Obviously, any Intelligent Person is Fluent in Latin

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So, I was watching this new NCIS Los Angeles, which was kind of dumb, but what the hell would I know? Because when Linda Hunt started speaking Latin I didn’t immediately know exactly what she was saying without having to look anything up. Retard that I am, I was stumped by why Linda Hunt used a long-e at the end of ‘trade’. I can only recall a handful of Latin morphemes that end in a long-e, but of course not being an oscar-calibur actress, I wouldn’t have done the research she did for her role.

She enunciated slowly and clearly:

“Trādē ēī ī quō cūbit.”

This, of course, I was too stupid to understand. I mean, if she meant “Trāde eī quod cupit” she would have said so, right?

Then one of the cops translated it for me – “Give them what they want.”

In my bottomless ignorance, I would have thought the problem was that he had mistranslated the ‘number’ of the nouns. But, Linda Hunt set me straight. He had mistranslated the ‘gender’ of the nouns. “eī” turns out to be ‘masculine, singular’.

Christ dying on a weeping rhood, how did I not detect in Linda Hunt’s carefully nuanced enunciation the difference between the masculine pronoun eī, the feminine pronoun eī and the neuter pronoun eī? And of course, they all sound singular to me, because I’m an idiot. Fortunately, the cop was at least able to understand latin that seemed nonsensical to me just by hearing it.

Something similar happened in an episode of Bones, in which one episode featured two scientists who could understand a Latin inscription without having to look anything up.

I am disappointed and bitter that nobody told me that understanding Latin just as easy as understanding Pig Latin – it’s is a birthright and marker of all smart people, and that I was wasting my time spending hours of my day reading, listening to and speaking the language. My translating knowledge of the language is childish and my attempts to acquire a speaking and hearing knowledge is folly, because it should have come naturally by now. It is only by some bizarre twist of happenstance that I rarely meet a scientist, much less a cop, who does more than sneer at the very idea of wrangling with this ancient language. Clearly, you’re either smart and you get it or you’re stupid and you don’t. Thanks, Television, for setting me straight.

2

Quite frankly, should anyone in these days who believes they have a speaking and hearing knowledge of Latin be catapulted into the past, they’d have a hard time ordering a cheeseburger. (And should someone of the Empire of - say - 200 C.E. be catapulted to the Republic of - say - 400 B.C.E., the same applies.)

I suppose it’s too late at this point to say, “Too pedantic, didn’t read”?

3

I don’t know what they call those quotations before a chapter in a novel, but read more 19th-century novels, especially those by Mark Twain. He required you be fluent in Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and any of a dozen other languages to translate what he said to, “My uncle is sick, but the highway is green.” Or be a middle-aged Catholic. We dismiss crappy Latin as not worth our interest in our sleep.

But yeah, if you wish to be recognized as intelligent anywhere, much less here, you need to bone up on your Latin.

4

I’ll bone up your Latin for you. Or is it Latina?

5

I took Latin in high school, and I am pretty sure that the true and “correct” pronunciation is basically unknown, lost to time. We just have conjecture and theories (which may be based on evidence, but are not absolute).

6

Well I’m Latino, so I’ll go ahead and do all the boning around here okay? :wink:

7

Am I really the first Doper to say this? Yes, it is true. Obviously, any intelligent person is fluent in Latin. If you wasted your time studying modern languages you will soon learn the folly of your ways. You will have only the most rudimentary understanding of legal phrases or medical terms, but what is worse is that you can never work at the Vatican.

8

Damn, and I was on a career path to Pope, as much as an atheist can be said to be on that path. We’re talking Lip Service with a capital L, and I can’t even say THAT in Latin.

9

I once knew a lawyer named Babbet
Who was asked, as luck would have it,
To teach a class:
Legal Ethics. Alas,
he replied “Nemo dat quod non habet”.

I postulate that this does, in fact, scan, give or take a punctuation mark.

10

I’m flatulant in Latin.

11

Jesus, get a grip. All I aimed for was being a Swiss Guard.

12

If only scholars were aware of these problems, Jesus mother fucking Christ. Look, there’s the churchy system that evolved naturally in parallel with Itallian, and there’s the reconstructed classical system with a lot of scholarship behind it. Have you got something better? Then perhaps you’re qualified to write for television.

13

In the end, yeah. Been that way for thousands of years. Sorry you only just figured it out, but you had tons of precedent to inform you. :frowning:

14

Vae! Volō meae matrī audiam.

15

Same to you, buster!
Note that I have never claimed to be anything but an idiot. It’s my brother who is spending one day a week teaching his pre-teens Latin while his wife, genuinely Russian, has two days a week to teach them her Mother Tongue.

16

True.

My family only spoke in Latin when I was growing up but I have forgotten most of it and even I would have a hard time understanding that now. The family down the street spoke in ancient Greek and we always had a (good-natured) rivalry going even though we could only communicate using hand signals. There was another family in town (with a really hot daughter) that spoke in Shakespearian English. It was very pretty and you could almost understand what they were talking about but not quite. Dinner parties were amusing because we all talked past one other but still laughed at the implied subtleties even if you didn’t really know what they were talking about. We finally all broke down and took modern English classes together and things works swimmingly after that. It turns out that English can handle almost any language condition just fine without resorting to language technology that has been instinct for many centuries if not several millennium :smack:

17

This is one of my peeves.

If you know the name of a bird or plant or something in latin, somehow thats “smart”.

If you can’t tell me something interesting about it besides its latin name…well BFD in my opinion…and I think you look like a tool spouting the latin name in casual conversation. Its a fucking Bluejay.

Kinda like flolks who spout bible verses. If you know the text of the verse and its implications, fine. Which book, verse, line, whatever doesnt do diddly for me,

18

Oh yeah? Well I’m fluent in Aramaic. I turn the subtitles off when I watch The Passion of the Christ.

Well, not really. But if I was going waste a bunch of time learning a useless half dead language, it’d be Irish. Or Fortran.

19

Pog mo thon. Tiocfaidh ar la!

20

My deficiency in Latin was badly exposed during my recent vacation in Latinia. The cab drivers really took me to the cleaners.