Latin Lives | Hacker News Reader

Latin Lives

thenation.com

72 pointsdiodorus32 comments

I was at Reggie's class in 2008 where he got sidelined for medical reasons and which turned out to be the last summer session in Rome, but somehow I didn't know the story of how Paideia had picked up the torch. What a delight. Gratulor his qui tantum honorem magistro fecerunt et faciunt.

I have a friend that is a historian. He was visiting a monastery in Macau to view some very old texts brought by the first Portuguese priests. They were under the care of a very old priest who spoke Cantonese and some Portuguese. My friend spoke Portuguese but they were not getting very far so he tried Latin. They conversed in Latin fluently for the rest of his time there.

I took Latin in high-school but I always wondered what Latin would have sounded like.

It's hard to tell with dead-languages; for example we say "chi" in english, but most grammars list χ as aspirated.

The pronunciation of Latin is extremely well studied and mostly known, including changes throughout its history.

Unfortunately it's quite far away from the pronunciation I've learned in school.

(and what Americans usually use seems to be even farther away)

We can deduce facts about how the Romans pronounced Latin sounds by:

* descriptions of the sounds by the Roman grammarians

* wordplay, onomatopoeia, spelling errors in graffiti, etc.

* the way in which sounds from other languages (particularly Greek) were adapted into Latin

* the way in which sounds of Latin were adapted into other languages

* comparative reconstruction of the Romance languages

* evidence from metrical poetry, which provides particular clues about consonant and vowel length

A very readable book on is W. Sidney Allen's _Vox Latina_.

[edit: meant to reply to immediately following sister of this post.]

I'd never thought of using misspellings from graffiti as a pronunciation clue, but it seems so obvious.

I wonder how anthropological linguists would someday treat modern rap and hip-hop. In German, for example, it's not uncommon for the artist to slightly or not-so-slightly mispronounce words to make them fit a rhyme. Would that help or hinder a study?

> Would that help or hinder a study?

I imagine it would help. If evidence for that mispronunciation happened consistently, it would be taken as a dialect, class, geographical or cultural thing (or subculture). If it happened consistently over a very short space of time (and there was surviving evidence) it could be confused as a blip, or fashion.

Example:

I'm constantly perplexed why 'where' is spelt as 'were' by so many, but I imagine there are a sufficient number of English-speakers' accents (or a sufficient amount of speakers of a single accent to be significant) where the two words sound similar enough to spell them out on a keyboard as the same.

I see some hand-written signs by native Spanish speakers in my neighborhood that interchange b and v (and sometimes k and c, and sometimes c and s), which would make for good evidence for a future historical linguist that these were homophones or near homophones in certain contexts.

For example, I think I've seen "besino" written by a native speaker for "vecino" 'neighbor'.

I've heard some academics who specialize in the phonology. I always thought it would sound like Italian, but the reconstruction actually sounded a lot more like French.

Firstly, the way Italians pronounce Latin is nothing like what it should should :) In the main, c is hard (Cicero is KIKero not CHIchero), v is to be pronounced as the English w. Those are the main points that irk me.

The best approximation we have is what's called the "restored" pronunciation. If you're interested in all the nuances the best book for this in my opinion is Vox Latina by Allen. Alternatively, just listen to anything by Evan der Miller on his YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/evan1965. His Latin pronunciation is the restored Classical and extremely good.

If you took Latin in Highschool and want to get back into it you should check out a book course called Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. It introduces Latin through Latin and also contains MP3 recordings for the first 31 chapters in first book, all in very good restored Latin pronunciation by the author Hans Ørberg. (there's a torrent of all the Lingua Latina resources)

And there's an interesting tie in to the article WRT the Orberg's Familia Romana. A quick glance at the article and a text search indicates the author is snubbing Orberg for some reason, as Familia Romana is much more famous in that field for that technique of teaching than the folks discussed in the article. I like that book and occasionally digest a chapter or two. Its like solving a puzzle.

I am pretty sure there are no legal ebooks of familia romana, its full of illustrations and the ebook transition would likely be painful. Too bad.

