[HN Gopher] The Vatican's Latinist (2017)
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The Vatican's Latinist (2017)
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 125 points
Date : 2025-03-24 01:29 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (newcriterion.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (newcriterion.com)
| gnabgib wrote:
| Discussions at the time (148 points, 61 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14769758
|
| (105 points, 23 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13789097
| coolsunglasses wrote:
| Foster was basically the rallying point for people opposed to the
| grammarian methods of teaching languages that started in Classics
| but ended up taking over how foreign language is taught in most
| schools and contexts. Virtually everyone actually fluent in Latin
| today (reading, listening, or speaking) either learned directly
| from his a tutor using Ossa Latinitatis Sola or was downstream of
| that.
|
| Striking contrast with the most well known classicist in the UK
| being unable, by their own admission, to comfortably read Latin
| text basically at all.
|
| Abandoning the old ways has cost us a lot in almost every area of
| human endeavour. Especially in pedagogy.
| globnomulous wrote:
| > Striking contrast with the most well known classicist in the
| UK being unable, by their own admission, to comfortably read
| Latin text basically at all.
|
| Sorry, what? Who is this? Even the PhD students I knew in
| classics, the ones who were specializing in history or
| literature, were comfortable reading texts written during their
| time periods of interest.
| svat wrote:
| https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-
| ignor... -- per this blog post (which takes https://www.the-
| tls.co.uk/regular-features/mary-beard-a-dons... as the
| starting point), most classicists "can't sight-read a complex
| Latin text all that well" [unlike medievalists and
| Renaissance scholars].
| camcil wrote:
| It is fascinating that a language that still has study devoted
| around it has died right in front of our eyes.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| But among the dead languages it's one if the liveliest
| mmooss wrote:
| > Striking contrast with the most well known classicist in the
| UK being unable, by their own admission, to comfortably read
| Latin text basically at all.
|
| That's hard to believe. A friend was a Latin teacher; high
| school students read actual Roman Latin in their second year.
|
| I've heard that few can speak Latin 'correctly', because the
| skill is almost useless - you can't talk to Romans or almost
| anyone else; it's all written. (I don't know about the Catholic
| or other churches, but I do recall that 'church Latin' differs
| from classical Latin.)
| philsnow wrote:
| > I've heard that few can speak Latin 'correctly', because
| the skill is almost useless - you can't talk to Romans or
| almost anyone else; it's all written.
|
| Because Latin has died out as a spoken language, it doesn't
| really change over time like modern languages do. If you find
| a sentence written 2000 years ago and another elsewhere
| written 1500 years ago, it's likely they mean the exact same
| thing.
|
| "Latin is a dead language" is actually a positive statement
| about the continued use of Latin, especially in the church;
| so much of the writing of the early church and the church
| fathers was in Latin, and we can know that we're interpreting
| it faithfully (or at least as faithfully as we have done for
| centuries) because the language is static.
| mmooss wrote:
| To add a bit of detail: At least in English etymologies,
| there are significant differences between classical Latin
| and post-classical Latin.
|
| But post-classical Latin unhelpfully covers Rome from ~200
| CE into the 20th century, including the Catholic Church and
| all those scholars and scientists. I'm not sure what
| differences arose before or after the fall of Rome in 476
| CE, which began the Middle Ages.
| adrian_b wrote:
| While Latin has indeed evolved very little after it stopped
| being a native language, its vocabulary had continuously
| expanded until 2 centuries ago.
|
| Until around the beginning of the 19th century, Latin had
| remained the most important language for the publication of
| scientific works and for international correspondence
| between well-educated people, and during this time many
| words have been added for naming things unknown to the
| Romans.
|
| Also the preference for various grammatical variants or for
| certain word orders has been strongly influenced by some
| features common to the evolution of European languages, so
| a Latin text written during the Middle Ages feels quite
| different from a text written during the Roman Empire.
| mmooss wrote:
| > Latin had remained the most important language for the
| publication of scientific works and for international
| correspondence between well-educated people
|
| ... and important to the Catholic Church.
| adrian_b wrote:
| That is right, but while I have found it very useful even
| today to read in original the works of Georg Bauer,
| Newton, von Linne, Gauss and the like, there is much less
| interest in reading the many ecclesiastic documents that
| treated subjects with only a limited temporal relevance
| (unless you are a historian of that time period).
|
| In general, I strongly recommend to read carefully in
| original the scientific literature of the 17th, 18th and
| 19th centuries, even if that requires the ability to read
| at least Latin, German, French and English, because by
| reading the original sources you can find frequently that
| the authors have said things quite different (and wiser)
| than what it is claimed that they have said in many
| university textbooks or popular science books.
