The Vatican's Latinist (2017)
71 comments
·March 24, 2025schoen
spudlyo
He's quite a character! I found a great video[0] of him speaking for over an hour to a classroom filled with former students.
ks2048
Some of the suggested videos from that link him speaking just in Latin, which is pretty interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBIZEkTKuq4 [LatinTalk: 045 Duo suadeo, duo propono]
schoen
Wow, it looks like there are also interviews recorded with him in his nursing home after his retirement!
https://www.youtube.com/@latintalk9556/videos
He had a lot more energy earlier in his life (of course), but you can still see a lot of his ideas and passion.
In the classroom in earlier decades he was sometimes a lot louder than this. :-)
unit149
"You don't study Liszt, you don't study Wagner, and come out hating music." [17:21]
Foster's work is based in the classical and English schooling tradition. When a boy was sent to school he would typically be introduced to the paradigms of Latin. Only having mastered it would Greek forms be introduced.
dang
Related:
Father Reginald Foster has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25539292 - Dec 2020 (51 comments)
The Vatican's Latinist - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14769758 - July 2017 (61 comments)
The Vatican’s Latinist - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13789097 - March 2017 (23 comments)
dhosek
I’ve been rebuilding the meagre Latin I picked up in college in the 80s and I’ve found late Latin to be a bit helpful for building confidence—Beeson’s Primer of Medieval Latin and the Vulgate Bible have been my primary texts of late. With the Vulgate, I’ve been painstakingly translating by hand every verse (I’m not as diligent as I should be so I’m only up to Genesis 17 despite a few years of doing this in fits and starts). With Beeson, I reached the point where by the time I got to the poetry section, I was relying much less on wiktionary (which is handy because you can find most words by their inflected forms rather than having to know the correct dictionary form). I doubt I’ll ever be fully fluent, but I’ve got a pretty solid reading knowledge these days.
coolsunglasses
Foster was basically the rallying point for people opposed to the grammarian methods of teaching languages that started in Classics but ended up taking over how foreign language is taught in most schools and contexts. Virtually everyone actually fluent in Latin today (reading, listening, or speaking) either learned directly from his a tutor using Ossa Latinitatis Sola or was downstream of that.
Striking contrast with the most well known classicist in the UK being unable, by their own admission, to comfortably read Latin text basically at all.
Abandoning the old ways has cost us a lot in almost every area of human endeavour. Especially in pedagogy.
mmooss
> Striking contrast with the most well known classicist in the UK being unable, by their own admission, to comfortably read Latin text basically at all.
That's hard to believe. A friend was a Latin teacher; high school students read actual Roman Latin in their second year.
I've heard that few can speak Latin 'correctly', because the skill is almost useless - you can't talk to Romans or almost anyone else; it's all written. (I don't know about the Catholic or other churches, but I do recall that 'church Latin' differs from classical Latin.)
akshayshah
Second-year high school students do read actual Roman texts, but they typically do so very slowly and laboriously - a day’s homework might be translating a single paragraph.
I studied Latin from 7th grade through my early undergraduate years (1990s to early 00s), and that dynamic didn’t change as much as you might expect - the focus remains on deeply reading a few texts, rather than building the fluency required to quickly read and understand new texts on unfamiliar subjects. The corpus of texts for standardized exams is also relatively small and well-known - I didn’t see a single unfamiliar passage on either AP Latin exam.
Perhaps some classics professors read Latin as fluently as the average Spanish literature professor reads a Madrid newspaper, but I certainly never met any outside Reginaldus’s orbit.
Symbiote
The Latin teacher at my school and my French teacher would discuss private matters in Latin, confident that us 13 year olds wouldn't understand.
I've no proof, but my assumption is there are students of Latin casually speaking the language to show off at places like Cambridge University.
mmooss
How could you not gain that fluency after years? Every human naturally learns languages; you don't need a Ph.D. at all.
philsnow
> I've heard that few can speak Latin 'correctly', because the skill is almost useless - you can't talk to Romans or almost anyone else; it's all written.
Because Latin has died out as a spoken language, it doesn't really change over time like modern languages do. If you find a sentence written 2000 years ago and another elsewhere written 1500 years ago, it's likely they mean the exact same thing.
"Latin is a dead language" is actually a positive statement about the continued use of Latin, especially in the church; so much of the writing of the early church and the church fathers was in Latin, and we can know that we're interpreting it faithfully (or at least as faithfully as we have done for centuries) because the language is static.
adrian_b
While Latin has indeed evolved very little after it stopped being a native language, its vocabulary had continuously expanded until 2 centuries ago.
Until around the beginning of the 19th century, Latin had remained the most important language for the publication of scientific works and for international correspondence between well-educated people, and during this time many words have been added for naming things unknown to the Romans.
