Toward a Prosody of Living Latin

[Johnny_Angel]

@DaphneBlack

It has its own natural rhythms (clausulae &c) which will become more familiar if critical mass is reached. Imposing from the top down is not the way forward.

The problem is that whatever rhythms it had are lost except for the broadest outlines and a smattering of specifics, and none of that can be taken entirely at face value. The Latin we study now has the rhythm we bring to it.

Or, here’s another way to think about it: I am reminded of Jurassic Park. They only have fragments of dinosaur DNA to work with, so they splice them into the DNA of currently living creatures. Well, the DNA that is spliced into gets to express itself, with wacky consequences, but it’s still the only hope mankind has to ever get eaten by a dinosaur. But I mean we’re not talking about a total crapshoot here. It’s not a coincidence that certain living creatures bear a resemblance to dinosaurs, and even with the inevitable differences it would still recover more information about what a dinosaur was really like than any amount of looking at the DNA fragments in a dish.

I have no knowledge of languages that aren’t Indo-European, and that may make a difference in what I choose to look into and what I conclude, but much of prosody arises out of certain physical constraints of the articulatory apparatus. A lot of similarities between English and Latin prosody can be tied to these constraints – the time it takes to enunciate different vowel sounds (as mentioned earlier), the syncopation of unstressed syllables, the shifting of vowel quality in special circumstances. If I investigate this further, I’m sure I could make a very strong case for this, but feel free to explain where I’m going astray here.

Basically, though, just the similar manifestations of prosody in response to biological apparatus common to humans suggests that a language like English would not be a bad stock to graft what fragments we have of Latin prosody onto. The result would be anglicized, but alive.

And it’s not just English. I haven’t gotten directly involved in this Living Latin movement, but I’ve chatted on the Locutorum at the Schola website with Italians and Germans, all of us expressing ourselves in Latin. All of them are presumably also learning the same reconstructed prosody that I’m learning, mutatis mutandis, with their own native prosodies filling in the unrecoverable gaps. And these voices, especially since it’s possible to hear them over the internet, will ultimately mesh – exchange memes and such.

So, I guess you are probably right. That is, I don’t believe that there are rhytms left from Latin that can be recovered without grafting them onto our own, but I do agree that the rhythms that emerge from doing so will tell us more than a handful of written records could about what Latin must have sounded like. Yet, I’d still like to start out with the best information we can glean.

[mswas]

@Maeglin

I don’t know what we’d call a marriage, but the poets give us some wonderful vocabulary to describe male gay sex. Catullus 16

Somehow I really don’t believe that ‘fudge-packed’ is a correct translation.

[mswas]

@Johnny_Angel

But… what you’re probably really asking is what is what to do about words we need in the modern world that the Romans didn’t have a need for or leave a record of if they did? Actually, I’m prepared to bite the bullet on that and say that new coinages, or new uses of old coinages are required. The attempt by some to create awkward circumlocutions (like instrumentum embolis extrahendis for ‘corkscrew’) is not acceptable, and John C. Trapman in his Conversational Latin has done much to help steer people away from this sort of thing (his word for ‘corkscrew’ is ‘extraculum’).

That is sort of what I was getting at. If we made a shortened form of that would there be gender specific versions that could differentiate between a marriage of two men, one of two women and one of a man and a woman?

I do not read, speak or otherwise know latin at all. I can understand simple stuff only in it’s relation to English. Like Extraculum I assume from context means basically, ‘extractor’.

[Maeglin]

@mswas

Somehow I really don’t believe that ‘fudge-packed’ is a correct translation.

I think it’s a very good translation, actually. Just like the wiki says, cinaede means you take it in the ass but there is nothing particularly anatomical about the word. “Butftucked” would be accurate but too anatomical and even verbal for cinaede. The author seems to be trying to capture the idiomatic obscenity without using anatomical or normally sexual terminology.

