Latin- as the languge of the people!

[Claudius]

On another note, all of this isn’t just about the Latin Language. It is about having something that continuously reminds us that we are or should be on the path of holiness. A Latin speaking community would be one where I envision people centering their lives around prayer. Even if they go to work in an office or factory somewhere, they take the time every three hours to pray a psalm. They go to verspers at night before going home. They really try to live the teachings of Jesus and increase in holiness as a sign to all the world. I know that this can be done with even modern languages like English or dare I say Arabic but for me, having that mark of unity with those in the community is me taking a step farther INTO the Church. It creates this distinction between those in our community and those that aren’t. I really have been (name removed by moderator)ressed on this point by the survival of Syriac and the way it is used by the population of speakers as a constant reminder that they are for Christ not the world.

 

[Volodymyr_988]

It is what we speak in my home. I don’t know Japanese and my wife doesn’t know English nor French but we can sure speak Latin to one another. Ok, admitadly, I do speak some Japanese but not near enough to explain wooing my wife to marry me.

I find it odd that you and your wife don’t speak a common language.

Is this in jest or does your family only speak Latin at home?

 

[Hesychios]

I have looked at Rosetta Stone and I actually wasn’t impressed. They didn’t treat Latin like the other languages there but put in drawings of Romans in togas.

I am surprised, I don’t remember seing that at all, perhaps a newer version (or older) than what I have.

It would be great if we could all get our resources together and go the company that made Rosetta Stone and get them to make a version for Modern Latin the way it sounds in the Catholic Church.

Yes, that is possible, although I don’t know the financial considerations. Rosetta Stone has a program for preserving langauges and will collaborate with groups.

I am sure they would consider it, at least.

On a side note, I have done a lot of learning of other languages as well, especially Coptic and Greek and I must say that linguistically, the Catholic pronunciation of Latin seems to be be by far the most accurate for even the Ancient Romans if that is what you really want to go to. The way that Latin was transliterated into Slavonic and Syriac as well as Greek and Coptic and other languages testifies to the existance Latin being pronounced as the Church does it going back to the very begining. We have Latin words and names transliterated into Egyptian Heirogliphics centuries before Christ and we see that the Catholic has way more evidence for it then against it. At the very least you would have to conclude that if the so called Classical pronunciation really existed back then, it only did so side by side with the current Catholic pronunciation. The issue of the letter H not withstanding, Latin words really only make sense linguistically when you use the Catholic pronunciation.

On another note, why would we want to pronounce our Latin like pagans anyway assuming that a Change even did happen.

This comment surprises me.

I am sure there were many thousands of Catholic priests and bishops in the first three centuries that were very conversant in classical Latin. Not to mention many thousands of classically trained convert laity and their children.

There is nothing wrong with classical Latin.

Sure, a Latin speaking community would of course always be in danger of dieing out. This is why we must all help each other, those of us that know Latin or want to learn Latin. There are good resources our there and we can be good resources for each other if we really decide to do it.

Common Latin was changing across Europe over the many centuries and it sounded different from country to country. Educators and scientists, even lawyers, as well as priests were using Latin and regionally it was diverging. Irish priests did not sound much like Croatian priests, and Spanish priests did not sound much like German priests. Ideally they should be readily mutually inteligible, even with accents, as indeed they would be today.

I do not know what year it was (cannot remember such details) but I think in the 1890’s the Vatican decreed that the north Italian pronunciation of Latin would be the norm, and that was mandated in the seminaries. In the early twentieth century most younger priests were making their own best efforts at pronouncing ecclesistical Latin as mandated, and the older priests were dying out.

So that’s the Latin we remember from our youth, and what priests try to use today, but it would not necessarily be the Latin of our great-great-grandparents day back in Ireland or Poland or wherever not so many generations ago.

Michael

 

[HashemEchad]

I’ll say it again: Latin rocks!

Dominus vobiscum, folks!

 

[EasterJoy]

OOOOH LA LA. Welcome to the world of Mudgiedom. A more MUdgie statement I could not behold.

I think a member of the Latin Community might take issue with that.

(If you think the French are picky… )

 

[brotherhrolf]

Oh, I know. That was an aside to my friend Ghoti.