No idea why they would snub Orberg. It's not like what they are doing is totally unique. Terentius Tunberg runs the Conventiculum Latinum, "an annual summer immersion workshop in spoken Latin held on the campus of the University of Kentucky" [1]. Not in Rome, but still full immersion.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tunberg

In my experience folks who've studied with Reginald Foster tend to admire Ørberg quite a bit, but they might think Ørberg's books are too basic for their own students (since I guess people coming to Paideia will have studied Latin for several years first) and/or study things that are not explicitly didactic works.

The article doesn't seem to mention this at all, but Latin definitely lives: it's called modern day Romanian. There are many differences but if Latin survived anywhere into modern times it would have to be Romania. I had some Latin in high school and that came in surprisingly handy, much more so than in other Latin derived languages.

Funny how Latin sounds so prestigious, while Romanian (even though the word clearly claims, well, Roman ancestry) has no such bling to it. Only because I was exposed to it by a Romanian student I got to know this, otherwise Romania's image made me think they used a slavic language.

It's a weird mixture actually, there are quite a few Slavic influences, and even a bit of Greek.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin

In fairness, Latin got a lot of Greek in it in Imperial times.

Sardinian is considered to be closer to Latin than Romanian, and arguably Italian and Spanish are closer to Latin too.

According to a book that I haven't read[1], but is cited by Wikipedia[2], "A 1949 study by Italian-American linguist Mario Pei, analyzing the degree of difference from a language's parent (Latin, in the case of Romance languages) by comparing phonology, inflection, syntax, vocabulary, and intonation, indicated the following percentages (the higher the percentage, the greater the distance from Latin): Sardinian 8%, Italian 12%, Spanish 20%, Romanian 23.5%, Occitan 25%, Portuguese 31%, and French 44%."

[1] Pei, Mario (1949). Story of Language. ISBN 03-9700-400-1 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sardinian_language

I have heard similar anecdotal evidence on Italian, and it's linguistic similarity to Spanish would support that. I'm a little surprised that Portuguese strayed so far.

Portuguese has some influence from French in terms of character set as the first King was of French origin.

At the time of the country origin, Galician, Catalan, Spanish, Asturian, Arab were all spoken in the penisula, which might have contributed to such deviation.

At its roots Portuguese came from Galician mixed with some Arab.

Looking at an excerpt in another wikipedia entry, it looks like the metric is based on phonology only:

> Demonstrates a comparative statistical method for determining the extent of change from the Latin for the free and checked accented vowels of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Rumanian, Old Provençal, and Logudorese Sardinian. By assigning 3½ change points per vowel (with 2 points for diphthongization, 1 point for modification in vowel quantity, ½ point for changes due to nasalization, palatalization or umlaut, and −½ point for failure to effect a normal change), there is a maximum of 77 change points for free and checked stressed vowel sounds (11×2×3½=77). According to this system (illustrated by seven charts at the end of the article), the percentage of change is greatest in French (44%) and least in Italian (12%) and Sardinian (8%). Prof. Pei suggests that this statistical method be extended not only to all other phonological, but also to all morphological and syntactical, phenomena.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_Romance_langu...

Sounds rather arbitrary. Linguistics has come a long way since the 1940s, so I would take that one with a big grain of salt without confirmation from more modern references.

That said, as another comment in this subthread says, Latin survives in all Romance languages. There's no objective basis in claiming that Romanian is the one true descendant.

Using your way of putting it I think all Romance languages have a legit claim to "being Latin". [I seem to recall reading that there were time periods in which all the local languages were still casually called "Latin" while being quite distinct.] Some are more conservative than others in terms of preserved phonetics or grammar etc. But none of them "are Latin", and yet all descended from it quite naturally. Is Romanian, which has had some changes over centuries just as any other, any "more Latin" or "less Latin" than Italian, Spanish, Portuguese -- each of these having unique and sometimes overlapping changes relative to Latin?

