Well, this has been an interesting discussion. I have just written to my friend sending him the link to the BBC and conceding he is essentially correct. Whether it is 100 or 10,000 is not important. His guess of 1000 is in the same ballpark. I had assumed that, maybe not every priest, but every bishop was fluent and that when two met, they spoke in Latin. Apparently not.
No, definitely not. As much as it pains me to say it (as a Catholic), some bishops are barely literate and fluent in their native tongues.
I can’t speak for the present but thirty years ago as a schoolboy I and the rest of my class could easily converse in Latin - and we did in the lessons - though I wouldn’t call myself fluent. My Latin teachers certainly were (and were fluent in ancient Greek too for that matter). One lesson one of them told us about striking up a conversation in Latin with someone on a ship because it was the only language they had in common. But Latin isn’t taught so much these days.
Hasn’t been the case for a long time.
The story is told of Cardinal Spellman of New York, who at the Vatican Council was a staunch defender of the use of Latin, and opposed the introduction of the vernacular mass. He addressed the Council at length on this subject, in Latin. His own Latin was, however, atrocious, and it was necessary to have on hand a translator who could translate Cardinal Spellman’s Latin into conventional Latin so that his brother bishops could understand his defence of the Latin language.
i wanted to, like, say i really suport making English thee onlee offishal langwaj of thee united sates of amerika. its the langwaj uf ar contry an part uf ar heritaj an we nid 2 protekt it wil u, help us
Is this supposed to be a written message? Because the spelling is atrocious, but most of it doesn’t represent mispronunciations that would be noticeable out loud if somebody was really ‘saying’ it. (Except for ‘sates’)
He’s not trying to represent “mispronunciations”, he’s done in writing what Spellman did in speech.
Exactly the same as it happens with every other language. New concepts require new words, news at 9.
Please. Every Latin class I took included both composition and chat in that language. Is that a scholarly level of fluency? No. Does it meet a standard of basic Latin as a Foreign Language? Yes.
There is. But they chicken out of translating the proper names.
It’s usually not the news that need to make them up, though.