But I do have to relate this to y’all. God blessed me when I was in the Navy. My squadron deployed to Rota, Spain. On the way back we flew into Swindon RAF base outside of Bath, England. I was torn. I could have gone to Bath and Stonehenge or I could have traveled to London. I went to London and the British Museum where I was able to put my hand on the Rosetta Stone. May not sound like much to y’all but it was a defining moment in my life. I touched the Rosetta Stone - the one that Champollion translated. No, I put my full palm on that stone. My 19 year old self felt it as fervently as my 56 year old self would. I can still see that black slab in my mind’s eye. I have gazed upon the death mask of Tutankhamon but there was a visceral thrill for me putting my palm on the Rosetta Stone.

 

[Claudius]

I find it odd that you and your wife don’t speak a common language.

Is this in jest or does your family only speak Latin at home?

No jest, my wife knows about as much English as our 2 month old son. She knows a few words like SAVE and MONEY but all th other English words that she knows are borrowed into Japanese. I know quite a bit more Japanese then she knows English but I still can’t carry a conversation outside saying thankyou are nice to meet you. I thought my French was bad but then I met some people from Moracco and I found that I could speak French with them pretty well. All the old knowledge from when I was five just came back.

Yes my wife does know Latin. She probably won’t say she knows Latin and she doesn’t know how to read it at all but she can speak it. We have been speaking Latin to each other almost from day one. She can’t pronounce English sounds since Japanese has fewer sounds in the language then English does but she can pronounce Latin becouse there aren’t so many sounds to get over and all the vowels have the same value. Plus, Latin grammar and Japanese grammar are the same on the basic setence formation level so it was just easier for her to pick up. She didn’t have to change the word order of sentences to English, she just needed to keep the Japanese word order and replace the Japanese Object marker of (WO) to the Latin Object marker of ( M ). She still doesn’t use plurals at all since Japanese doesn’t have them but over all it has been a great success. When we first started dating we were useing an electronic dictionary to say one word back and forth. Then she started to be at my home when I would pray the Liturgy of the Hours in Latin. After a while she just picked it up. There are many areas that we are still working on but for the most part we speak more Latin to each other everyday then any other language and if we do use other language words, we are putting Latin grammar markers on the ends of them.

 

[Claudius]

I am surprised, I don’t remember seing that at all, perhaps a newer version (or older) than what I have.
Yes, that is possible, although I don’t know the financial considerations. Rosetta Stone has a program for preserving langauges and will collaborate with groups.

I am sure they would consider it, at least.

This comment surprises me.

I am sure there were many thousands of Catholic priests and bishops in the first three centuries that were very conversant in classical Latin. Not to mention many thousands of classically trained convert laity and their children.

There is nothing wrong with classical Latin.
Common Latin was changing across Europe over the many centuries and it sounded different from country to country. Educators and scientists, even lawyers, as well as priests were using Latin and regionally it was diverging. Irish priests did not sound much like Croatian priests, and Spanish priests did not sound much like German priests. Ideally they should be readily mutually inteligible, even with accents, as indeed they would be today.

I do not know what year it was (cannot remember such details) but I think in the 1890’s the Vatican decreed that the north Italian pronunciation of Latin would be the norm, and that was mandated in the seminaries. In the early twentieth century most younger priests were making their own best efforts at pronouncing ecclesistical Latin as mandated, and the older priests were dying out.

So that’s the Latin we remember from our youth, and what priests try to use today, but it would not necessarily be the Latin of our great-great-grandparents day back in Ireland or Poland or wherever not so many generations ago.

Michael

The version of Rosetta Stone that I am refering to is the demo version. In the later lessons, there is a bit of someone asking directions and it is a cartoon character in a toga asking the way to the Forum and being told that it is on the other side of the Bath house. The pronunciation was really labored and make it seem to me that Classical pronunciation makes the language hard to pronounce.

As to the other thing, the way that Latin was transliterated into other writting systems, it is true. It isn’t 100% but there are more instances of the Catholic pronunciation then the other. Now, I have read it claimed that perhaps this comes about because of a difference in pronunciation between the rich and the poor, or between the so called “real Romans” and those that were conscripted into the Army and had to learn Latin in order to follow commands. But then we look at the evidence from Old Latin, the Latin of Cato and before and we see something a bit closer to Catholic Laitn then we do to Classical Latin. This is subjective to be true but just as much evidence exist for one as the other on this point.

