I offer free Latin classes in my parish for absolute beginners only. If I did the same in your parish, would you come?

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Yes I looked at it. It’s quite good up to a point, but there comesxa moment when someone actually has to explain the grammar
 
that is the weakness of duolingo in general: by design, it uses repetition, rather than formal grammar.

My Spanish is nearly back up to speed, but I haven’t found a solid reference for formal grammar. (but then, what I really need is more street Spanish than academic, so . . .)
 
If it was Ecclesiastical Latin, I would. I would pay if needed. I want to learn Latin but the only classes out there are Classical Latin, and I can’t teach myself, I’m too old for this. :sweat_smile:Wish we had it at our church.
 
I don’t think you should be discouraged. The early stages of Classical latin are needed for ecclesiastical latin. I reckon you could step off the boat when it starts to get rough, and still have a rewarding time reading the vulgate. It’s amazing what you can unpack from the Latin which just doesn’t emerge in translation. Also it’s amazing the things that are in the original Greek that come through in Latin but get lost after that.
 
I might do but only if it’s liturgical Latin. I struggle to learn new things and have no interest in languages but would like to learn to pronounce the Kyrie, Pater noster etc. at our mass properly.
My current priest pronounces them differently from our usual choir…confusing.
 
The Church has a standard way, which is to pronounce it as if it were Italian, except for letter H which is pronounced H if you can do it, or k if you can’t (French and Italians usually can’t).

There is a common, though incorrect, tendency for priests to pronounce the letter C according to the custom of their own language. A German might say “Tsivis Romanus sum” for example.

An extremely good way to familiarise oneself with some useful latin phrases is to pray tge rosary aloud in Latin.
 
Yes, I was hesitating to point that out. But actually the pronunciation of the Kyrie follows the same rules.
 
I would surely be interested, but there is a chance I might be a bit busy with all the school going on. Still, I would try to make it happen.
 
Maximian said:
The Church has a standard way, which is to pronounce it as if it were Italian
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That’s incorrect. There have always been regional varieties of Ecclesiastical Latin: Italianate, French, Spanish, German, Polish, etc. There was even a really weird English variety that has fallen out of disfavor because it was so divergent but which you can still hear in how legal and scientific terms are pronounced, and is still sometimes used by the Church of England (that is not the so-called “Classical” pronunciation of Latin, which is a different beast altogether).

Wikipedia even has an article about the Traditional English Pronunciation of Latin:

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

And that has been the situation since the eighth century. There never has been a Church-wide “standard”.

The use of the Italianate as a “standard” has nothing to do with the church but with secular classical musicians, who needed everyone in the choir to be singing with the same pronunciation. Church choirs just used their own local pronunciation.

English speakers also adopted a more Italianate pronunciation once they abandoned their own local variety in the nineteenth century, and it has also become more common in other countries in the last fifty years after the switch to the vernacular for the Mass.
Bluebright said:
My current priest pronounces them differently from our usual choir…confusing.
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Not really. As I said, differences in pronunciation have always existed, just like we have different accents in English.
 
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Jbrady said:
There was even a really weird English variety that has fallen out of disfavor because it was so divergent but which you can still here in hoe legal and scientific terms are pronounced, and is still sometimes used by the Church of England
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The ‘Traditional English’ (as I’ve seen it termed) pronunciation is quite close to French pronunciation of Latin. For example Cicero and Diocletian in English are very comparable to Cicéron and Dioclétien in French.

It was very jarring when I first studied Classics: Italianate pronunciation on Sunday Mass, (reconstructed) Classical pronunciation when reading Latin aloud in class, and Traditional English pronunciation when discussing Latin in English.

It was much simpler in Classical Greek where no-one seems to particularly care about pronunciation: nobody wants to pronounce φιλοσοφία philosophia with phi (φ) as an aspirated plosive like pee-loso-pee-a (which sounds so silly).
 