[Johnny_Angel]

That is sort of what I was getting at. If we made a shortened form of that would there be gender specific versions that could differentiate between a marriage of two men, one of two women and one of a man and a woman?

Yeah, the version I put together is a description more than it is a useful term. My understanding is that the Romans didn’t think of homosexuality the way that we do, so terms quite capturing won’t be found in ancient texts.

One useful avenue for finding a modernized latin term is to try and see if you can turn it up in a search term on Vicipaedia, the Latin Wikipedia. Generally, if I don’t know the Latin term to begin with, I’m stuck trying to see if the English term will turn up anything, which it often does because the english words for things are often relevant even in an encyclopedia entry in Latin. For homosexuality, what I get is Homophylophilia, which appears to be entirely Greek in construction, so maybe that’s whence they gleaned it. I’d probably just say ‘homophilia.’ Then you make it adjectival – going with the -us, -a, -um endings suggests itself – and just tack it on to your favorite word for marriage: Conubium homophilium.

I do not read, speak or otherwise know latin at all. I can understand simple stuff only in it’s relation to English. Like Extraculum I assume from context means basically, ‘extractor’.

This does not appear in the Tufts lexicon, so it’s probably not a re-purposed ancient word. It appears to be constructed from the root on up:
Ex (out, from) - trac (pull or draw) - ulum (diminutive suffix)
The little thing that pulls out.

[CJJ]

As a fluent Latinist and author of a blog dedicated to the revival of Latin, I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about this subject.

My general views on pronunciation are fairly close to Maeglin’s. The theological debates over “proper” Latin pronunciation are mostly just expressions of personal style. Don’t get me wrong, Allen’s Vox Latina is an invaluable resource, but it doesn’t do us any good to beat each other over the head with it. For example I recently witnessed a pointless internet debate over the pronunciation of Fr. Reginald Foster, the Vatican Latinist who, admittedly, retains more than a bit of his native Milwaukee accent in his Latin speaking. Judge for yourself, but IMO if he’s understandable, why worry about whether he softens his c’s or inserts an aspirate?

Regarding vowel quantity, IMO the best we can say is that the Romans commonly noticed some difference between “heavy” and “light” vowels, but this quantity was given a greater-than-natural emphasis in oratory and verse. Thus, while I don’t believe conversational Latin needs to maintain the 2-1 morae fiction–something which should probably be reserved for recitation of classical verse–a decent pronunciation should differentiate between long and short vowels (if only to distinguish between homographs like cedo, latus, lego and levis).

I also agree with Maeglin regarding the wide artistic possibilities of Latin; an over-emphasis on quantity, IMO, promotes the tendency to ranks classical forms as “better” or “purer” than their medieval or modern counterparts. I’m very interested in the artistic possibilities that a revival of Latin will spark (granted, a very narrow field, but hey we all need a hobby). IMO there are some highly skilled classical Latin versifiers writing today, but I also think the really interesting artists will be those who take the language in a new direction away from pure imitation of classical predecessors. Coinages like extraculum over the pedantic instrumentum embolis extrahendis are a tiny step in that direction, but like DaphneBlack my hope is that such a term is adopted through common use (i.e. Latin speakers today like it) rather than “top down”.

[DaphneBlack]

Father Reggie is the best!

[Johnny_Angel]

@CJJ

Regarding vowel quantity, IMO the best we can say is that the Romans commonly noticed some difference between “heavy” and “light” vowels, but this quantity was given a greater-than-natural emphasis in oratory and verse.

My impression is that the difference was more noticeable in Latin than in English, but less so than in Greek. But a difference does persist in English, which Campion observed 400 years ago in his Observations on the Art of English Poesy well before we had oscilloscopes to prove that the same phenomenon was still going on in modern English. But accent is not readily separable from quantity in English. Any syllable you stretch out will be perceived as accented, and any syllable accented will be stretched out. Something will be lost in the transition. Similar accommodations will be made by speakers of other languages, and when those voices converge and mix what will emerge will be a new sound of the language. And this discussion has helped me let go of fretting about it, but it’s still worth talking about the givens we go into the project with.