The last thing that I will say is that I really have found it strange that people would want to go backwards in time with a Language. Certainly historians should want to know about these things but for us to learn the language, we should want to learn how we speak the language in our modern time. I don’t champion the Catholic pronunciation because it is more, in my opinion, historically accurate, but because this is the modern form of the language. If someone wants to learn English from me I am not going to teach then the English of Shakespeare. I am not going to teach then to pronounce English the way Beowulf did. There comes a point when you have to let this stuff go and accept the modern version of the language.

 

[Claudius]

Another thing that I will point out is that a lot of this Classical Latin stuff is being promoted by ANTI-Catholics. Even if the Classical pronunciation was historically accurate, and in my opinion it is not, that is still not the reason that university Latin teachers want to promote it. They are promoting it as a form of attack against the Church. I know what you are saying “you don’t really believe that a bunch of teachers have it out for the Catholic Church?” YES they do. In my opinion, they have created this classical pronunciation which makes the language difficult to pronounce and understand on purpose. It is a pronunciation that has almost know evidence of ever existing before they made it up. They also made up a new writting convention that every already knows NEVER EXISTED at ALL before they made it up. This last point can’t even be disputed because all the documents attest to it. They want to take J and ligets out of the writting system as well as several modern point of punctuation but they don’t want to take out spaces, or miniscule or U or G or Y or Z or any of the other letters that one could say don’t belong. They sure don’t want to but Semac back into the language. (this letter was used in the earliest days of Latin and looked like a flag in the shape of an M on a flagpole.) I don’t see them asking us to pronounce C as a G either which is how we must assume it was originally pronounced.

The point of all of this is that the Classical pronunciation is in dispute and has not been verified as accurate outside the opinions of anti-Catholic scholars. The writting convention is admittidly a new creation that is nothing like the Romans would have written at all. Even if you do think that Classical pronunciation is accurate, why stop there? Why stop with Cicero and Caesar? Why not go back to the Etruscins? Or at least to Cato the censor? There poeople are picking and choosing what they want in their language and they are butchering the pronuciation, writting convention and vocabulary. They even go so far as to find graphity in pompei that is written in a way that clearly suggest the Catholic pronunciation was used there and they dismiss it as, “well, this is not grammatically correct Classical Latin.” Excuse me, since when did a modern day scholar have the right to criticize the writting of a Latin NATIVE SPEAKER.

These scholars created their new writting system and new pronunciation for one simple reason, They wanted to know Latin and to study it but did not want to have anything to do with the Catholic Church. In order to divorce Latin from the Catholic Church and get anti-Catholics to study Latin they had to do this. So every point that the Catholic Church has in her Latin they want to change even if it is historically accurate or not. Then they want to introduc MACRONS and all kinds of other nonsense into the language to make it as hard to learn as possible. Why? because they don’t want people to actually learn Latin. Go take a class in Classical Latin. You won’t actually learn Latin, you will instead have to learn and be tested on all the reasons why the teachers says the Catholic pronunciation of Latin is Wrong. They have made the vocabulary difficult, the idiom difficult and uneven, the writting system makes many words ambiguous in meaning and the pronunciaiton impossible to manage. They have put up every block they can to prevent the actual mastery and fluency of Latin.

Then we hear the stories of the Classical Latin people boycotting the Passion of the Christ movie because it uses the Catholic pronuciation. They don’t want to go and make their own movie, their sole goal is to provent people from having the Catholic Pronunciation avaliable. That is also why they attack this new effort to have Latin Mass avaliable to the people again. The person who did the translating and speach coaching for the Passion even got death treats bacause of the movie’s pronunciation. Someone is being unreasonable in this and it isn’t the Catholic Church.

For my part, I say, if the scholars and University proffessors want to butcher their Latin, I will let them. It doesn’t have anything to do with me. On the same tokin, If I want to use the Catholic pronunciation, I must be given the freedom to do it. This is something that Scholars don’t want to grant. There is no leanancy from them on this point. Their goal is to stamp out the Catholic pronunciation.

I say it is about time that Catholics stood up to these bullies and told them where they can put their made up pronunciation and writting convention. I use the letter J. It is a modern letter and there is no reason why a conversation between me and my wife should be restricted to the way Cicero spoke, if he even indeed spoke that way. I don’t see why some teacher in some school is able to dictate to all the Catholics in the world that we have to change our way of writting and speaking. This is unreasonable. It would be like asking Americans to adopt the Brittish pronunciation and writting convention. It just doesn’t make any sense and doesn’t respect the Language or the people who speak it.