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Bithynian said:
The ‘Traditional English’ (as I’ve seen it termed) pronunciation is quite close to French pronunciation of Latin.
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No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t close to anything. See the Wikipedia article that I linked to above.
 
I did not say the Church has always had a standard way, I said it has a standard way now.

Up to the 1920s latin was taught at school using pronunciation as if it were English (think of Wilfred Owen’s 1915 poem in which he rhymes mori with die). I was at a school which preserves this pronunciation for certain formal purposes as a curiosity. BUT had you at the same time walked into a Catholic Church you would have found the Italian pronunciation use at Mass.

As a result, at the bar it was possible sometimes to detect a Catholic barrister by the way he pronounced a phrase like “ab initio”
 
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My mistake. I seemed to have been recollecting far too ambiguously.

I remember conversing with a native French speaker and her French pronunciation of some Latin proper nouns seemed, at that time, remarkably closer to English than other European traditions. Cicero in pronounced in German (tzitzero), Italian (chichero) and Classical (kikero) sound entirely unlike English.
 
Bithynian said:
remarkably closer to English than other European traditions. Cicero in pronounced in German (tzitzero), Italian (chichero) and Classical (kikero) sound entirely unlike English.
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They are all following their own national spelling convention for pronouncing a c before i or e.

So (sorry dont have accents)

City (s) Eng
Citta (ch) It
Ciudad (th) Sp
Cite (s) Fr

Etc
 
I would. It is a goal of mine to learn the rosary in Latin.
Alot of times, I have it playing in gregorian chant Latin n the background while I pray.
Maybe it will subconsciously help me Learn. 😏
 
NevermoreLenore said:
If we do not charge patients, most often they do not value the expertise nor do they have as good of clinical outcomes than those who pay even a nominal fee.
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Lawyers frequently find this doing pro bono work.

And it’s also well documented in Catholic/private education.

For that matter, getting back to my areas, it’s well established in experimental economics that having a real payoff is far more important than the size of the payoff. That is, you get most of the results you would with a $100 prize with a candy bar.

There are also studies about how result vary with size–decades ago, I went to a grad student workshop with Vernon Smith ( the father of this stuff) where we played for $100 in games that usually play for $1 or $10. This had the dual purposes of being how he funded our trip/lodging/meals, and studying the differences between our choices and others). [sidenote: after years of efforts by each crop of students, I was the one that finally beat the public good game so that we could maximize the payout!]

I kept peppermints in my pockets to toss out for both good answers and questions from students . . .

Oh, and another one: a study was done which imposed a $1 copayment on medicaid visits. The number of “trivial” visits (sniffles, etc.) plummeted. Synopsis: at no cost at all it was simple entertainment!!

Oh, and these results hold if you give the subject the money that you’re going to charge them, leaving them the choice of whether to spend on it or keep the money.

Oh, there is also a difference between giving someone the money and letting them pay to play, and putting in the game–even though their choices are mathematically identical. (e.g., give someone a dollar and let them pay it to win $3 or $0 on the flip of a coin gives different results than offering them a choice between a dollar or flipping a coin for $3/$0 [they’re more likely to take the flip in the latter case]).

And another, if thee is a “leader” in a game who determines much of the outcome, potentially to his own benefit, people are more likely to act for their own gain (as opposed to the group’s) when there is some kind of predecesor game or other reason to see themselves as having “earned” this position.

hawk
LisaB said:
I don’t think Latin will help you with this. 😉
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🤣 🤣
 
I definitely would. I wish our parish would offer it. I would love to learn Latin so much, and would definitely come. Also, I understand the comments about offering it free, but in the church context, I think people would not ‘abuse’ it, or could make payment by way of donation to the parish / charity.
 
No one has abused it. My pupils are a Japanese, a Dutch, a Hungarian and three Luxembourgers. Periodically they bring me a cake and every so often make a generous contribution to the parish.
 
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