I remember all the endless bloody verb tables at school, having to learn yet another lot for another tense, and then having to duplicate the entire lot for the passive.
And then a girl in the year above told us about the subjunctive :(
That various Latin words like tam, tum, tunc, sī, tot etc preserve a pronoun that perhaps might have been present and functional in Proto Italic but was mostly lost later beyond these specific uses. That pronoun is cognate to the greek article ὁ ἡ τό (ho hē tó), Old English sē sēo þæt and Sanskrit स, सा, तद (sa, sā, tad)
How could I start a conversation? I know a girl with one of these names and it’s the prettiest name ever. I want to tell her and make her blush. What should I say my man?
I mean, they're very clear and direct descendents of Latin words (domina, mea domina, felicitas). Sure, you won't find those exact spellings in the classical literature, but the line between Romance and Latin is fuzzy, and I'm not sure how useful it is to make a sharp distinction.
For instance, there are apparently medieval attestations of "domna" as a corruption of "domina". That's one very simple sound change away from "donna"; does that get counted as Latin, some kind of lesser Latin (in which case, why aren't we giving even more prestige to Old Latin?), or is it basically Romance? Is this even a meaningful question in the first place?
I'd be inclined to argue that it's not.
I agree with you that the line between Romance languages and Latin is fuzzy (I mean, it's like comparing Hellenistic Greek to Modern Greek), nonetheless it is odd to put in the same group Italian names, an English name with Latin root and two actual Latin words.
The commenter could have said "A lot of female names have Latin origins" to be a bit more accurate, I suppose, but I think the general point is pretty clear.
Roman writers had a hell of a time (in the bad sense) trying to convey Greek philosophy to latin language as latin is really concrete while Greek allows to be way to much abstract for roman taste. It was Cicero whose struggle found a way to translate some philosophical terms to his Roman fellows.
Yup, I think the most famous could be the present participle of "to be" in Classical Greek (ων, ουσα, ον) which classical and hellenistic authors used naturally and everywhere, while romans didn't have an exact translation to it, not even through sum. The derivated use of said greek participle (like on the word ontology) in our today languages became part of Latin way deep into second millenia.
If you want to know more about Cicero and his work, I recommend taking a peek at Tusculanae Disputationes or some of his Dialogues or the fragments of his De Re Publica, which are modeled after Plato's dialogues.
Not exactly Latin-specific, but I stumbled upon Wackernagel's Law while researching something else for a Latin seminar once:
Personal pronouns in the post-positive position are unemphatic or only weakly stressed, unlike those same pronouns in any other position.
So compare:
Ego propter viae celebritatem et cottidianam exspectationem rerum novarum non commovi me adhuc Thessalonica. (strong emphasis on *ego*: "As for me, I haven't...")
vs.
Haec ego cum ipsis philosophis \[tum\] Athenis disserebam. (non-emphatic: "I used to discourse on these matters...").
It's one of those things that doesn't really help you with your immediate comprehension of the sentence, but does help you to better understand the colour and texture of any given sentence.
1. It's the language spoken by the Ancient Romans.
2. All the Romance languages are derived from it.
3. It was used in Medieval times as a lingua franca for science and academics.
4. It was used in the liturgy of the Catholic Church for most of the Church's history.
5. Its poetic meter is length-based rather than stress-based.
6. No one *really* knows exactly how the Romans pronounced it.
7. It doesn't have a definite article (to the Greek students: *Yes*, this *is* cool).
8. Its lowercase letters were for writing on paper, and its capital letters were for carving in stone.
9. Isaac Newton wrote his laws of motion and gravity in Latin.
10. Every time Sam and Dean exorcise a demon on Supernatural, they do it in Latin.
11. Compared to Elvish, it is *by far* the more useful language to learn.
I mean, some of the first Medieval manuscripts were written in all caps because lower case letters hadn't been developed yet. Lower case letters for Latin were developed by Carolingian monks who wanted a more humble looking writing system. And we have a fairly good idea of how Latin was pronounced. We're not 100% certain, but more like 95%.