|
| In science and technology, there is very little that
| becomes truly obsolete, because the optimal solutions for
| solving practical problems often cycle through the space
| of solutions during the years, depending on how the
| balance between various advantages and disadvantages
| changes with the evolution of the available technologies.
| So those who believe that it is enough to read the up-to-
| date literature are typically wrong, because the miracle
| new solution of tomorrow is frequently again the same
| that was best 50 years ago, or even earlier, but which
| had become forgotten in recent years.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| > there is much less interest in reading the many
| ecclesiastic documents [...] In science and technology,
| there is very little that becomes truly obsolete
|
| Documents that contain administrative minutiae or legal
| rulings or whatever may only have value for historical
| study, yes, but one major reason for the very existence
| and authority of the Catholic Church is to serve as
| guardian of her doctrines and their development, and to
| communicate them faithfully across generations. Meaning,
| the doctrines of the faith are never made obsolete, or
| else the faith, and certainly the authority of the
| Church, is undermined. The understanding of them can be
| deepened and expanded over time, but the doctrines
| themselves are fixed.
| mmooss wrote:
| That is great; thanks.
|
| I think of it as reading the very best writing, e.g.,
| Charles Darwin, and not just another paper or book.
| Wouldn't you love to have a conversation with Darwin?
| That's what you get when you engage with their writing.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _Because Latin has died out as a spoken language_
|
| It evolved into Italian, Spanish, _etc_ :
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages
| akshayshah wrote:
| Second-year high school students do read actual Roman texts,
| but they typically do so very slowly and laboriously - a
| day's homework might be translating a single paragraph.
|
| I studied Latin from 7th grade through my early undergraduate
| years (1990s to early 00s), and that dynamic didn't change as
| much as you might expect - the focus remains on deeply
| reading a few texts, rather than building the fluency
| required to quickly read and understand new texts on
| unfamiliar subjects. The corpus of texts for standardized
| exams is also relatively small and well-known - I didn't see
| a single unfamiliar passage on either AP Latin exam.
|
| Perhaps some classics professors read Latin as fluently as
| the average Spanish literature professor reads a Madrid
| newspaper, but I certainly never met any outside Reginaldus's
| orbit.
| mmooss wrote:
| How could you not gain that fluency after years? Every
| human naturally learns languages; you don't need a Ph.D. at
| all.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| >Foster was basically the rallying point for people
| opposed to the grammarian methods of teaching languages
| that started in Classics but ended up taking over how
| foreign language is taught in most schools and contexts
|
| Humans naturally learn languages when they are immersed
| in the language. It sounds like Latin instruction was
| more focused on rules, and didn't provide that immersion
| before Foster. I can attest that many other foreign
| language classes also don't provide enough immersion to
| really learn the language, although being limited to ~10
| hours a week makes that virtually impossible.
| mmooss wrote:
| Ph.D.'s are rather immersed. Imagine how much time you
| spend staring at Latin texts over many years.
| akshayshah wrote:
| It's certainly possible to gain that fluency, as
| Reginaldus demonstrated. But it seemed to me that fluency
| reading unfamiliar texts simply wasn't the goal of my
| Latin education; instead, we were studying to know
| Catullus, Ovid, Horace, Cicero, and Vergil, with a small
| smattering of other Roman authors. It was an education in
| classics, not the Latin language. We just weren't asked
| to extract information from large volumes of text, speak
| extemporaneously, or comprehend casual conversation.
|
| The best analogy I can give is this: imagine taking
| Spanish from grades 7-12, culminating in a full year
| reading and understanding selections of Don Quixote. The
| entire curriculum builds towards this capstone year, and
| other areas of inquiry get very short shrift. Nobody
| cares if you can live comfortably in a Spanish-speaking
| country or watch Spanish-language TV. Nobody cares about
| modern idiom, or any more recent works of literature, or
| technical writing. s/Don Quixote/Aeneid + a small corpus
| of Roman poems/g and you have the bulk of my Latin
| education.
|
| This sounds negative - we weren't fluent in Latin! But
| for a teenager, it was a wonderfully deep exploration of
| Rome's greatest hits. I loved it.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| It's because you only ever translate but never speak or
| synthesize latin exept in a few church circles where it
| is or was used as Lingua Franca (such as depicted in
| Conclave last year). I understand the original post to be
| about the profound difference this makes in acquiring a
| language intuitively.