Take some trivial word like "bene". The Italians say "bene". Their spelling is the same, so OK, it superficially resembles Latin when it's written out. But the Spaniards say "bien". That diphthong "ie" looks like a radical change but IIRC it's actually capturing the fact that the length of the Latin word's first vowel is different from the 2nd one. Less Latin? Who is to say, really? Then the Portuguese say "bem", which looks ridiculous with that M in there ... until you realize that nasal consonants come and go, they change into each other in certain positions, is it really "less Latin"? Would it really be shocking if some Roman pronounced an M in some position we think of today as having Ns? We don't have recordings or time machines so we can't say if they did.

At some point in my own amateurish study of Romance languages I realized this sort of thing and gave up trying to classify as "less Latin" and "more Latin". If you want to make a statement about who's speaking Latin today, the best way to capture it is that they all are, really (and at the same time, they are not).

I think you're mostly right, though there is a notion of a "more conservative" or "less conservative" pronunciation.

For example, surely we could see Spanish "luna" as just closer to Latin "lūna" than the Portuguese "lua" is, and Spanish "consonante" as closer to "cōnsonāntem" than Portuguese "consoante" is. (But that doesn't make Spanish as a whole closer to Latin than Portuguese as a whole... but it's possible to imagine a language typically being more conservative in some respect, having fewer sound changes applied and so on, than another language.)

Yes, I am aware of this. Even that strikes me as the wrong metric. For instance, AFAIK standard Italian is mostly conservative due to standardization efforts. I had known that it was largely based on the Tuscan dialect, but when I saw what actual Tuscans do to their consonants I couldn't believe it. Though this conservatism is now present in the native language of a country, it seems to have come about through somewhat artificial means, rather than a long unbroken chain to Rome.

I recall there were other such examples of a romance culture re-importing Latin words from literature, and it being fairly common to have two words with the same root, where one is conservative and another drops syllables, changes consonants, or both. Spanish is the one I know best, just to throw one out there from my head, you have "llave" and "clave", or "llano" "plano" and "plan". (All of this from the consonant + L -> ll change, then I presume a re-import from Latin happening later.)

Secondarily, who is to say some of the sound changes we see in Romance languages couldn't have somehow originated with regional or informal pronunciation of Romans? I am sure many have studied this question more than I have, but I will bet the answer here is nonzero.

Those are good observations that I hadn't considered before -- thanks!

Romanian was NOT so "Latin" as the people like to put it. Yes, cherry-picking one could find instances of astonishingly well preserved Latin traces, but the fact is that the old Romanian had only under 40% Latin-descending words and was heavily infused with words from Slavic, Turkish, Magyar, Bulgarian, German, and what not! By the way, those layers were being ousted continuously in a political effort to "re-Latinize" the Romanian language. To give you an example, the word "slobod" was a common Romanian word of Slavic origin, meaning "free" and was used broadly in various formal contexts (like administration, where "slobozie" was officially a locality free of taxes), and now its default meaning is the content that was "freed" on ejaculation, thus avoided in all but vulgar instances. For a while now Romanian proffered Latin-originated borrowings and thus become more related, but I think you could force that pretty much on any language if you try hard enough.

To complement, here is a [parody] metal song in Latin. Press "Play".

http://iramen.ru/spisok/stramosljabi_alba-potentia.html

(can't comment on the quality of language tho)

There's actually a number of bands in Germany that uses various old/dead languages including Latin. In most cases they are just musical adaptations of historic texts, though, not novel works entirely.

As far as rap music goes, I particularly enjoy this[0] interpretation of the "love" song "Ich was ein chint so wolgetan" (it's actually about rape, from the perspective of the victim[1]). It's alternating between Middle High German and Latin.

[0]: http://mp3.pm/song/13460415/Schelmish_-_Ich_Was_Ein_Chint/

[1]: http://lyrics.wikia.com/Helium_Vola:Ich_Was_Ein_Chint_So_Wol...

This kind of verse is called macaronic verse (or makkaronische Dichtung in German).

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

I think the Wikipedia article's coverage of the German/Latin macaronic verse tradition could use some more detail.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_with_Latin_lyrics

I am a natural skeptic of much of the whining in the humanities. (It sounds too elitist and unmeasurable to my ears) That said, this seems like a very interesting way to connect both modern and ancient culture.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com