We should all be proud of our Catholic pronunciation and we should resist anyone who tells us to change. We should make a point of using the letter J and accent marks as much as we can. This is OUR language and OUR idiom and OUR vocabulary and we should not allow anyone to take it away from us. If they want to have a conversation with US, then they will need to speak so that we can understand them and that means using the CATHOLIC pronunciation. They can go off by themselves and speak whatever made up language they want but don’t ask me to speak Classical Latin because it makes about as much sense to me as speaking Klingon.

 

[Simon_X]

Carpe diem

 

[holdencaulfield]

Not that I dislike Latin, just seems a little cultish to me.

 

[HashemEchad]

When I was learning Latin, it was in public school, and we learned classical/secular Latin (you know, Walesne hodie, instead of Valesne hodie, and all that.)

Unlike some other posters, I do believe that classical Latin is more authentic, but ecclesiastical Latin just SOUNDS better to me.

Its very much like the difference between the Ashkenazic pronunciation of Hebrew and the Sephardic pronunciation…Ashkenazic is more common in the Western world, but Sephardic to me just SOUNDS better (and in the case of Hebrew, actually is the more ancient pronunciation!)

 

[Ite_ad_Ioseph]

My Latin book I bought at home says ‘v’ is ‘w’, etc. Evidence supposedly shows it was from Viking loanwords. Some scholars say ‘m’ was nasal. Cicero says some country folk do not pronounce ‘s’ at the end of words, not unlike French. Some say ‘z’ was ‘dz’. Others say ‘s’ was like Spanish s or Greek sigma-between ‘s’ and ‘sh’.
I find it interesting that some here think this pronunciation was made up to discouraging people from learning Latin. If anyone has proof of this, please post it-a link or a book reference- that ‘v’ is ‘v’, palatizations of c,g,t ,etc.
Like people finding Catholic Latin in the ruins of Pompeii and blowing it off- that would be interesting.
Back to the point of the thread-would you use ‘classical’-or Church pronunciation? Someone brought up it could become a modern Romance language- also would be interesting.

 

[HashemEchad]

This thread is really bringing back some very fond memories for me, from when I was studying Latin. I appreciate everyone taking part in the discussion, you’re making me feel good.

Here is a link to the Latin curriculum they used to teach us Latin in public school. I see they are marketing it to homeschoolers now!

bolchazy.com/index.php?cat=al&sub=main

I’ll probably use Artes Latinae (the linked-to curriculum) for my daughter next year; I’ve used some Christian Latin for the early grades, just deleting the overly religious aspects (for example, she’d not memorizing the Credo or the Sanctus!)

I used the Christian Latin books to give an introduction, and will probably got for the classical Latin next year, even though I don’t like the classical pronunciation.

 

[Claudius]

My Latin book I bought at home says ‘v’ is ‘w’, etc. Evidence supposedly shows it was from Viking loanwords. Some scholars say ‘m’ was nasal. Cicero says some country folk do not pronounce ‘s’ at the end of words, not unlike French. Some say ‘z’ was ‘dz’. Others say ‘s’ was like Spanish s or Greek sigma-between ‘s’ and ‘sh’.
I find it interesting that some here think this pronunciation was made up to discouraging people from learning Latin. If anyone has proof of this, please post it-a link or a book reference- that ‘v’ is ‘v’, palatizations of c,g,t ,etc.
Like people finding Catholic Latin in the ruins of Pompeii and blowing it off- that would be interesting.
Back to the point of the thread-would you use ‘classical’-or Church pronunciation? Someone brought up it could become a modern Romance language- also would be interesting.

I think that it is important that you point out that different Latin speakers in the Roman tiimes did pronounce their Latin a bit differently. Just as English and Russian are pronounced differently in the different part of where they are spoken.

Latin names and words are transliterated into Syriac, Coptic and Hebrew with B standing in for V. This is interesting because the letter that gave rise to F, V, U, Y and W was a letter from the Phoenician writting system that supposidly made the W sound. It is in the Tetragramaton twice and is called waw or vav depending on the language or dialect you are speaking in. This letter became the Greek Y but came into Latin as F. The sound of these two letters was clearly different by the time the Romans started to “get smart” and learn Greek because they borrowed Y into Latin and it became the letter V. Then, when the sound of Y changed in Greek, Y was re-borrowed into Latin as Y.

