum design just falling apart because things like product names were longer than 'lorem ipsum'. Yes I get the idea of lorem ipsum but I always found we wasted time, insulted the client and just created problems for ourselves, just to accomodate a designer that only ever saw text as shapes on a page.
/s