latin, polyglots and conlangs

[aokoye]

I know of two high schools in my state that actually teach Latin; one was a Latin club, where the students could actually speak it, and the other was a formal course. I'm not sure about the details of either approach.

Until about ten years ago, the local university had a Classics department; at this time I think it disappeared. I don't know of any university in my state that teaches Latin, though some Christian and Catholic colleges might teach NT Greek and Latin.

That Latin club sounds awesome! None of the high schools in the public school district in my city teach Latin - I'm not sure about the entire state though. My university does teach Latin and Ancient Greek and I am assuming the christian colleges do as well (I'm not sure about Greek but I would assume Latin and I know at least one teaches Biblical Hebrew as I have a friend whose father teaches it).

[IronMike]

Interestingly, there is a community of Latin learners/speakers in the U.S. (maybe elsewhere) that no one has brought up yet (unless I missed it perusing this thread....Ani?): that is Homeschoolers who use the "classical curriculum." There are routinely published articles in homeschooling journals about Latin curricula, testing, textbook reviews, etc. Many homeschooling co-ops will bring in someone fluent in the language to teach the kids Latin (and Greek). Decades ago we lived in Denver and there was an orthodox church in town that taught New Testament Greek and I know several homeschoolers would take that class.

We used the classical catholic curriculum, strong on the "classical liberal arts" of grammar, rhetoric, math, arts, music, early in our homeschooling, but we've transmogrified it over the years to concentrate heavily on math, science, writing, literature, languages. I broached the subject of Latin and Greek for our kids when we started, but my wife brushed that aside, in favor of more "useful" languages like German, Spanish and Russian. (I'm only getting to teach my 16-year old Esperanto because I promised to take care of that subject entirely and our daughter promised her mom that she'd keep up with all her other subjects, to include Russian.)

[Gweilo]

You usually don't study Latin in order to become fluent in it, but to read classical Roman literature. I had five years of Latin at school, we didn't even once string together a Latin sentence on our own. Instead, we read Caesar, Ovid, and Pliny the Younger in the original, which meant sentence-by-sentence or even word-by-word translation of the texts.

Most polyglots are mostly interested in the speaking aspect of languages, so dead languages aren't very attractive to them. There's simply no one to talk to, which isn't the case with conlangs.

Interestingly, there is a community of Latin learners/speakers in the U.S. (maybe elsewhere) that no one has brought up yet (unless I missed it perusing this thread....Ani?): that is Homeschoolers who use the "classical curriculum." There are routinely published articles in homeschooling journals about Latin curricula, testing, textbook reviews, etc. Many homeschooling co-ops will bring in someone fluent in the language to teach the kids Latin (and Greek). Decades ago we lived in Denver and there was an orthodox church in town that taught New Testament Greek and I know several homeschoolers would take that class.

We used the classical catholic curriculum, strong on the "classical liberal arts" of grammar, rhetoric, math, arts, music, early in our homeschooling, but we've transmogrified it over the years to concentrate heavily on math, science, writing, literature, languages. I broached the subject of Latin and Greek for our kids when we started, but my wife brushed that aside, in favor of more "useful" languages like German, Spanish and Russian. (I'm only getting to teach my 16-year old Esperanto because I promised to take care of that subject entirely and our daughter promised her mom that she'd keep up with all her other subjects, to include Russian.)

Even though most Latinists just read the language, there are Circuli Latini in many major cities whose members meet for Latin conversation and, particularly in the USA, there is a movement to include a spoken element in High School Latin. Try, for example, the videos at https://www.facebook.com/ACLClassics/vi ... 842026946/ There is also a chatroom (Locutorium Latinum - see the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T9V04fDh6o) where people normally text in a similar way to What's App but some users hook up for oral conversation.

[DaveAgain]

We used the classical catholic curriculum, strong on the "classical liberal arts" of grammar, rhetoric, math, arts, music, early in our homeschooling, but we've transmogrified it over the years to concentrate heavily on math, science, writing, literature, languages. I broached the subject of Latin and Greek for our kids when we started, but my wife brushed that aside, in favor of more "useful" languages like German, Spanish and Russian. (I'm only getting to teach my 16-year old Esperanto because I promised to take care of that subject entirely and our daughter promised her mom that she'd keep up with all her other subjects, to include Russian.)