Taking all of this into consideration, and the fact that languages that did not use alphabets were uneven in their transliterations gives us some valuable evidence to work with. Languages that had WaW as the sound and not VaV would transliterate the Latin V as a B sound using the second letter. Languages that had VaV but not WaW as the sound would use the V letter. For me, this is strong proof. Also, in Egypt, there was a pronunciation difference between North Egypt and South Egypt and this same separation of tranliteration can be seen, not only for words coming from Laitn but for words coming from Greek as well.

This also gives us evidence of the soft C and G pronunciations. In fact, the evidence that I find suggest that that it was once always pronounced soft and that the hard pronunciation came latter. We also see evidence of consonant sliding, where the last consonant sound of one word jumps to the beginning of the next word if it is begun by a Vowel. However, we never see this if the next word begins with an H, suggesting that H has a much stronger sound then than is currently used in Latin.

For my part though, I still point out that I do not champion the Catholic pronunciation because it is the “Historical” Latin, though I believe it is more historically accurate then the Classical pronunciation, but because it is what I speak and what the Church uses. It is the modern form of the Language. If we respect the language enough to want to learn it and even to join a community of speakers, then we should not be trying to tell the language about itself but to go with the flow. Catholic Latin is a real language that is filled with all the kinds of goodies and anomolies that all real languages have.

 

[Claudius]

As to scholars blowing off the Latin that is written in Pompei, one can check out the page on Wikipedia that talks about Latin profanity. There is a section about some of the stuff in Pompei that is blown off by academics. Then, if you know any Latin and can read the bits of graphity that are left and want to read what the “scholars” think of them, then you are in for a real treat because they will actually write papers talking about what a great find Pompei is but when they show any samples of the graphity at Pompei, they “correct” the Latin.

This is intolerable if you actually respect Latin and the people who have spoken the language through out the years. I certainly don’t want some scholar to go after me when I die and “correcting” all my English to look like Shakespeare or Beowulf.

Certainly historians should look at the Romans and their language and culture and record things about it but at the end of the day, they can’t missinform us about what the actual history is because they want to have something, anything, to prove the Catholic Church wrong. When I speak Latin, I am not trying to be a Roman, I am trying to be a Catholic. If I went to Greece and went to live in the monastary that used Koine Greek but used it with the modern Greek pronunciation I would be laughed at if I showed up and started trying to lecture them that their pronunciaiton was historically wrong. Now, we have much more evidence that Greek has changed in pronunciation when we ever will for Latin, since Latin is a much more conservative language in this regard, but I would still be a fool to do this. They are speaking and using Modern Koine Geeek. A Latin community would be using Modern Catholic Latin.

 

[Claudius]

Not that I dislike Latin, just seems a little cultish to me.

Not cultish, it is just a language. It happens to be one of the most important languages considering that a large part of Christian writting and indeed living has been done in this language and as a Catholic, I want to put myself into that culture. I also support other rites having ways of preserving their languages. There are 8 Catholic Languages and they are: Latin, Greek, Slavonic, Armenian, Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic and Ge’ez. Each one is considered a “dead” language but they live on in the liturgy, liturature, and prayer life of the Church. I do not mean to disparage modern languages but for the Church to loose knowledge of any of these wonderful liturgical langauges would be a terrible misstep.

Latin is not for everyone. I understand that. English is not for everyone either. My ancestors spoke a langauge called Muscogee but later changed to speak French. They now lament the loss of their former langauge, not because they Hate French, for indeed, many of them refuse to learn English and will only speak in French, but because it is part of our culture that we have lost. I only know how to say a few words in the old language and I changed to English from the time I was a boy. I always heard a lot of resentment for the “white anglophones” thrown around. Certainly the Church can do a better job of getting Christianity into the hands of all the people around the world in their languages so that what happened to my tribe does not need to be repeated. Indeed, Liturgy in Latin is the result of doing exactly this so many centuries ago. On the other side, Latin is the langauge that identifies the face of the Church, specifically in the Latin rite. I am a Latin rite Catholic. I love the other rites and have learned some Coptic, Armenian and Syriac and I am hoping to get some Slavonic and Ge’ez, or maybe even Hebrew under my belt but Latin is the Language for me. I fell in love with my wife in this langauge, I asked her to marry me in Latin and I tell her I love her in Latin every single day. Sure, I am trying to learn Japanese, and she is trying to learn English but at the end of the day Latin usually wins. I don’t think there is anything “CULTISH” about that.