| umanwizard wrote:
| I'm skeptical how much speaking/synthesizing the language
| matters if you only care about reading.
|
| I can read German moderately well (can get through
| newspaper articles pretty easily, and novels with some
| effort), but I have very little ability to synthesize it
| (it'd take me quite a lot of effort to construct a
| sentence in writing, and I can't really speak at all).
| But the lack of ability to produce the language doesn't
| seem to negatively impact my reading ability.
| jhbadger wrote:
| And this is the case for most scholars of ancient
| languages besides Latin and Ancient Greek. While those
| two big ones get the occasional translation of a modern
| work like Harry Potter or The Hobbit, nobody is writing
| new works in Sumerian or Middle Egyptian, although
| reading existing works is what these scholars do.
| dkarl wrote:
| I think it's because it's "classics." Your first couple
| of years excepted, everyone hears about a text years
| before they read it. By the time they read it, they
| already know a lot about it, and they read it closely and
| systematically to get a deep understanding of it.
|
| There isn't a firehose of new text being created in
| Latin, and you never (or very rarely) scan over something
| to find out what it's about, extract a quick fact from
| it, or decide if it's worth reading. You know what's in
| it, you know the standard take-away from it, there's a
| good chance you've read the highlights in translation
| already, you may even know one or two hair-splitting
| academic controversies about it, and you are sitting down
| for a good hour or several hours with it. It's a
| completely different kind of reading from scanning a web
| site or a newspaper to find something worth reading more
| closely, looking for the answer to a concrete question,
| or scanning something to decide if you can afford to not
| really read it.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > Every human naturally learns languages
|
| ... in the first few years of life. Beyond that, it's an
| intentional, conscious and often challenging effort for
| many.
|
| Some people, even as adults, are far more adept at
| learning new languages than others. For the rest of us,
| it typically requires devotion to the subject for years.
| Symbiote wrote:
| The Latin teacher at my school and my French teacher would
| discuss private matters in Latin, confident that us 13 year
| olds wouldn't understand.
|
| I've no proof, but my assumption is there are students of
| Latin casually speaking the language to show off at places
| like Cambridge University.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Did the Latin students have a rivalry with the goth kids
| and the vandals?
| ptsneves wrote:
| So good!
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| I was a high school student studying Latin. Like almost all
| high school language students, we could not read fluently. It
| took a long time and potentially many trips to the dictionary
| wisty wrote:
| I think it's a bit out of context. I think they are referring
| to Mary Beard, who is a classicist / historian who said her
| Latin wasn't that good, but may have been exaggerating
| because she was IIRC arguing against gatekeeping in history
| (like saying physicists don't need advanced math, because
| Einstein wasn't the best at math compared to a few other top
| theoretical physicists).
| graemep wrote:
| and her standard of "good" is probably quite high.
| lolinder wrote:
| They're referring to this story from a few years back:
|
| _Latin as She is Spoke: How Classicists Tricked Themselves_
| Jan 2022 (171 points, 191 comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30124101
| cafard wrote:
| I guess that one would have to know what "comfortably" means
| and what sort of texts. At the speed of English? Caesar or
| Tacitus?
|
| The essayist Sydney Smith, himself an Anglican clergyman,
| said something teasing about "false quantities" in Roman
| Catholic services. I can tell you that the pronunciation
| varies in church Latin: c and g can be "softened" when
| followed by e or i; v is v, not w.
|
| You don't hear a great deal of Latin in Catholic services
| these days: in the Tridentine rite the congregation doesn't
| get much to say. The Novus Ordo Latin Mass is awfully rare.
| Roscius wrote:
| > I've heard that few can speak Latin 'correctly', because
| the skill is almost useless
|
| Not useless at all - speaking Latin helps you to better
| appreciate both prose and poetry. Understanding the sound of
| the language helps you to appreciate the word play and
| nuance. Also as children we learn language mostly by
| listening and speaking, not by reading, so it makes sense to
| learn Latin in that way.
|
| There's been significant research on reconstructing classical
| pronunciation. But Latin was spoken as a primary language for
| over a thousand years, so the pronunciation naturally changed
| over that time and there were of course regional dialects -
| some of which evolved into Romance languages.
|
| In reading Latin, it doesn't have a lot of silent letters (it
| does have some), so it's quite easy to read aloud a Latin
| sentence once you understand the basic phonetics. In
| classical times poems like the Aeneid were recited aloud, so
| doing so today makes sense.
|
| Fluency is a somewhat subjective concept, but the growth of
| the internet has spawned a growing community of Latin
| speakers internationally. (I speak Latin at roughly a B2
| level and am constantly improving).