I'm reading a biography of André Citroën (ISBN: 9782080664846) at the moment.

One thing I've learnt is that during his school days there were student strikes and demonstrations to drop the classical curriculum, and adopt a forward looking one with more sciences and living languages.

[Mr Citroen had a dutch father, and a polish mother. I'm expecting to see a impressive list of languages spoken at some point!]

[Iversen]

I sometimes write in Latin in my log thread, but only if there is a suitable reason (as happened a few days ago when I commented on music written by a jesuit genius in 1600-something). I definitely write more often in Esperanto, and there are several reasons for this: I have participated in several Esperanto conferences, but so far not in Latinist meetings. I know that there are active 'Neo-latinists' out there, but they are a minority among all the read-only Latinists. On the other hand, the Esperantists learn their language to communicate (albeit mostly about Esperanto and World Peace) so it feels less like swimming against the stream when you formulate something in Esperanto. And I have even spoken Esperanto within the last year, but hardly ever Latin. So for me Esperanto is both a spoken and a written language, whereas Latin so far mostly is a written language which I might revive if I ever decided to participate in one the events that have been mentioned earlier in this thread - and this hasn't happened yet.

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.

A second reason for not writing more often in Latin is that I expect some readers of my log to use Google Translate to translate the more exotic passages, and the simple fact is that its Esperanto translations aren't too bad, while those from Latin into anything are so thoroughly rotten that they simply can't be used for any meaningful purpose (except to force Latinists to either laugh hysterically or cry their guts out).

[Querneus]

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).

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.

[DaveAgain]

We used the classical catholic curriculum, strong on the "classical liberal arts" of grammar, rhetoric, math, arts, music, early in our homeschooling, but we've transmogrified it over the years to concentrate heavily on math, science, writing, literature, languages.

I've been looking into rhetoric a little, and rhetorical exercises do look like they'd help with language learning too:

Varying a sentence
Eramus demonstrates how to add, subtract, invert, and substitute both grammatical and rhetorical elements of a model sentence (giving 150 ways to say "Your letter pleased me greatly" as an example).

Double Translation
A favorite exercise of Juan Luis Vives, this included translating a passage from Latin to English, letting it rest a day, and then (without help of the original) attempting to retranslate the English back into Latin.

Metaphrasis
This included "translating" within a given language from one genre to another, such as a prose letter into a poem.

Paraphrasis
This exercise did not mean to shorten a model text but to express its meaning using other words.

Epitome
To abbreviate a model text or passage, boiling its content down to a pithy summary.

http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Pedagogy/Rhetor ... rcises.htm

http://rhetoric.byu.edu/

[Beli Tsar]

I've got the impression that the community of Latin-speakers is actually reasonably large. You can even study Latin by immersion in various places, for instance https://vivariumnovum.net and https://www.polisjerusalem.org/latin-language-course, as well as numerous opportunities for spoken Latin online, and lots of shorter meetups. As someone learning ancient Greek I envy the range of opportunities for Latinists.

But it's true that Latin-speakers and polyglots don't seem to meet much. I also haunt various Ancient Greek/Classics forums, and it's amazing how little things cross over between here and there.

Is it because people who learn Latin are likely to also add Greek, rather than lots of modern languages? And learning to speak two complex dead languages is hard. If Modern Greek is a higher category language for FSI, then Ancient is harder. There's so little easy literature to get you started, and very little easy radio (though there is a little now)! Once you've learned those, and maybe dabbled in Syriac, you might learn some reading French and German for academic purposes, but becoming a real polyglot is an awful lot of learning.

It's surprising how different learning philosophies tend to be too. I get the impression that in both Greek and Latin forums, people are acutely aware of being behind the times, and have largely adopted CI/communicative approaches. The approaches here seem a lot more varied.

[AntonyLWT]

Try the Paideia Institute for Speaking Latin. It is great. Vale.

[Elexi]

I have found that Traupman's Conversational Latin for Oral Proficiency is the best starter to begin putting together the roots of some conversational Latin together.

Fortunately, Luke Ranieri has recorded the dialogues on Youtube in RCP:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYgC_33 ... 9mUGQ9OVn4