Is the Latin in textbooks and, presumably, the Latin used a the Vatican, more or less true to the Latin spoken in Ancient Rome? If we transported yer average high school Latin teacher to Rome, 30 CE, could he understand the locals, and be understood?
Or is this like the whole Chaucer’s-English-vs.-my-English thing?
Church Latin is pronounced differently than classical Latin – more like Italian, with soft consonants and the like. Certainly the way we pronounced the Latin prayers when I was an altar boy (I was of the last generation that memorized the Mass in Latin) was very different from the Latin we spoke in my High SDchool classes. I believe that the Latin you use in High School and College tries to be faithful to Classical Latin.
The stuff used in Chuirch almost certainly has changed in many ways from Classical – it’s essentially a living language (if one mainly used in officuial pronouncements and scholarship), and has evolved as languages will. New words and constructions have certainly been introduced over the centuries.
Heck, even in modern academic Latin they have to make allowances for modern terms. If you’re going to translate modern texts into Latin, you need words for “automobile” and the like. My copy of Green Eggs and Ham in Latin has lots of these latin neologisms.
Most Latin classes are geared toward being able to read and write Latin and do translations, not how actually speak Latin.
Very true. It’s one of the reasons Latin can be both easier and harder than other foreign languages to learn. Easier, because you don’t have to learn how to speak it, just read it; harder because regularly speaking a language makes it easier to learn it.
The Latin spoken in the Catholic church is not the Latin that is taught in high schools or colleges. Educational institutions attempt to teach a form of Latin deduced to be faithful to the classical Latin of the period around 100 BC to 100 AD. As with any language, Latin changed considerably over the centuries of the Roman Empire, even without considering the debasement caused at the end through the influence of conquering barbarian tribes. Because most of the authors read in Latin classes come from the above period, and because that’s considered to be the quintessential period of the Roman Empire by many.
Of course, when you are learning that Latin, you are undoubtedly learning the equivalent of the King’s English, that is, the “proper” way to use the language, as opposed to what the hoi polloi were actually speaking along the Tiber. 
So basically a modern Latin student would have a truly bizarre accent to Roman ears and have better luck finding someone literate and passing notes? Of course the studen would also have to be able to read ancient Roman handwritting.
Additionally, the Latin taught in high schools is trying to be faithful to the WRITTEN classical Latin of Roman antiquity. The everyday spoken (“vulgar”) language was a bit different. It was less inflected, for one thing. That is why the Romance languages (French, Italian, Catalan, etc.) are more similar to each other than they are to “classic written” Latin. The spoken language had already begun to move in the direction of these modern Romance languages by the first centuries of the Christian era. We have glimpses of this by comparing the earliest written records of, say, spoken Provencal (I’d guess in about the eighth century), with the few scribblings of SPOKEN Latin from the last centuries of the Roman Empire (graffitti and the like),perhaps supplemented by looking at a few modern Romance languages which were, in some ways, more conservative, like Sardinian.
In other words, if you wanted to speak to Romans in, say, 200 AD, you’d probably be better off learning “classical” (high school) Latin AND Italian, and then trying to mix the two up.
I’ll let others with more linguistics chops, like Johanna, expand on this, if they’d like.
Incidentally, this is true even of Catholic schools. I’m not sure if ecclesiastical Latin (in which “pacem” is pronounced “pachem”, rather than the presumed-classical “pakem”) is taught anywhere any more, other than word-of-mouth of a few traditional hymns. Possibly in seminaries, I suppose.
One of the most difficult things for those of us learned textbook-Latin or classical-text Latin would be that, so we determine from inscriptions’ spelling mistakes and other evidence, the ‘m’ that features at the end of so many inflectional noun endings was really just a nasalisation of the vowel.
So, ‘magnam cartam’ (acc.) would sound much more like ‘magna carta’ (nom.) than we would expect.
Well, here’s a bit of fun news for you. A lot of homeschoolers study Latin, and most of them go for Church Latin first, moving on to classical later. Not necessarily so much for religious reasons, but because Church Latin has a lot of fun songs to sing and is somewhat easier to learn, which is good if you’re teaching an 8-yo. It’s mostly Dorothy Sayers’ fault, actually; she said she’d prefer that kids learn Church Latin first, and said exactly why–and certain people decided that she was right and ran with it. I think the Latin programs from the UK are more often classical, as they’re usually designed for the schools. There are 7 or 8 out there.
Ancient Roman in 3 by TKO
People still learn the mass responses in Latin.
I don’t know exactly what you mean by this. I have no doubt that some people do. But until the 1960s (even after Vatican II for a while) all altar boys learned and memorized the prayers in latin. By the late 1960s it was not the practice – they were saying the responses in English. While there were still some groups that insisted on a latin mass, the practice was actyively discouraged in an effort to use the vernacular and make the Mass more acceptable and involving for everyday folk.
What I mean by my comment is that your generation was not the “last that memorised the mass in Latin”. Traditional Latin mass parishes flourish all around the Catholic world today. Adults and children in those parishes memorise the Latin responses.
Ecclesiastical Latin is a medieval form of the language (I ought to know, my name Johanna was derived in medieval Latin by the addition of -h- to the ancient form Joanna). The liturgical Latin formerly (and still by some) used in Mass dates from what, at least a thousand years after the Classical Latin of the textbooks?
Interesting to compare with Sanskrit, in which the liturgical language, known as Vedic, predates the classical form of Sanskrit by over 1,000 years. And Vedic is so different from Classical Sanskrit it’s counted as a separate language. If you get a textbook for learning Sanskrit, you’ll be studying the polished literary language of Kalidasa. Study of the Vedic language required different textbooks (which I have on my shelf but haven’t gotten to).
In Arabic, the liturgical and classical forms of the language just happen to coincide.
We mean different things. As I explain, in my time it was universal. It no longer is so, and wasn’t after my time. There are certainly folks doing so, but they’re definitely a minority.
Don’t forget that we only have educated guesses about what ancient Latin actually sounded like. These pronounciations were deduced from the languages that descended from Latin, but we can’t guarantee that the ancient Romans would pronounce the words in exactly the same way.
This is not entirely correct. Our best estimation of the pronounciation of ancient Latin was via contemporary transliterations from Greek. There is a maze of conflicting evidence. W Sidney Allen’s Vox Latina is a helpful place to start.