| coolsunglasses wrote:
| >That's hard to believe.
|
| I understand why you'd feel that way but classics departments
| aren't what they used to be. It's pretty common for even
| elite universities these days to not require grad students to
| understand the languages of the cultures they purportedly
| study across the board, let alone for Latin.
|
| https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-
| ignor...
| spudlyo wrote:
| If you find this article fascinating, and are intrigued by the
| possibility of learning to speak a dead language like Latin, I'm
| here to tell you that it's probably a lot easier than you think.
|
| To start off, there is a textbook that I think really resonates
| with hackers. It's called "Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata" (The
| Latin Language Illustrated through itself) and it teaches Latin
| in a fun and mind-altering way. The entire book is in Latin, but
| it starts of with very simple sentences that anyone who speaks
| English or a Romance language can intuit with a bit of effort.
| There are very clever marginal illustrations that help drive the
| meaning home. It builds an understanding in Latin brick by brick,
| and eventually you find yourself understanding complex sentences
| and ideas. Furthermore the book is just fun and often funny, it
| tells a story of a Roman family and strikes an excellent balance
| between teaching and entertaining. Contrast this approach with
| dense Latin texts that have a heavy focus on grammar and
| translation.
|
| So that's one way to learn the language, but what about speaking
| it? Well, that's where the Legentibus app comes in. It's a Latin
| language podcast application which has wealth of well recorded
| stories in classical Latin at a bunch of different difficulty
| levels. It also has has the Latin language text of the stories
| that are highlighted as the audio is read, with optional
| interlinear English translations. I find these really help at
| first to help me understand the content. I turn them off later
| once I get the gist of what is being said, or just listen without
| reading. You can also do dictionary lookups of individual words
| without turning on the translation.
|
| Here are the reasons why I think this is one of the most
| enjoyable and useful things I do as a newbie Latin language
| learner:
|
| 1) The stories themselves are engaging. Some of my favorites are
| from "Gesta Romanorum" (Deeds of the Romans) which is a 13th or
| 14th century collection of stories often with a moral allegorical
| themes. These were rewritten in a beginner friendly style, but
| use classical Latin idioms, some of which are explicitly pointed
| out in the text as clickable footnotes.
|
| 2) Daniel (the co-founder of the app and Latin scholar) does an
| excellent job as a reader. I listen to a lot of audio books, and
| I especially like it when the reader consistently does memorable
| character voices. Be it an extortionist dog slyly claiming "Omnes
| canes amant" (everyone loves dogs) or Pluto, King of the
| Underworld, commanding "Eurydice accede huc!" in a booming voice,
| Daniel nails it.
|
| 3) You can listen to these while folding laundry, cooking dinner,
| or doing whatever. I manage to squeeze in 40 minutes a day or so
| of these stories, and I'm always happy to do it.
|
| 4) Often times when I learn a new bit of grammar or learn the
| precise meaning of a word, my mind often will replay in my head a
| phrase (in Daniel's voice) from one of the stories that uses that
| word or grammatical concept. This happens more than you might
| expect.
|
| Finally, there is a pretty vibrant online community of Latin
| language learners out there, from the /r/Latin subreddit, to the
| LLPSI (Lingua Latina per se Illustrata) Discord
| (https://discord.gg/uXSwq9r4) to the Latin & Ancient Greek)
| Discord (https://discord.gg/latin) and others.
|
| It's never been easier to pick up Latin.
| aag wrote:
| Thank you very much for recommending the Legentibus app. I've
| just installed it, and I'm already enjoying it. It looks nice,
| has just the right amount of introductory material, and runs
| smoothly, which already puts it head and shoulders above most
| apps. I'm looking forward to diving in.
|
| I had four years of Latin in junior high school and high
| school, and have been trying to revive my skills using Duolingo
| for five minutes a day for a few years. It will be fun to try
| something new.
| bombcar wrote:
| A surprisingly large amount of works are available in Latin -
| including modern ones you might not expect:
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/0865164207 or
| https://www.amazon.com/Hobbitus-Ille-Hobbit-Tolkien-Septembe...
