Schola Latina Europæa and Universalis
53 comments
·January 8, 2025alexey-salmin
AntoniusBlock
I started with LLPSI along with Oerberg's companion books (Colloquia Personarum, Fabellae Latinae, Fabulae Syrae). After that I read Hyginus' Fabulae and then Commentarii de Bello Gallico by Caesar. Since then I've read more Caesar, Nepos, Apuleius, Seneca, some Livy, some Catullus, some Cicero, and I'm currently reading Ovid. I did this by reading Latin for at least 1 hour every day since the first COVID lockdown in 2020, even if I was sick or not feeling it I made sure to get my Latin reading in. I did do a lot of grammar drills in the beginning, and I made an Anki deck for vocab. Grammar drills definitely help big time, along with jumping in head first with a book like LLPSI and reading from the get go is the way to go IMO.
fdgjgbdfhgb
Did you ever read Roma Aeterna? Or did you go straight into literature?
AntoniusBlock
I just looked at my backlog book and apparently I did read the first half of LLPSI 2. I don't recall much from it though. I think after a certain point in the book, I found it too difficult straight after LLPSI 1, which is why.
AntoniusBlock
I went straight into Hyginus and Caesar. Hyginus is not difficult at all. After LLPSI, you should be able to read this: https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/hyginus/hyginus5.shtml
Caesar is not too difficult either. The biggest problem I had with Caesar was that he used indirect speech a lot and LLPSI doesn't really prepare you too well for that, but you get used to it.
gone35
Very good yes. Such is my experience, not only with Latin. Received language instruction may have it exactly backwards.
niemandhier
It’s a pity we stopped using Latin in favour of scientific pidgin English as universal language in scientific communications.
Gauss still wrote in Latin 1801, his Disquisitiones Arithmeticae are a marvel.
Up until a few years back my university would still have accepted PHD thesis in Latin, they ditched it after no one had done it for almost a century.
pbmonster
> It’s a pity we stopped using Latin in favour of scientific pidgin English as universal language in scientific communications
As an ESL speaker and scientific writer: why?
For people fluent in several languages, which of those languages is chosen to communicate makes little difference. I'd argue all (sufficiently mature) languages work equally well for transmitting information to other people fluent in that language.
So choosing the language most people you want to communicate with are fluent in makes sense.
If you favor Latin simply for aesthetic reasons, I recommend choosing a more widespread modern language, that has non-pidgin characteristics. French or German (the latter might require a puritan style guide to go with it) would work well.
marginalia_nu
The argument for sticking with Latin is that it's a relatively unchanging language, and the virtue of that is that it gives you first hand access to historical knowledge in a way most are locked away from today.
If we conduct science in Latin, it gives all scientists first hand access to sources from classical works, a thousand years of papal edicts, the works of Duns Scotus, Isaac Newton and Erasmus; and extended to the future, future scientists will have the same access but access to what we produce today, without having to learn 21st century English or having to rely on 23rd century translations.
woodruffw
> The argument for sticking with Latin is that it's a relatively unchanging language
This is as much of an argument against Latin, given that there's no way to say "transistor" or "x-ray" without falling back on pidgin. Translation is part of the scientific process, insofar as science itself isn't static and can't be expressed throughout the ages with a single vocabulary.
(Besides, why stop there? How can we expect today's scientists to truly grasp Plotinus's the One without mastering Koine Greek?)
niemandhier
When using a language none of us speaks we can truly be equals.
Discussing with e.g people who are the product of English boarding schools, they always have the home field advantage.
leoc
Latin does give a significant advantage to Romance-language speakers, and anyway trying to make everyone equally bad at the common language is a bit procrustean. The big disadvantage to the decline of Latin (which is probably mostly something that took place in the eighteenth century) is that it fragmented western Europe's academic writing. So without Latin you can't read Thomas Aquinas or Thomas Hobbes' De cive or John Napier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjIwCOevUew in the original; or often at all, as a great deal has never been translated while some translations aren't of the best quality. And even with Latin and English you can't read the enormous amount of important material which has been published in (particularly) French and German, especially up to about WWII.
dlisboa
> When using a language none of us speaks we can truly be equals.
It's the opposite: having a preferred "high language" for science means it's gatekept by people who have the means to learn it. Those people will have the home field advantage, much like it was for much of history.