@CJJ

Thus, while I don’t believe conversational Latin needs to maintain the 2-1 morae fiction–something which should probably be reserved for recitation of classical verse–a decent pronunciation should differentiate between long and short vowels (if only to distinguish between homographs like cedo, latus, lego and levis).

There certainly should be different vowel sounds between the two, and for the most part that’s how it’s practiced from what I can tell. The problem comes in with the ‘a’, because some sources (such as Allen) say that the short ‘a’ is like ‘u’ in ‘but’ and others follow the Roman poet Lucilius in saying that it’s like the long ‘a’ only shorter. I’ve been playing with my own responses to words with ‘a’ in accented and unaccented syllables and I’ve come to feel that it depends a lot on the sounds around it, perhaps more so than the other vowels. I find the first ‘a’ here difficult to enunciate as an accented syllable without promoting the quality of the vowel in approximately the same direction that would take me to the long ‘a’:

Itắlia

I notice also that it’s hard to say that second i, which is short and unaccented, like the ‘i’ in ‘bit’ when I’m going to have to say the ‘a’ right after it without promoting the short ‘i’ to effectively a long ‘i’. I spent years slamming my glottis when reciting my paradigms before I figured out it was supposed to work this way.

I have a wonderful book for ESL teachers that encapsulates for a number of languages the differing phoneme catalogs and grammatical tendencies that cause predictable difficulties for people coming to English from another tongue. Even if we don’t sweat phonemes too much, challenges of this kind will still arise, so awareness of these matters is always a good idea.

@CJJ

I also agree with Maeglin regarding the wide artistic possibilities of Latin; an over-emphasis on quantity, IMO, promotes the tendency to ranks classical forms as “better” or “purer” than their medieval or modern counterparts.

It is a good point, and all the more so when it comes to pushing a Living Latin. But do I really want to give up bearding ‘churchy’ latinists when I come across them?

@CJJ

Coinages like extraculum over the pedantic instrumentum embolis extrahendis are a tiny step in that direction, but like DaphneBlack my hope is that such a term is adopted through common use (i.e. Latin speakers today like it) rather than “top down”.

It will happen, because languages just do that. But in order for it to spread bottom-up, we have to be in communication. I enjoy trying to keep up with the chat on Schola, but it’s not a place where solutions to needs for new coinages will have a chance to spread and compete for mindspace. And this thing, oy vey:

http://facweb.furman.edu/~dmorgan/lexicon/silva.htm

I mean, I consult it, but Heu! Some of these terms were clearly not ginned up by people who had any intention to try and push this mess out of their face holes any time soon. And I’ve heard the Vatican’s catalog of recent terms can be just as bad for circumlocutions, only it’s massive.

[mswas]

@Maeglin

I think it’s a very good translation, actually. Just like the wiki says, cinaede means you take it in the ass but there is nothing particularly anatomical about the word. “Butftucked” would be accurate but too anatomical and even verbal for cinaede. The author seems to be trying to capture the idiomatic obscenity without using anatomical or normally sexual terminology.

Right, but why use the idiom of ‘chocolate brownie’? And why are you considering it being ‘packed’? Does cinaede euphemistically refer to the feces (as chocolate) being shoved back up into the colon as ‘fudge-packed’ does?

[mswas]

@Johnny_Angel

Yeah, the version I put together is a description more than it is a useful term. My understanding is that the Romans didn’t think of homosexuality the way that we do, so terms quite capturing won’t be found in ancient texts.

