Societas Via Romana - Discussion Archives

Salvete;

To continue the thread of the former topic started by Camillus.

Actually, I think living Latin, if it is ever to live outside of academic circles, will inevitably evolve. However, I have a few remarks regarding this:

1. I think it's unlikely that we will ever speak Latin with one another. An ex-member of ours, L. Silvanius Florus, told he wanted to have a Latin-speaking household. It's an interesting experiment but I wonder if it worked / is going to work. It's actually very difficult to try and speak Latin if there's no one to speak it with on a regular basis. In high school, by the way, Latin was taught passively, meaning Latin --> Dutch and not Dutch --> Latin because we didn't need it.

2. If we speak Latin I think we should really depart from correct, academic Latin. By this I mean no muddling and mixing of cases, verb conjugations or pronunciation mistakes. Of course the lower classes of the Roman population spoke (and wrote?) Latin which many academics would consider wrong but was probably closer to everyday speech and interaction. However, one should take in account that there are always differences between language standards and the actual speech of the ordinary man (this also holds true for modern languages... if I tried to write Scots English it would probably be considered wrong). Secondly, we don't actually know what "ordinary Latin" really was like. We have most information about academic, literary Latin so we should really go with that.

That's my opinion in a nutshell .

Valete!
Draco

I think one of the most useful, although again passive, tools for learning Latin on the Internet is the weekly radio broadcast of news in Latin by Radio Finland. Here is the address followed by a short description from the website itself:

http://www.yle.fi/fbc/latini/summary.html

Nuntii Latini - News in Latin - is a weekly review of world news in Classical Latin, the only international broadcast of its kind in the world, produced by YLE, the Finnish Broadcasting Company.

Nuntii Latini is heard around the world on short or medium wave and via satellite on Radio Finland, the external service of the company. Nuntii Latini is now also available on the Internet, on RealAudio, at http://www.yle.fi/fbc/latini/recitatio.html . In Finland it is broadcast on the national FM network YLE R1.

Launched in September 1989 by producer Hannu Taanila at the Finnish Broadcasting Company, Nuntii Latini is edited by Professor Emeritus Tuomo Pekkanen and Docent Reijo Pitkäranta of Helsinki University. For thirteen years they have taken it in turns to put together the five-minute weekly bulletin, which consists of the main international news headlines of the week and includes Finnish news of international interest, and arts, science and sports topics as appropriate.

Salvete;

A link I picked up from a familiar newsgroup which was very interesting (the link, that is ). Compare it to my own "pronunciation sheet" .


http://www.orbilat.com/Latin/Grammar/La ... ccent.html


Valete!
Draco