Also the preference for various grammatical variants or for certain word orders has been strongly influenced by some features common to the evolution of European languages, so a Latin text written during the Middle Ages feels quite different from a text written during the Roman Empire.
mmooss
To add a bit of detail: At least in English etymologies, there are significant differences between classical Latin and post-classical Latin.
But post-classical Latin unhelpfully covers Rome from ~200 CE into the 20th century, including the Catholic Church and all those scholars and scientists. I'm not sure what differences arose before or after the fall of Rome in 476 CE, which began the Middle Ages.
throw0101c
> Because Latin has died out as a spoken language
It evolved into Italian, Spanish, etc:
Roscius
> I've heard that few can speak Latin 'correctly', because the skill is almost useless
Not useless at all - speaking Latin helps you to better appreciate both prose and poetry. Understanding the sound of the language helps you to appreciate the word play and nuance. Also as children we learn language mostly by listening and speaking, not by reading, so it makes sense to learn Latin in that way.
There's been significant research on reconstructing classical pronunciation. But Latin was spoken as a primary language for over a thousand years, so the pronunciation naturally changed over that time and there were of course regional dialects - some of which evolved into Romance languages.
In reading Latin, it doesn't have a lot of silent letters (it does have some), so it's quite easy to read aloud a Latin sentence once you understand the basic phonetics. In classical times poems like the Aeneid were recited aloud, so doing so today makes sense.
Fluency is a somewhat subjective concept, but the growth of the internet has spawned a growing community of Latin speakers internationally. (I speak Latin at roughly a B2 level and am constantly improving).
wisty
I think it's a bit out of context. I think they are referring to Mary Beard, who is a classicist / historian who said her Latin wasn't that good, but may have been exaggerating because she was IIRC arguing against gatekeeping in history (like saying physicists don't need advanced math, because Einstein wasn't the best at math compared to a few other top theoretical physicists).
graemep
and her standard of "good" is probably quite high.
coolsunglasses
>That's hard to believe.
I understand why you'd feel that way but classics departments aren't what they used to be. It's pretty common for even elite universities these days to not require grad students to understand the languages of the cultures they purportedly study across the board, let alone for Latin.
https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignor...
cafard
I guess that one would have to know what "comfortably" means and what sort of texts. At the speed of English? Caesar or Tacitus?
The essayist Sydney Smith, himself an Anglican clergyman, said something teasing about "false quantities" in Roman Catholic services. I can tell you that the pronunciation varies in church Latin: c and g can be "softened" when followed by e or i; v is v, not w.
You don't hear a great deal of Latin in Catholic services these days: in the Tridentine rite the congregation doesn't get much to say. The Novus Ordo Latin Mass is awfully rare.
lolinder
They're referring to this story from a few years back:
Latin as She is Spoke: How Classicists Tricked Themselves Jan 2022 (171 points, 191 comments)
aprilthird2021
I was a high school student studying Latin. Like almost all high school language students, we could not read fluently. It took a long time and potentially many trips to the dictionary
camcil
It is fascinating that a language that still has study devoted around it has died right in front of our eyes.
gattilorenz
But among the dead languages it’s one if the liveliest
globnomulous
> Striking contrast with the most well known classicist in the UK being unable, by their own admission, to comfortably read Latin text basically at all.
Sorry, what? Who is this? Even the PhD students I knew in classics, the ones who were specializing in history or literature, were comfortable reading texts written during their time periods of interest.
svat
https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignor... — per this blog post (which takes https://www.the-tls.co.uk/regular-features/mary-beard-a-dons... as the starting point), most classicists “can't sight-read a complex Latin text all that well” [unlike medievalists and Renaissance scholars].
dhosek
Granted I’m 35 years out of undergrad, but my classics professors could most definitely sight-read complex Latin just fine.
null
spudlyo
If you find this article fascinating, and are intrigued by the possibility of learning to speak a dead language like Latin, I'm here to tell you that it's probably a lot easier than you think.
To start off, there is a textbook that I think really resonates with hackers. It's called "Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata" (The Latin Language Illustrated through itself) and it teaches Latin in a fun and mind-altering way. The entire book is in Latin, but it starts of with very simple sentences that anyone who speaks English or a Romance language can intuit with a bit of effort. There are very clever marginal illustrations that help drive the meaning home. It builds an understanding in Latin brick by brick, and eventually you find yourself understanding complex sentences and ideas. Furthermore the book is just fun and often funny, it tells a story of a Roman family and strikes an excellent balance between teaching and entertaining. Contrast this approach with dense Latin texts that have a heavy focus on grammar and translation.
So that's one way to learn the language, but what about speaking it? Well, that's where the Legentibus app comes in. It's a Latin language podcast application which has wealth of well recorded stories in classical Latin at a bunch of different difficulty levels. It also has has the Latin language text of the stories that are highlighted as the audio is read, with optional interlinear English translations. I find these really help at first to help me understand the content. I turn them off later once I get the gist of what is being said, or just listen without reading. You can also do dictionary lookups of individual words without turning on the translation.