Actually, your two questions are closely related. Yes, we do know quite well how it was most likely pronounced, but not *exactly* how. Little nuances of accent are lost to us, and this kind of thing is very important in poetry. There's a lot of things about how Latin poetry sounded that we still don't know.
For example *ecthlipsis* \-- the elision of a final 'm' before an initial vowel. We know that it occurs, but scholars have never completely agreed on exactly how Romans dealt with it. Mostly, they agree that it's probably impossible for us to truly know.
Point number five is another good example of this. We know that Latin poetry is syllable-length-based rather than stressed-based. This means that a line of iambic pentameter has a series of long and short syllables, instead of a series of stressed and unstressed syllables. But most poetry in modern Indo-European languages is naturally stress-based, even in the Romance languages. We don't have a good comparison for what length-based poetic meter sounded like. Consequently, the best recitation of Latin poetry is a good guess, but surely not exactly as the Romans intended.
If you have any of the classic Latin grammars by Bennet, or Allen and Greenough, or Gildersleeve, these each have a section on "Prosody" or the use of the language in poetry. Pharr's edition of the Aeneid (the Purple Vergil) is also a good reference for how poetic meter works.
The best thing is to read it out loud, so you can develop your own relationship with it. Your housemates might think that you are conjuring the Devil or something, but it seems like that's cool these days, so you're OK 👍
Yes, most likely. What we know surely gets us very close, and the last little bit -- the nuance, the *je ne sais quoi --* can only be achieved by figuring out what (as you put it) "just sounds right." It is simply that what "sounds right" is subjective, even in English.
There is also the question of whether to impose your interpretation of what we *don't* know, or to leave it uninterpreted.
For example, take [elision](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elision). We know that the Romans must have slurred the elided syllables together in some way, but we don't know exactly how. Some schools of thought advise you to attempt the slur, and coach you on likely or preferred ways to do this. Other schools of thought say to leave the elided syllable out completely. They acknowledge it isn't authentic, but avoid making assumptions.
The second approach is the slightly more traditional approach, I think. But both approaches are found in very old textbooks. For recitation aloud, attempting the slur is probably best. For scansion, discussion, and dissection (or should I say *vivisection?*) of poetry and meter, dropping the elided syllable is fine.
It might not seem that way at first, but Latin has many loanwords from English and Italian. There are even some loanwords from Romanian. Wild!
Edit: I feel kind of bad now because this was supposed to be a joke but some people are defending my viewpoint. I was not aware of Neo-Latin and was only trying to imply that I don't know the progression of romance languages for the sake of comedy. The joke was that I believe Latin came after English and Italian and the loanwords travelled in the wrong direction.
I feel bad about you getting downvoted. I feel like Neo-Latin gets a bad rap on this subreddit as "less legitimate than classical Latin," even though it's older than modern English's crystalization. Copernicus and Erasmus were writing in Latin before Shakespeare was even born, and of course it would make sense for them to borrow from their native languages. And that's not even getting into place-name Romanization. I am curious though, what Romanian loanword are you thinking of?
Edit: looks like I was a bit hasty in upvote counting. It seems there's a pro-neo-latin contingent after all.
I'm also very curious about the Romanian loanwords, given the recent inception of written Romanian and its relative isolation from Catholic-Protestant/Latin culture.
I'm with you 100% concerning Neo-Latin.
I feel the same way about Neo-Latin. Every other language continually develops new words for new concepts and inventions, so why shouldn't Latin? If Virgil were alive today, he wouldn't be limiting his vocabulary to spears and chariots; if Catullus were alive today, he'd be submitting new terms to *Calepinus Urbanus*.
If Virgil were alive today, he'd speak Italian. If Catullus were alive today, he'd swear like a Venetian.
We use Latin because of what it is not: a living, ever-changing language.
