Hi
I’ve always wondered whether the Latin used by the Roman Catholic Church would come across as clichéd or hackneyed to an erudite Latin speaker living in imperial Rome. After all it is not a “living” language. I have hear of some speakers of Latin in the Vatican that actively use it. But for the majority of us it is a language that is for all intents and purposed “dead”. It is not an “evolving language” as German, French or English might be.
So I’m inclined to think that when we do use Latin, the phrases would be well-worn by now. I have read that there are modern terms being incorporated into Latin to express modern concepts, but is the Latin phrasing still ancient? Would a Roman senator of imperial Rome have trouble understanding the way we use Latin today? Would be find it dull/plodding?
I look forward to your feedback
“Living language” does not mean “maternal language”. Latin doesn’t have any people who speak it as their first language, but as you say yourself it does get new words. There’s people who switch to it as easily as to any of the other languages they’re fluent in (people who actively speak Latin tend to be highly multilingual). It’s got dialects: people with different primary languages and who learned it from different teachers pronounce it differently.
The grammar is being kept as close to what it was 2000 years ago (give or take a century) as its users can keep it, but note that to someone from 2000 years ago that would be “current”, not “old”. Given the kind of way-back-then sources used as reference, it may sound somewhat overwrought in the way that the registers of a newscaster or a politician given a speech are different from those of a conversation at the grocer’s or with your family. But depending on which accent the modern speaker has, the accent might be a worse problem.
Thanks Nava. Does anyone really know how standard Latin sounded in those days?
So today we speak “ecclesiastical Latin” not the ancient Roman Latin. Apparently according to this video Latin accents vary depending on the region of the world and the environment.
So today we speak “ecclesiastical Latin” not the ancient Roman Latin. Apparently according to this video Latin accents vary depending on the region of the world and the environment in which it’s spoken.
Not with 100% certainty and completeness, it’s not like we can get a recording of Cicero giving the Catilinarias. We do know a lot about it, including some information on dialects, partly from conservation and partly from looking at how its children languages evolved.
There is a level of exactitude where diminishing returns become prohibitive when mapping dialects with current languages, as well, after all.
And I’d already mentioned accents.
yes and no.
The latin used for church was a formal written language, used by scholars. (and kings,princes,etc, and law courts ?)
The written latin of the two latin bibles, being “Late latin” and “old latin” are more similar to each other than to the “vulgar latin” (watch out for other meanings of vulgar and vulgate … ) which is the latin of the ordinary people on the street.
St Jerome’s “vulgate” (where “vulgate” is ambiguous to mean
either 1 “the one for everyone to use”, or 2.
“language corrected academically” … Which is ambiguous because the greek language vulgate was written in ancient greek so that any scholar could read it no matter if they were Attic, Ionian or the Athens vulgar greek at the time.
Well I believe St Jerome had no choice but to erradicate bad grammar from the text, but it would have to sound very formal, like you were reading the laws of you land. but I guess it would be harder for a person from Naples to understand bad spoken grammar of Athens than to understand correct grammar even if it sounds formal.
However, classic latin texts are written in an older written language called Classical Latin.
Why the update ? Because the spoken language had changed, and perhaps had to extend to cover new concepts.
So basically its clear that the existence of the written language “late latin” is due to the need for scholars to obey the rules of grammar, and it would sound formal, but it was a language updated so that it wasnt impossibly hard to understand.
One curious aspect, St Jerome didn’t write “daily bread” but wrote “transubstantiated” bread". this shows that he wanted to make it easy to understand by changing words, yet had to use a formal grammar.
The idea is that the grammar is preserved from that time. as no great body of writing came into the body of Late Latin literature and was updated in such a way that it changed the language,
evidence: various latin language copies of the testaments are based on greek texts or the Vetus latina (pre-St Jerome), or the St Jerome version , but none show an evolution, they are just using the older version by mistake (perhaps to match up to, or explain, the liturgy which quotes older translations.)
Thanks Isilder.
Interesting article here.