One useful avenue for finding a modernized latin term is to try and see if you can turn it up in a search term on Vicipaedia, the Latin Wikipedia. Generally, if I don’t know the Latin term to begin with, I’m stuck trying to see if the English term will turn up anything, which it often does because the english words for things are often relevant even in an encyclopedia entry in Latin. For homosexuality, what I get is Homophylophilia, which appears to be entirely Greek in construction, so maybe that’s whence they gleaned it. I’d probably just say ‘homophilia.’ Then you make it adjectival – going with the -us, -a, -um endings suggests itself – and just tack it on to your favorite word for marriage: Conubium homophilium.

Right. Interesting.

This does not appear in the Tufts lexicon, so it’s probably not a re-purposed ancient word. It appears to be constructed from the root on up:
Ex (out, from) - trac (pull or draw) - ulum (diminutive suffix)
The little thing that pulls out.

Right that’s what I would think it would mean.

[Johnny_Angel]

@mswas

Right, but why use the idiom of ‘chocolate brownie’? And why are you considering it being ‘packed’? Does cinaede euphemistically refer to the feces (as chocolate) being shoved back up into the colon as ‘fudge-packed’ does?

Translators often find that the literal just isn’t an accurate translation. Even using the direct translation ‘fellates’ for the Latin ‘felat’ would be inaccurate, because the word is much weaker for us than it was for the Romans. Even though the word has survived, you pretty much have to use different ones like ‘sucks cock’ to get the original author’s tone across.

@mswas

Right that’s what I would think it would mean.

And you weren’t really looking for an etymological tangent? Quite understandable. But you knew you were going to be dealing with nerds when you opened this thread, no?

[Kimstu]

@CJJ*

IMO there are some highly skilled classical Latin versifiers writing today, but I also think the really interesting artists will be those who take the language in a new direction away from pure imitation of classical predecessors. Coinages like extraculum over the pedantic instrumentum embolis extrahendis are a tiny step in that direction, but like DaphneBlack my hope is that such a term is adopted through common use (i.e. Latin speakers today like it) rather than “top down”.

As a sort of hack classicist (historian of science), I timidly suggest that an interesting source of usable near-modern Latin coinages and style, in a place where a lot of modern Latinists might not think of looking, is the scientific research papers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These may be some of the latest examples of Latin used for actual communication (although of course it wasn’t conversational) among a sizeable and widespread group, and of course they contain countless examples of constructing new words.

(My favorite word in that category appears in a mathematics paper by Leonhard Euler, although I’m not totally sure that Euler coined it or even that it was really new in his day: “lineola”, for the tiny line segment representing a differential quantity.)

[mswas]

@Johnny_Angel

Translators often find that the literal just isn’t an accurate translation. Even using the direct translation ‘fellates’ for the Latin ‘felat’ would be inaccurate, because the word is much weaker for us than it was for the Romans. Even though the word has survived, you pretty much have to use different ones like ‘sucks cock’ to get the original author’s tone across.

Still, the nature of ‘fudge packer’ is very specifically referring to something that has a consistency like that of feces but isn’t feces.

And you weren’t really looking for an etymological tangent? Quite understandable. But you knew you were going to be dealing with nerds when you opened this thread, no?

Eh, whatever’s clever, but extraculum definitely works quite well for corkscrew. I kind of like the idea of Latin using English words like Japanese does rather than trying to come up with latin words. It would make some very funny latinate pidgin dialect.

[CJJ]

@Johnny_Angel

There certainly should be different vowel sounds between the two, and for the most part that’s how it’s practiced from what I can tell. The problem comes in with the ‘a’, because some sources (such as Allen) say that the short ‘a’ is like ‘u’ in ‘but’ and others follow the Roman poet Lucilius in saying that it’s like the long ‘a’ only shorter.

I’m less inclined to believe Lucilius (or at least his stripped-of-context quotes preserved by the Late grammarians), if only because the Romans were slavish imitators of the more sophisticated Greek. Like the older English grammarians who insisted on unnaturally imposing Latin syntax rules on English (split infinitives, ending a sentence with a preposition), their Roman counterparts often tried to push a square peg into a round hole in following Greek style.