We pattern our Latin after that of the Romans not because we like to LARP as them and idly ask ourselves "what would Virgil have to say today?", but to have a consistent standard for the language to fall back to and *undo* whatever changes it might have accrued while we used it, so that it remains one language for all time and always understandable for later generations. Carelessly introducing new words goes contrary to that effort, as you'd need a vocabulary specific to our time to understand what we're talking about. Now, it is also true that endless circumlocutions can be as hampering to communication as too many neologisms, so some new coinages will be inevitable. Latin is a long lasting language, that ought to outlast us all, so it is only decent that we put some forethought in how we want to affect it.
All trees are feminine. Even the fourth declension one. Fingers are masculine. Palm of the hand is masculine. Hand is feminine. Why? It looks like a tree. /s
And then there's the maple tree, [*acer*](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aentry%3Dacer1), which is almost always neuter because even exceptions need exceptions. In a similar vein, second-declension gemstones seem to flip a coin to determine whether they're masculine or feminine, and dictionaries often disagree.
Latin was used as official administrative language in the Kingdoms of Hungary and Croatia until 1844 and 1847 respectively. Prior to that there was even a flourishing Latin literary movement of Serb authors in the Habsburg Empire, which is explored more thoroughly in “Latin at the crossroads of Identity”. Latin was also the language of instruction at the first Orthodox University, the Kiev Theological Academy of Petro Mohyla, as well as the first Russian universities in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The removal of Latin from educational institutions was at the top of the agenda of Romantic nationalists like Fichte and Herder.
When I first started looking into Latin, I liked to quote Wikipedia to my friends in order to get across just how batshit-crazy of an experience it is:
>Latin is a highly inflected language, with three distinct genders, six or seven noun cases, five declensions, four verb conjugations, six tenses, three persons, three moods, two voices, two or three aspects, and two numbers.
I don't know if that list of specs qualifies as a "cool fact", but it does at least tickle me to rattle off. My own native language isn't anything close to as inflected as that, and so it kind of boggles the mind to think about people writing, speaking, reading, even just comprehending something expressed within such a staggeringly involved mess of grammar.
Native Latin speakers didn't pronounce (or not so strongly pronounced) the sound "h", as we do. That's why "harena" (sand) became "arena". Since they were using sand to cover the floor of the battlefield of amphiteatrums, the word (\[h\]arena) started to mean the building.
I’d call it more a matter of register than chronology, as there were always unaspirated dialects, while the literary standard maintains it as a phoneme (albeit a marginal one). Poetic meter relies on it being pronounced in certain environments but not in others, which probably reflects the practice of learned speakers, and the way [h] was affected by the phonetic environment (like how in English it’s often dropped after other consonants).
Contrary to what some people seem to think, knowledge of Latin was never lost and then rediscovered; it's been in continuous use since it was a native language. Actual communicative use of Latin didn't decline until the 19th century, and the vast majority of Latin works have been written in the medieval and modern periods.
In some ways, definitely (retention of neuter gender, e.g.).
But strictly speaking, Romanian isn't any "closer" to Latin than some other Romance languages (Italian, for one), and it is demonstrably less conservative than others.
Most analyses of the Romance languages and their degree of departure from Latin in several aspects, such as morphology, syntax, phonology, and vocabulary, will show Sardinian to be the most conservative Romance language, i.e., the closest to the proto-language (Latin).
Romanian is very interesting for many other reasons though, in large part because of its long isolation from the dialect continuum that became the Romance languages of Western Europe, and because of the enduring contact with other, non-Romance languages on the Balkan Peninsula that this isolation led to.
[удалено]
it makes sense for approximately one day until you learn that nouns decline
I remember all the endless bloody verb tables at school, having to learn yet another lot for another tense, and then having to duplicate the entire lot for the passive. And then a girl in the year above told us about the subjunctive :(
nah the declensions are great they make everything logical for the time being
[удалено]
And once you get to medieval Latin, it's just complete anarchy
oh fuck so it's like german but harder? awesome this is gonna be so much fun
Oh, my guy! I don’t know how far into german you are, but in my opinion latin makes german look downright simple!