 

[Ite_ad_Ioseph]

This also gives us evidence of the soft C and G pronunciations. In fact, the evidence that I find suggest that that it was once always pronounced soft and that the hard pronunciation came latter. We also see evidence of consonant sliding, where the last consonant sound of one word jumps to the beginning of the next word if it is begun by a Vowel. However, we never see this if the next word begins with an H, suggesting that H has a much stronger sound then than is currently used in Latin.

When you say c and g were always pronounced soft- do you mean always as ‘ch’ and ‘j’? Geber, the Islamic mathematician or something, had his name translated as such because Latin had no letter denoting ‘j’. Interesting… I don’t understand how the consonant jumps to the next word, though.
Like ‘vasum aqua’ would be ‘vasu maqua’?

I wonder how palatization happened. I can say ‘ki’ or ‘ke’ or their voiced counterparts in that position fine without changing the sound. I wonder if the Italian pronunciation is the most authentic being in the actual land of the Romans.
If I went to Greece and went to live in the monastary that used Koine Greek but used it with the modern Greek pronunciation I would be laughed at if I showed up and started trying to lecture them that their pronunciaiton was historically wrong. Now, we have much more evidence that Greek has changed in pronunciation when we ever will for Latin, since Latin is a much more conservative language in this regard, but I would still be a fool to do this. They are speaking and using Modern Koine Geeek. A Latin community would be using Modern Catholic Latin.*

I never thought about it this way before. So I assume we would be using North Italian pronunciation like that Pope said then.

 

[Claudius]

When you say c and g were always pronounced soft- do you mean always as ‘ch’ and ‘j’? Geber, the Islamic mathematician or something, had his name translated as such because Latin had no letter denoting ‘j’. Interesting… I don’t understand how the consonant jumps to the next word, though.
Like ‘vasum aqua’ would be ‘vasu maqua’?

I wonder how palatization happened. I can say ‘ki’ or ‘ke’ or their voiced counterparts in that position fine without changing the sound. I wonder if the Italian pronunciation is the most authentic being in the actual land of the Romans.

I never thought about it this way before. So I assume we would be using North Italian pronunciation like that Pope said then.

Originally, the letter C did not have the K sound at all. It had a soft G sound that was kind of nasal and had a bit of a Y sound in it. Over time, the sound of the letter developed and it came to represent several different sounds in the language. This is not uncommon, especially in the early stages of languages when they first are written down. All writting systems are flawed in that they can not truly capture the full effect of the spoken langauge. This is why we see new letters dirived from older ones. Separating them out to distinguish which sound it is actually intended to make helps with comprehention and understanding. It is allowing the written form of the language to catch up a little bit to the spoken form even though it can never go all the way. Spoken languages go through stages of more complexity to less and back again. This just can not be helped and is the nature way that langauges work.

As to the sliding, think about the English sentence “My book is red.” Say this sentence a few times and try to hear how you naturally sound it out. I just bet you say say “Mai bu kis red.” The K of the word Book will jump to be with the I in is. In English and indeed in most langauges this happens all the time, and it happens on a rampant scale in French. My point is that it also happened in Latin and the evidence tells us that ancient Romans were not so sure as to where one word ended and another began when trying to write them down. For them, the whole sentence was just a hig series of sounds that represented a thought. Educated Roman got with the program but normal people who could just bearly read and maybe couldn’t write at all didn’t think of their langauge the way we are taught to think of langauge today. There is evidence of considerable contractions and word blending. Woking backwards through the Romance Langauges to the Latin root reveals such things to us, especially in the way they all form the future tense.

But again, a modern day Latin speaking community need not worry about all these such matters. We would need to get the basics, then get proficient in conversation and reading and writing and then work to full fluency. We should treat Latin as a real language. It would be natural yet we should try to keep it simple. The way the Pope says we should speak is really only a starting ground. The real pronunciation will come about when we have the community of Latin speakers going and seeing how true everyday life works out.

 

[EasterJoy]

As to scholars blowing off the Latin that is written in Pompei, one can check out the page on Wikipedia that talks about Latin profanity. There is a section about some of the stuff in Pompei that is blown off by academics. Then, if you know any Latin and can read the bits of graphity that are left and want to read what the “scholars” think of them, then you are in for a real treat because they will actually write papers talking about what a great find Pompei is but when they show any samples of the graphity at Pompei, they “correct” the Latin.

This is intolerable if you actually respect Latin and the people who have spoken the language through out the years. I certainly don’t want some scholar to go after me when I die and “correcting” all my English to look like Shakespeare or Beowulf.

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.