I’ve been playing with my own responses to words with ‘a’ in accented and unaccented syllables and I’ve come to feel that it depends a lot on the sounds around it, perhaps more so than the other vowels. I find the first ‘a’ here difficult to enunciate as an accented syllable without promoting the quality of the vowel in approximately the same direction that would take me to the long ‘a’:

Itắlia

I notice also that it’s hard to say that second i, which is short and unaccented, like the ‘i’ in ‘bit’ when I’m going to have to say the ‘a’ right after it without promoting the short ‘i’ to effectively a long ‘i’. I spent years slamming my glottis when reciting my paradigms before I figured out it was supposed to work this way.

But the word itself is unmistakeable whether its pronounced “Ih-TAHL-eh-a”, “ee-TAHL-ee-a”, “Ih-TA-leh-a”, or “ee-TA-lee-a”, so long as the general pattern or accent is followed and the vowel sounds are close relatives (like eh to ee or a to the slightly-extended version ah; boy I wish I knew how to write phonetic terms in ASCII!). This for me is the only test of whether a pronunciation is good enough for general use. Furthermore, the Romans themselves has pronunciation variance with this word; Virgil could not get away with putting Italia as the first word of the Aeneid’s second line unless there was already a general tendency to pronounce the first syllable with a long i, despite the rants of grammarians.

IMO it’s relatively pointless to insist on an unyielding Latin prosody when (1) one didn’t exist in classical times outside of highly artificial settings, and (2) historically, such top-down conventions have been used in all languages to maintain a class distinction. But now I’m ranting…

It will happen, because languages just do that. But in order for it to spread bottom-up, we have to be in communication. I enjoy trying to keep up with the chat on Schola, but it’s not a place where solutions to needs for new coinages will have a chance to spread and compete for mindspace. And this thing, oy vey:

http://facweb.furman.edu/~dmorgan/lexicon/silva.htm

I mean, I consult it, but Heu! Some of these terms were clearly not ginned up by people who had any intention to try and push this mess out of their face holes any time soon. And I’ve heard the Vatican’s catalog of recent terms can be just as bad for circumlocutions, only it’s massive.

Absolutely true. Morgan’s lexicon looks like a textbook on sailing written by someone who’s read every book on the subject but has never been to sea. Traupmann’s suggestions in his latest pocket dictionary are better (I’ve chatted with him on maillists, and he really made an effort to improve the English-to-Latin section with the growing conversational Latin movement in mind), but even here, until they are used regularly by a large pool of speakers, we can’t say for sure.

As for being in communication, I’m sure you’re aware of the growth of spoken Latin Conventicula over the past several years, gatherings where participants spend a weekend or even a week attending events and speaking only Latin. Dr. Tunberg’s (the fellow who translated “Green Eggs and Ham” into Latin) program at the University of Kentucky has been around for a while, but similar summer programs have sprung up in Boston, Buffalo, Washington state, and elsewhere. These are excellent opportunities for anyone wishing to improve their Latin via conversation.

[Johnny_Angel]

@CJJ*

I’m less inclined to believe Lucilius (or at least his stripped-of-context quotes preserved by the Late grammarians), if only because the Romans were slavish imitators of the more sophisticated Greek.

Well, let us say at least that Greek prosody was more complex, and avoid normative language. All languages are sophisticated in their own way.

@CJJ*

Like the older English grammarians who insisted on unnaturally imposing Latin syntax rules on English (split infinitives, ending a sentence with a preposition)

If you encountered a foreign language that had a technique to create emphasis by displacing a preposition, you’d probably think, “Gee, that’s nifty. I wish English could do that.” Well, I’ve got some good news for you.

@CJJ*

IMO it’s relatively pointless to insist on an unyielding Latin prosody when (1) one didn’t exist in classical times outside of highly artificial settings, and (2) historically, such top-down conventions have been used in all languages to maintain a class distinction.