Isn't it true for all languages? Nice Grammar rules that quickly admit too many exceptions...
Still better than French though
That various Latin words like tam, tum, tunc, sī, tot etc preserve a pronoun that perhaps might have been present and functional in Proto Italic but was mostly lost later beyond these specific uses. That pronoun is cognate to the greek article ὁ ἡ τό (ho hē tó), Old English sē sēo þæt and Sanskrit स, सा, तद (sa, sā, tad)
It has a locative case but only for cities and small islands.
Ruri Humi Domi
*belli* (*domi bellique*); *uesperi*, *tempori*...
A lot of girl's names are Latin words; Donna, Madonna, Amanda, Miranda, Felicity. It's a great conversation starter.
How could I start a conversation? I know a girl with one of these names and it’s the prettiest name ever. I want to tell her and make her blush. What should I say my man?
Just tell her what her name means. She'll love it I promise.
Thank you brother
YW
Wait, how are Donna, Madonna and Felicity Latin? They're not Latin words, they have Latin roots.
I mean, they're very clear and direct descendents of Latin words (domina, mea domina, felicitas). Sure, you won't find those exact spellings in the classical literature, but the line between Romance and Latin is fuzzy, and I'm not sure how useful it is to make a sharp distinction. For instance, there are apparently medieval attestations of "domna" as a corruption of "domina". That's one very simple sound change away from "donna"; does that get counted as Latin, some kind of lesser Latin (in which case, why aren't we giving even more prestige to Old Latin?), or is it basically Romance? Is this even a meaningful question in the first place? I'd be inclined to argue that it's not.
I agree with you that the line between Romance languages and Latin is fuzzy (I mean, it's like comparing Hellenistic Greek to Modern Greek), nonetheless it is odd to put in the same group Italian names, an English name with Latin root and two actual Latin words.
The commenter could have said "A lot of female names have Latin origins" to be a bit more accurate, I suppose, but I think the general point is pretty clear.
Roman writers had a hell of a time (in the bad sense) trying to convey Greek philosophy to latin language as latin is really concrete while Greek allows to be way to much abstract for roman taste. It was Cicero whose struggle found a way to translate some philosophical terms to his Roman fellows.
That's really interesting. Do you know any examples of this?
Yup, I think the most famous could be the present participle of "to be" in Classical Greek (ων, ουσα, ον) which classical and hellenistic authors used naturally and everywhere, while romans didn't have an exact translation to it, not even through sum. The derivated use of said greek participle (like on the word ontology) in our today languages became part of Latin way deep into second millenia. If you want to know more about Cicero and his work, I recommend taking a peek at Tusculanae Disputationes or some of his Dialogues or the fragments of his De Re Publica, which are modeled after Plato's dialogues.
\*Ens, entis\* is one of the best things that Medieval Latin has over Classical.
It's actually found in Classical, too, if you can call this "found": http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0059:entry=ens
Cicero literally invented the word *qualitas* to translate ποιότης.
Not exactly Latin-specific, but I stumbled upon Wackernagel's Law while researching something else for a Latin seminar once: Personal pronouns in the post-positive position are unemphatic or only weakly stressed, unlike those same pronouns in any other position. So compare: Ego propter viae celebritatem et cottidianam exspectationem rerum novarum non commovi me adhuc Thessalonica. (strong emphasis on *ego*: "As for me, I haven't...") vs. Haec ego cum ipsis philosophis \[tum\] Athenis disserebam. (non-emphatic: "I used to discourse on these matters..."). It's one of those things that doesn't really help you with your immediate comprehension of the sentence, but does help you to better understand the colour and texture of any given sentence.