To use one Oft-cited example, Caesar’s most famous quote probably sounded like “WAY knee, WEEDy, WEAKy,” rather than “VEINy, V.D., VEECHy.”
Actually, Caesar’s most famous quote probably didn’t include a single diphthong… both of your transliterations do.
I assume everyday street Latin was probably as colloquial and as slang-filled as modern-day English.
Less “I greet you, my mother, on this anniversary of your birth”, and more “Happy B-day, Mom!”
Thanks for reminding me of that one astorian. But the "VEINy, V.D., VEECHy. probably sounds better to modern earns even if it is wrong. "WAY knee, WEEDy, WEAKy sounds lispy/Monty Pythonesque
Modern ears which are used to hearing it that way. In the Latin I was taught in high school, Veni, Vidi, Vici is pronounced /beni bidi biʧi/ (that /ʧ/ is “ch like in chocolate”). Hey, yes, I do know we got most of the consonants “wrong”… the teacher was concerned about “the uses of cum and ut”, not phonetics.
Much of the comment in this thread could apply to Hebrew as well: modern versus biblical.
Once, many years ago, I stumbled upon a college-level Hebrew textbook in a public library, which focused largely on teaching biblical Hebrew. I guess it was intended for a class for wanna-be bible scholars. I spent a few minutes skimming through it.
The translation exercises had a lot of formal-sounding structures of the “I greet you, my mother, on this anniversary of your birth” sort that BrotherCadfael suggests. Things like:
Translate to Hebrew: “The shepherds arrived at the well and drew water for their father’s flocks”
Never took Latin, but IIRC, wasn’t one of the reasons in Goodbye, Mr. Chips for pushing Chips into retirement the pronunciation of “kickero” as opposed to “sissero”?
We have an excellent idea how the Romans sounded speaking Latin, with the following caveat: What we call ‘Classical Latin’ in formal study is actually normalized to the practices of the high literate culture of around the Augustinian period, which by no coincidence is the period and social echelon from which we have the most evidence and in which the most highly regarded literature in the language was produced.
Pronunciation is not really what the OP asked about, but it has come up and it’s frankly the part I am best prepared to opine on. But let me deal with the actual question in parts:
Seems unlikely. More likely the amount of innovation rather that had happened over 2,000 years would annoy a Roman about modern Latin, not a bunch of things familiar to the Romans that Latinists are still using all that time later.
Latin is a special case. Because it is only actively used by people who have made a special effort to learn it, it evolves very slowly. Mostly what has changed is vocabulary, but where a high-born Roman might get his nose hooked to hear you use an infinitive to express purpose, later Latinists often treat this as a legitimate move.
The Societās Latīnae, dedicated to the using of a Latīna Vīva, has put in a great deal of work into the problem of speaking of modern things in as classical a manner as possible. I have one of their books, Collectanea Usuī Linguae Latīnae Dicāta, in which famous Latinist Caelestis Eichenseer went to considerable pains to match modern expressive needs to documented usages. There are chapters citing for comparison the many words used for vehicles, the many words and phrases for getting into, getting out of, starting, stopping and otherwise controlling those vehicles. When modern speakers of Latin want to talk about getting around in our modern contraptions, we have recourse to do so in a very ancient manner.
More likely simply alien. We bring an extra couple of millenia of dead metaphors into our discourse, and a modern speaker finds that a modern Latin listener understands them when calqued into Latin.
Not that is was included in Caesar’s speech, but wah-geeh-na(i.e. vagina) would draw smiles and chuckles moreso than the way we pronounce the word today. 
Thanks Johnny Angel. Very helpful. Thank you all.
Is Italian just the natural evolution of Latin, or did it have outside influences?
Oh, lord, not this again…Nava, please try to understand: it’s easiest to convey information like this to most English speakers in this way. There is an appropriate time and place to teach English speakers about the beauty of non-diphthong vowels (and/or mid-vowels like the Romance “a,” “o,” etc.), but this sort of situation is NOT that time or place.