Well, I’d say rather that a metrical system based on quantity is fairly ephemeral, as that is tied to vowel quality, which seems to shift a lot more than stress. As for class distinctions, that’s also a function that language serves, whether we like it or not.

As for being in communication, I’m sure you’re aware of the growth of spoken Latin Conventicula over the past several years, gatherings where participants spend a weekend or even a week attending events and speaking only Latin. Dr. Tunberg’s (the fellow who translated “Green Eggs and Ham” into Latin) program at the University of Kentucky has been around for a while, but similar summer programs have sprung up in Boston, Buffalo, Washington state, and elsewhere. These are excellent opportunities for anyone wishing to improve their Latin via conversation.

I have heard of them, and it sounds like a blast. But I think I’ll get some more individual study under my belt before I take it on the road. In a chat window nobody can see me frantically looking up words.

It occurs to me that one thing the modern world offers that previous generations didn’t have as an education and communication tool is the option to create a virtual space that will allow for the kind of immersion in a language that would at least help make up for the fact that its harder to come by such a thing in physical space.

I futzed around with the idea of translating some of the dialogue in the game Fallout 3 into Latin, but I couldn’t get my recorded voice to play in-game. But as neat as that would be to establish an immersive space in a single-player environment, it would be easier to just to set up a voice chat in a shared virtual space with some 3D avatars and let live people actually provide the language component.

As for the Latin Dr. Seuss, I have a bit of a bone to pick about “Invidiosulus Nomine Grinchus.” “Grinchus” will do, thanks. The English version trusted the reader to get that Grinch was a name.

[metrodorus]

This issue of new vocabulary in Latin has been going on for a long time.

John Amos Comenius, who wrote an encyclopaedic school syllabus in Latin, was forced to make up many words, and came under attack for this by the purists. His arguments for this can be read here in his Apologia - what he has to say is as relevant now as it ever was.

More info on Comenius’ syllabus can be obtained from latinum
One needs to recall, that Adler was writing the American edition of the FIRST EVER modern conversational textbook for Latin - no-one had ever before attempted a complete Latin course in conversational Latin. The prototype was written by Henri Ollendorff.

Indeed, no-one has written one since. 9Traupman’s book is wonderful, but it isn’t a complete Latin course) While some of the vocabulary in Adler is not practical, this isn’t the point, there are dictionaries for modern Latin, and these topics can always be discussed with the Latin user-community onScholahttp://schola.ning.com which now has over 1000 members in an all-Latin online community.

Finally, if you are learnng Latin, the new collection of beginning readers (illustrated) on the Tar Heel readersite, will be of interest.

[Johnny_Angel]

@metrodorus

One needs to recall, that Adler was writing the American edition of the FIRST EVER modern conversational textbook for Latin - no-one had ever before attempted a complete Latin course in conversational Latin. The prototype was written by Henri Ollendorff.

I have been assuming that 1) he didn’t want to step on any toes by doing any coinages and 2) it seemed sensible to stick to Latin as received rather than lose focus. That’s all fine, but unless by the end he has a full catalog of modern concepts, it seems odd that he would introduce ones so early that read more like definitions than terms.

Any idea what the source is of the new vocabulary being used on Vicapaedia?

[CJJ]

@Johnny_Angel

Any idea what the source is of the new vocabulary being used on Vicapaedia?

As you might expect, there is a used-created Victionarium to support Vicipaedia.

[Johnny_Angel]

@metodorus

While some of the vocabulary in Adler is not practical, this isn’t the point

Hmmm. It looks like the point is that it was based on a method used for teaching German, and they for some reason decided that making the lessons parallel was important. So, they used the closest Latin they could render for the vocabulary in the German version.

@CJJ*

As you might expect, there is a used-created Victionarium to support Vicipaedia.

Unfortunately, not all the words in Vicipaedia appear in the Victionarium.