Here are the reasons why I think this is one of the most enjoyable and useful things I do as a newbie Latin language learner:
1) The stories themselves are engaging. Some of my favorites are from "Gesta Romanorum" (Deeds of the Romans) which is a 13th or 14th century collection of stories often with a moral allegorical themes. These were rewritten in a beginner friendly style, but use classical Latin idioms, some of which are explicitly pointed out in the text as clickable footnotes.
2) Daniel (the co-founder of the app and Latin scholar) does an excellent job as a reader. I listen to a lot of audio books, and I especially like it when the reader consistently does memorable character voices. Be it an extortionist dog slyly claiming "Omnēs canēs amant" (everyone loves dogs) or Pluto, King of the Underworld, commanding "Eurydicē accēde hūc!" in a booming voice, Daniel nails it.
3) You can listen to these while folding laundry, cooking dinner, or doing whatever. I manage to squeeze in 40 minutes a day or so of these stories, and I'm always happy to do it.
4) Often times when I learn a new bit of grammar or learn the precise meaning of a word, my mind often will replay in my head a phrase (in Daniel's voice) from one of the stories that uses that word or grammatical concept. This happens more than you might expect.
Finally, there is a pretty vibrant online community of Latin language learners out there, from the /r/Latin subreddit, to the LLPSI (Lingua Latina per se Illustrata) Discord (https://discord.gg/uXSwq9r4) to the Latin & Ancient Greek) Discord (https://discord.gg/latin) and others.
It's never been easier to pick up Latin.
bombcar
A surprisingly large amount of works are available in Latin - including modern ones you might not expect: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0865164207 or https://www.amazon.com/Hobbitus-Ille-Hobbit-Tolkien-Septembe...
vintermann
Don't know about hackers, but that method of teaching, "the direct method", is how I learned English back in the day. Our English teacher was an Esperantist, which was probably how he came in contact with this idea, "la rekta metodo" has strong connections with the Esperanto movement.
I've read the criticisms of it, and it could well be it works worse for others, but for me it worked very well - and I utterly failed to learn German to anything like the same level, despite ~8 years of classes in it. My German teachers were hardly consistent in their methods (some were very classicist-latin-grammarian types), but none of them used the direct method.
aag
Thank you very much for recommending the Legentibus app. I've just installed it, and I'm already enjoying it. It looks nice, has just the right amount of introductory material, and runs smoothly, which already puts it head and shoulders above most apps. I'm looking forward to diving in.
I had four years of Latin in junior high school and high school, and have been trying to revive my skills using Duolingo for five minutes a day for a few years. It will be fun to try something new.
radix7
I've worked at Latin on and off over the past ten years or so, starting with LLPSI and similar beginner materaials. Trying to read actual Roman texts still feels like slamming into a brick wall.
bigstrat2003
Alas, Latin is probably third on my list of other languages to learn (Spanish and Japanese, in that order). I doubt very much if I ever make it to #2, let alone #3. Life is too short, we don't get to do all the cool stuff one might want!
sandbach
If you wait until you're fluent in Spanish to get started with Japanese, you'll be waiting a long time.
I recommend learning them concurrently. It'll be easier than you might think!
akshayshah
I had the chance to attend some of Father Reginaldus’s summer school in 1999, and it sparked a lifelong love of Latin. The article did a wonderful job capturing the verve that Reginaldus brought to the material.
I’ve always imagined the Recurse Center being similar-ish for programming.
cbm-vic-20
It's fun to set your browser preferences to Latin (ISO 639-1: "la") and see what sites respect that.
Aransentin
Do you have any examples of sites that do that?
cbm-vic-20
Wikipedia does this. The Vatican site did in the past. Google seems to have partial support, showing Italian in some places and Latin in others.
Koshkin
For anyone curious, this is one of the best places to learn about some early Indo-European languages:
slyall
When Pope Benedict resigned he announced it in Latin unexpectedly. Many present did not understand what he was saying.
https://insidethevatican.com/magazine/pope-benedicts-resigna...
felipeerias
Time will tell, but after more than two millennia this might have been the last significant announcement made in Latin.
error_logic
Revealing much?
error_logic
Memetic hazard.
gnabgib
Discussions at the time (148 points, 61 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14769758
(105 points, 23 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13789097
dhosek
A bit late to add to the discussion, but a couple things of note:
1. Foster died in 2020 (he tested positive for Covid at the time of his death, but it’s unclear whether that was the cause).
2. The promised second volume to the bones is available now.
3. There is a third volume coming out in August.
I've mentioned here that I got to study with him in his summer course the very last year it was held in Rome (when he got sick and ultimately came back to the U.S.).
He was a really cool guy and teacher of some really cool students, many of whom are still teaching Latin with their own spins on it.
This article was published in 2017, so it doesn't mention that Foster subsequently died in 2020.