Plus it's just a bad idea. Firstly, it'll take more time for young students to learn to read a scientific paper. Second, you significanly diminish the pool of thinkers and therefore scientists, you're basically making 99% of the population illiterate. Finally there will always be more people willing to communicate in the "vulgar" language and it's where all new vocabulary will be created, which is why every single high language has pretty much died off except in cerimonial contexts.
English is just the language du jour, before that it was French, German in some fields, Arabic, Latin, Greek, etc.
woodruffw
Being equally bad at speaking Latin seems like a strictly worse outcome than having a mix of L1 and L2 speakers.
(I studied Latin for about a decade.)
jhbadger
The mathematician Giuseppe Peano even suggested a simplified Latin without declensions as a scientific/mathematical language in 1903. He even wrote several of his works in it, although not many others adopted it.
ryao
Ego adhuc latine scribam, si roges.
kensai
Which uni was that?
AndrewDucker
The history of how we know what Latin sounded like is fascinating.
Reminds me this video on what Shakespeare's original pronunciation sounded like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
defrost
The bardcore crowd have endless fun with various theories of pronunciation, eg:
Boulevard of Broken Dreams in Classical Latin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mip30YF1iuo
tgv
We don't know. What's mentioned is informative, but certainly not decisive. Language is way too noisy for simple conclusions. E.g., spelling errors aren't exclusively based on phonetic similarity, and even if they were, their absence proves little.
ryao
Latin followed the alphabetic principle with few exceptions (U and J were later invented to fix the main exceptions). We know almost exactly how it was pronunced because of that and remarks contemporaries recorded on how speech sounded. For example, R was called the littera canina because of the trill. It is especially noticeable when you have two of them together like in terra.
The main thing we do not know is how regnum was pronounced. We know it was either of two options for interpreting gn and a third choice is that both were acceptable. People are also unsure how 4 of the short vowels sounded. Some say that they have slightly different sounds while others say that they are just short versions of the long vowels like the other two (A and Y). It is possible both variations co-existed.
We also know that western Romans often mispronounced Y as I since they had trouble rounding their lips for Y. Y had been introduced for transliteration of Greek loanwords, so it was not a native sound for the western Romans.
usrnm
There is more to a language than knowing how to pronounce each individual letter. You can easily see it if you take any modern language, write a text in it down in IPA and ask a linguist unfamiliar with the language itself read it. It will still sound very alien to a native speaker. And this is with a live language we have full knowledge of.
MLR
Do you know if there have been any of these kinds of recreations done on contemporary languages/dialects/accents, or I guess even created ones, to test the accuracy of these methods?
It sounds like something that should obviously have been done, but my naive googling isn't getting me anywhere so far.
dghf
Schola Latina Europæa et Universalis, surely? (Actual page title includes an ampersand, which I'm guessing HN doesn't like.)
ryao
Illa est quam putavi.
psychoslave
Since the text mention difference between educated, less educated and uneducated people (though not illiterate, in that time?!), it would be fair to mention that maybe not everyone in the Latinophonie would pronounce words the same way.
Nice to see a old-fashioned webpage by the way.
leoc
Warning: I'm not an expert on this or on anything.
W. Sidney Allen's old Vox Latina https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/vox-latina/0D460CEF06E5... is apparently still the standard starting reference for classical Latin pronunciation, at least for English-speakers. (Many nineteenth-century German philologists died to bring us this information, of course.) People such as Luke Ranieri on YouTube use a version of Allen's system, though a number of people including Ranieri claim that there should be five vowel qualities rather than the seven described by Allen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH8E5RKq31I .
Note that if you want to speak Latin that's roughly faithful to how it was spoken up to (but not necessarily including) late antiquity, pronunciation is actually less important than quantity: basically, using clearly distinguishable short and long vowels in the right places (plus not running together double consonants in some places). I suppose it's similarly important to get the stress right, but at least that's generally agreed to be pretty easy. Classical Latin quantity feels weird and unnatural to English-speakers, and to Romance-language speakers, German-speakers ... : words often include one or two or three unstressed long vowels before getting to the stressed syllable, which might or might not itself have a long vowel. Even people who advocate for (classically-)correct quantity often don't consistently get it right.
(And yes, Allen also did publish a Vox Graeca https://www.cambridge.org/ie/universitypress/subjects/classi... , too, but be careful: the pronunciation of Ancient Greek is a question that might actually get you into a fistfight https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BybLbHPU7Qc&list=PLQQL5IeNgc... .)
euroderf
OT but... modern Icelandic is close enough to Old Norse that a reasoned mashup of Icelandic and Latin (sans inflections?) might start to resemble contemporary English. It would be a fun exercise anyways.
adlpz
This is lovely. And it's great to have it both in English and Spanish because it makes it much easier to guess the sounds from the explanations as you can compare.
