Latin- as the languge of the people!

[Ite_ad_Ioseph]

If we were to do such a thing we have to tell our children who speak Latin as a first language to speak it like we always have so it would never deviate from Latin and be a Romance language. Like English; ‘ain’t’ isn’t a word, right? Well, people use it so it is English. Language is determined by how people speak it, not how people are supposed to speak it. That might be hard to do.

 

[John_Higgins]

Ah, Latin, the language of the people–the Roman Empire people.

jh

 

[Claudius]

Why disrespectful? I wouldn’t have a problem with some archeologist digging up a sign that said “Old Towne Ice Cream Shoppe” and asking themselves, “Towne?! Shoppe?! In 2008? What is with that?” I won’t even get started on some of the other stuff you’ll see written on signs now. Even after we’re dead, there will always be Mudgies.

As long as they aren’t arguing that no one wrote like that, that the writing on some bathroom stall must be the work of a later author because the text would not have been grammatical in that time period, I don’t have a problem with it. Our Mudgies are going to stick up for their Mudgies. That’s a Mudgie for you.

The bit that I call graphiti actually comes from several very nice wall paintings that had sentences written as part of the pictures. In one home there is the story of Hurcules and almost all the verbs show an older form of conjugation then the people in Rome at the time were using. It happens to be a kind of naughty story about Hurcules but that is besides the point. It was put in the kind of place of honor that suggest that it was far removed from what you call bathroom stall writing. I have read some of the “scholarly” works that talk about this and they almost always jump to point out that it “isn’t Classical Latin” and then stay on that point forever as it that is the only note worthy thing about the entire painting. They will go through it and “correct” the Latin to make it look the way Cicero would have written it. But point is that Cicero didn’t write it. It was written by someone else, and my point is that it was written by a Latin Native Speaker. We aren’t talking about comparing a retarded inner city gang member to all normal English speakers here, we are talking about comparing normal English speakers to someone whose English, though held in amazingly high esteme, is unique to that person and is not at all the standard that normal everyday educated people use.

Should a Latin speaking community come into existance, the language would be natural. We wouldn’t just know how to say things from Church. However, the idiom would almost certainly be Christian. “Factum est” instead of being obcure and almost grammatically incorrect would probably be a normal part of everyday conversations. Things that mark Cicero at his best would probably be non existant, like supines. Most people probably would just not use them and if they did, they would not be thinking of them as supines but just using what sounded right. One thing that I wouldn’t like at all is for some college profesor to show up and start lecuring everyone on how we are speaking Latin incorrectly accordiing to his theory. There are Five different “scholar” theories about the pronunciation of Latin floating around out there right now. That is quite a bit too much divergence for a community that will be lucky to have even 100 members to begin with. We will need to keep it simple and give people bits of langauge they will actually use. We almost certainly will be all Catholics who join this community and as such we should use Catholic Latin with Catholic pronunciation. This isn’t out of reach at all and will get the community going a lot faster then having everyone learn to revalue all their letters so that they can sound like some northeasterner.

 

[Ite_ad_Ioseph]

Not to keep nagging on this subject, I like linguistics, so please bear with me.
*
We almost certainly will be all Catholics who join this community and as such we should use Catholic Latin with Catholic pronunciation.*

What would Catholic pronunciation be, then? North Italian? Or we will only know when people start a community and talk frequently and adapt it as best as possible to everyday life?

Salvete

 

[Claudius]

Not to keep nagging on this subject, I like linguistics, so please bear with me.
*
We almost certainly will be all Catholics who join this community and as such we should use Catholic Latin with Catholic pronunciation.*

What would Catholic pronunciation be, then? North Italian? Or we will only know when people start a community and talk frequently and adapt it as best as possible to everyday life?

Salvete

I do not know if the pronunciation used will be exaclty like what is used in North Italy or not seeing as I have never been there. I know that if I buy a book aimed at teaching Latin and look at the pronunciations used in the book, a secular book is pronounced differently and a Catholic book used to teach Catholic prayers is pronounced the same.

I do have some qualms with the Catholic pronunciation but it is not so great as to warrent jumping to a completely unknown system that was only invented less then 100 years ago.

For instance, I prnounce Mihi as MEE-Stop-EE. I didn’t have to train myself to do this, it just developed out of my normal speach pattern after speaking Laitn every day for most of my day of a period of years.

Another point of difference between me and the official Catholic pronuniciation is that I let the C on the end of words like Fac, Dic and Hoc to be soft. I have tried to think of a reason why I just naturally want to do this. It isn’t just because it sounds better, to me it is just the natural way that the words seem they should sound. Besides, coming from an English speaking country, if I told someone “fac id” and didn’t allow the C to soften, it would sound sexual.

Also, I do let some of my I lighten just a little. In really short words the I is going to always be EE in sound but in longer words a slightly softer I sound like is found in English but not in the Romance languages for me is ok and everyone still knows what I am saying.

But at the end of the day, I suppose we need to understand the reasons behind going into a community with Latin as the main language, to be as Catholic, specifically as Latin Rite, Roman Catholic as possible. If we hear the Pope give a speach in Latin on TV, we should Idealy be able to understand him completely without looking into a dictionary or converting it into a different pronunciation. I have a lot of friends from Australia and I can not tell you the number of times that I have had to translate for my Australian friends simply by changing the pronunciation to the way my American friends speach.

Now, to move onto bigger questions, what should the government of a Latin speaking community be like?

 

[Ite_ad_Ioseph]

We don’t want consuls or praetors, we aren’t Ancient Rome. I see two ideas I will submit:

1. Ancient Greek system- direct democracy. There would be leaders, but everyone would vote on everything. And women could vote. (They couldn’t back then, for those who somehow don’t know.)
2. Theocracy- no thats not the right word. I’m going to invent the word
   ‘ecclesiocracy’- ‘rule by Church’. Listen to the Church, don’t mess with each other, but it would depend on if we made a parish or a city, which would involve a charter and mayor. A city charter would involve the government of the country make us allow non-Catholics to come and speak only English to mess up our stuff because of religious freedom. Enough ranting.
   Anyway, there would no crime in a Catholic community, right, Claudi? (That is the vocative form, right?)

Not to bring this up again, I found this from EWTN’s website:
[ai.uga.edu/mc/lat(name removed by moderator)ro.pdf](http://www.ai.uga.edu/mc/lat(name removed by moderator)ro.pdf)

 

[Ite_ad_Ioseph]

I thought if I posted again this would go to the front of the line where it belongs.
So what do you all think about the Latin community government? And what I said? Any comments?

 

[Claudius]

I thought if I posted again this would go to the front of the line where it belongs.
So what do you all think about the Latin community government? And what I said? Any comments?

Government by the Church for regular matter sounds fine to me. By the way the vocative form is actually Claude but anything logical is also allowed in Latin. A form of direct democracy on matters that the Church entrust to the people would be best in my point of view since I envision the community being very small. Direct democracy seems the best way giving the Church a veto as it were.