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Alas, Latin is probably third on my list of other languages to
| learn (Spanish and Japanese, in that order). I doubt very much
| if I ever make it to #2, let alone #3. Life is too short, we
| don't get to do all the cool stuff one might want!
| sandbach wrote:
| If you wait until you're fluent in Spanish to get started
| with Japanese, you'll be waiting a long time.
|
| I recommend learning them concurrently. It'll be easier than
| you might think!
| vintermann wrote:
| Don't know about hackers, but that method of teaching, "the
| direct method", is how I learned English back in the day. Our
| English teacher was an Esperantist, which was probably how he
| came in contact with this idea, "la rekta metodo" has strong
| connections with the Esperanto movement.
|
| I've read the criticisms of it, and it could well be it works
| worse for others, but for me it worked very well - and I
| utterly failed to learn German to anything like the same level,
| despite ~8 years of classes in it. My German teachers were
| hardly consistent in their methods (some were very classicist-
| latin-grammarian types), but none of them used the direct
| method.
| radix7 wrote:
| I've worked at Latin on and off over the past ten years or so,
| starting with LLPSI and similar beginner materaials. Trying to
| read actual Roman texts still feels like slamming into a brick
| wall.
| schoen wrote:
| I've mentioned here that I got to study with him in his summer
| course the very last year it was held in Rome (when he got sick
| and ultimately came back to the U.S.).
|
| He was a really cool guy and teacher of some really cool
| students, many of whom are still teaching Latin with their own
| spins on it.
|
| This article was published in 2017, so it doesn't mention that
| Foster subsequently died in 2020.
| spudlyo wrote:
| He's quite a character! I found a great video[0] of him
| speaking for over an hour to a classroom filled with former
| students.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZLcWl_NCMY
| schoen wrote:
| Wow, it looks like there are also interviews recorded with
| him in his nursing home after his retirement!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@latintalk9556/videos
|
| He had a lot more energy earlier in his life (of course), but
| you can still see a lot of his ideas and passion.
|
| In the classroom in earlier decades he was sometimes _a lot_
| louder than this. :-)
| unit149 wrote:
| "You don't study Liszt, you don't study Wagner, and come out
| hating music." [17:21]
|
| Foster's work is based in the classical and English schooling
| tradition. When a boy was sent to school he would typically
| be introduced to the paradigms of Latin. Only having mastered
| it would Greek forms be introduced.
| ks2048 wrote:
| Some of the suggested videos from that link him speaking just
| in Latin, which is pretty interesting:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBIZEkTKuq4 [LatinTalk: 045
| Duo suadeo, duo propono]
| akshayshah wrote:
| I had the chance to attend some of Father Reginaldus's summer
| school in 1999, and it sparked a lifelong love of Latin. The
| article did a wonderful job capturing the verve that Reginaldus
| brought to the material.
|
| I've always imagined the Recurse Center being similar-ish for
| programming.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Father Reginald Foster has died_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25539292 - Dec 2020 (51
| comments)
|
| _The Vatican 's Latinist_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14769758 - July 2017 (61
| comments)
|
| _The Vatican's Latinist_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13789097 - March 2017 (23
| comments)
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| Would not have expected to read all of this article, but I did,
| started my day. Can recommend, would read it again.
| slyall wrote:
| When Pope Benedict resigned he announced it in Latin
| unexpectedly. Many present did not understand what he was saying.
|
| https://insidethevatican.com/magazine/pope-benedicts-resigna...
| felipeerias wrote:
| Time will tell, but after more than two millennia this might
| have been the last significant announcement made in Latin.
| error_logic wrote:
| Revealing much?
| error_logic wrote:
| Memetic hazard.
| Jun8 wrote:
| Who would be a person with similar competency in Ancient Greek
| living now?
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| It's fun to set your browser preferences to Latin (ISO 639-1:
| "la") and see what sites respect that.
| Aransentin wrote:
| Do you have any examples of sites that do that?
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| Wikipedia does this. The Vatican site did in the past. Google
| seems to have partial support, showing Italian in some places
| and Latin in others.
| dhosek wrote:
| I've been rebuilding the meagre Latin I picked up in college in
| the 80s and I've found late Latin to be a bit helpful for
| building confidence--Beeson's Primer of Medieval Latin and the
| Vulgate Bible have been my primary texts of late. With the
| Vulgate, I've been painstakingly translating by hand every verse
| (I'm not as diligent as I should be so I'm only up to Genesis 17
| despite a few years of doing this in fits and starts). With
| Beeson, I reached the point where by the time I got to the poetry
| section, I was relying much less on wiktionary (which is handy
| because you can find most words by their inflected forms rather
| than having to know the correct dictionary form). I doubt I'll
| ever be fully fluent, but I've got a pretty solid reading
| knowledge these days.
| Koshkin wrote:
| For anyone curious, this is one of the best places to learn about
| some early Indo-European languages:
|
| https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol
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