To the OP: I am one of those aspiring polyglots that study Latin, and I've had a few
viva voce conversations in it before (over Skype), plus many more by chat. Others have said the main issue with learning to speak Latin in this thread: most students only want to learn to read it, so those interested in speaking it and writing it are a small minority of the whole.
I don't think being able to speak Latin is as esoterical, special or magical/wizard-like as you think it is though. Once you get a basic hang of it, it'll seem rather like any other language. In the end the experience is not too different from learning to speak, say, Czech or Ukrainian, except the speaking community is a lot smaller than that of Czech or Ukrainian (and there's way more written media than spoken media).
Iversen wrote:Fortunately I own the New College English <--> Latin dictionary (bought in Manila, of all places), and it often saves me in situations where I simply don't how to express something. And we are not only speaking modern contraptions and science here - even ordinary notions are often expressed in totally unpredictable ways in Latin, and since most dictionaries from something into Latin apparently have been concocted by reversing the direction in a Latin-to-something dictionary they are pretty useless for those who want to write their own stuff in Latin. Their only target group is pupils in Latin classes who do the obligatory translations in their textbooks, not people like me who want to discuss dark energy and excavations in Plovdiv and similar subjects.
What you say is true, but fortunately there are exceptions, notably Smith and Hall's Copious & Critical English-Latin Dictionary (
mirror 1,
mirror 2,
mirror 3). Admittedly, it hails from the 19th century, so sometimes you have to think of an old-fashioned synonym to find how to say something (e.g. "to pass" in the sense of "three years passed" is not included under "to pass", you have to look up the entry "to elapse"; the entry "should" doesn't include the most common modern meaning (Spanish
debería, Mandarin 應該 ying1gai1), you actually have to look up "ought" for that). It is well complemented by the
Morgan-Owens Lexicon of Neo-Latin and Contemporary Latin.