New life goal unlocked: live in a farm away from any computers and learn latin.
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emblaegh
Funny how the use of the acute accent instead of the macron for long vowels completely changes the “feel” of the written language to me. Makes it look less classy.
ale42
Being used to the more traditional "ā"/... for long vowels, I found it very weird when opening the page, I was first wondering if it was actual Latin or an artificial language based on it.
Vox_Leone
Please don't take it as pedantic, but iirc the acute accent is modern and not a standard feature of classical Latin. While "Európæa" might be used in some modern contexts or to reflect contemporary pronunciation, it wouldn't be common in strict classical Latin texts.
yorwba
To appear pendantic, you would need at least a link to an external source, like Wikipedia or something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_(diacritic)
Bairfhionn
I had Latin in school for seven years but we never learned to use it in a conversation. It was mostly vocabulary, grammar and translation of texts into my native language and interpreting/discussing them.
It did help to have an easier access to learn other languages. But in hindsight I would have loved to be able to talk in Latin.
ryao
Adhuc tu discere potes. :)
Insanity
I enjoy learning about languages and their histories, and this was a fun read. One thing I would say though is that stating a certain pronunciation is "correct" never sits well with me. Language is incredibly fluid, and typically when a certain pronunciation is deemed 'correct' it's related to people in power and how they pronounce(d) it.
There are of course regional variation where claiming one is more 'correct' than the other doesn't hold up well (north USA vs south USA), but even further I'm sure most would take offense at the idea that everyone in the US mispronounces words where they differ from British pronunciation. (I know, both languages evolved independently since the countries split, but you get my point).
stonesthrowaway
> One thing I would say though is that stating a certain pronunciation is "correct" never sits well with me.
Who cares how it sits with you? There is a "correct" way in every aspect of language - accent, spelling, etc.
> Language is incredibly fluid, and typically when a certain pronunciation is deemed 'correct' it's related to people in power and how they pronounce(d) it.
Probably. But somebody has to set the standard.
> There are of course regional variation where claiming one is more 'correct' than the other doesn't hold up well (north USA vs south USA),
Bad example. There is most definitely a "correct" american pronunciation. It's why much of news/media has a neutral american accent. Most americans, from whatever region, can speak it to some degree or another.
> but even further I'm sure most would take offense at the idea that everyone in the US mispronounces words where they differ from British pronunciation.
Who would take offense? Not me. Not anybody I know. Especially since american english is the dominant form of english and probably will be the standard around the world.
> but you get my point).
You have no point. Just misinformed silly gripes. All languages standardize in some form or another whether it be accents, pronunciation, spelling, script, etc.
int_19h
Language standardization is by and large a product of nation-states combined with widespread education. Applying it to a language such as Latin is anachronistic.
Timwi
The article only uses the word “correct” twice: once in the context of aspiration (_per_ should not be pronounced as _pher_) and once when talking about the Latin _r_, which is markedly different from English _r_.
In the rest of the article, they seem to prefer saying that certain pronunciations “should be avoided” or that the speaker should pay attention to a specific distinction (such as vowel lengths or syllable boundaries).
It doesn't strike me as elitist or gatekeeping. It's making an honest effort to communicate the information you need to sound as authentically Latin as possible and to avoid speaking with an English accent.
The only way I made progress in latin was when I bought a few books and started reading, beginning from (modern) children fairy tales. This actually gave me a lasting knowledge which up to this date allows me to read a simple latin text or guess a meaning of a word in English or French (neither language is native to me).
Speaking latin of course takes it way further but I think the direction is the same: learn it as a living language not as as a dead one. Starting from declensions and cases gets you nowhere, judging from my friends who learned it in school for years with zero results. Instead, start using the language, if only for reading. Then you can return to grammar later if you ever want to become proficient.
I also recommend this guy [1] who not only shares the same approach but apparently have fully dedicated himself to it. He has books, ebooks, audiobooks, a mobile app and a youtube podcast, all in latin. I can't cease to be impressed by the effort and the quality of the content. In comparison the Duolingo latin course is a complete disappointment.
[1] https://latinitium.com/legentibus/