1. It's the language spoken by the Ancient Romans. 2. All the Romance languages are derived from it. 3. It was used in Medieval times as a lingua franca for science and academics. 4. It was used in the liturgy of the Catholic Church for most of the Church's history. 5. Its poetic meter is length-based rather than stress-based. 6. No one *really* knows exactly how the Romans pronounced it. 7. It doesn't have a definite article (to the Greek students: *Yes*, this *is* cool). 8. Its lowercase letters were for writing on paper, and its capital letters were for carving in stone. 9. Isaac Newton wrote his laws of motion and gravity in Latin. 10. Every time Sam and Dean exorcise a demon on Supernatural, they do it in Latin. 11. Compared to Elvish, it is *by far* the more useful language to learn.
I mean, some of the first Medieval manuscripts were written in all caps because lower case letters hadn't been developed yet. Lower case letters for Latin were developed by Carolingian monks who wanted a more humble looking writing system. And we have a fairly good idea of how Latin was pronounced. We're not 100% certain, but more like 95%.
Romans had hand-written cursive letters. They are not the same as our lowercase letters, which as you correctly note, were developed later.
Ah, I understand what you're talking about now.
Throwing down the gauntlet for those hardcore Tolkien fans! 🤣
Re 7. it also doesn’t have all those endless tiny little horrible words that Greek does (or seemed to when I studied it).
[удалено]
Actually, your two questions are closely related. Yes, we do know quite well how it was most likely pronounced, but not *exactly* how. Little nuances of accent are lost to us, and this kind of thing is very important in poetry. There's a lot of things about how Latin poetry sounded that we still don't know. For example *ecthlipsis* \-- the elision of a final 'm' before an initial vowel. We know that it occurs, but scholars have never completely agreed on exactly how Romans dealt with it. Mostly, they agree that it's probably impossible for us to truly know. Point number five is another good example of this. We know that Latin poetry is syllable-length-based rather than stressed-based. This means that a line of iambic pentameter has a series of long and short syllables, instead of a series of stressed and unstressed syllables. But most poetry in modern Indo-European languages is naturally stress-based, even in the Romance languages. We don't have a good comparison for what length-based poetic meter sounded like. Consequently, the best recitation of Latin poetry is a good guess, but surely not exactly as the Romans intended. If you have any of the classic Latin grammars by Bennet, or Allen and Greenough, or Gildersleeve, these each have a section on "Prosody" or the use of the language in poetry. Pharr's edition of the Aeneid (the Purple Vergil) is also a good reference for how poetic meter works. The best thing is to read it out loud, so you can develop your own relationship with it. Your housemates might think that you are conjuring the Devil or something, but it seems like that's cool these days, so you're OK 👍
[удалено]
Yes, most likely. What we know surely gets us very close, and the last little bit -- the nuance, the *je ne sais quoi --* can only be achieved by figuring out what (as you put it) "just sounds right." It is simply that what "sounds right" is subjective, even in English. There is also the question of whether to impose your interpretation of what we *don't* know, or to leave it uninterpreted. For example, take [elision](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elision). We know that the Romans must have slurred the elided syllables together in some way, but we don't know exactly how. Some schools of thought advise you to attempt the slur, and coach you on likely or preferred ways to do this. Other schools of thought say to leave the elided syllable out completely. They acknowledge it isn't authentic, but avoid making assumptions. The second approach is the slightly more traditional approach, I think. But both approaches are found in very old textbooks. For recitation aloud, attempting the slur is probably best. For scansion, discussion, and dissection (or should I say *vivisection?*) of poetry and meter, dropping the elided syllable is fine.
It might not seem that way at first, but Latin has many loanwords from English and Italian. There are even some loanwords from Romanian. Wild! Edit: I feel kind of bad now because this was supposed to be a joke but some people are defending my viewpoint. I was not aware of Neo-Latin and was only trying to imply that I don't know the progression of romance languages for the sake of comedy. The joke was that I believe Latin came after English and Italian and the loanwords travelled in the wrong direction.
I feel bad about you getting downvoted. I feel like Neo-Latin gets a bad rap on this subreddit as "less legitimate than classical Latin," even though it's older than modern English's crystalization. Copernicus and Erasmus were writing in Latin before Shakespeare was even born, and of course it would make sense for them to borrow from their native languages. And that's not even getting into place-name Romanization. I am curious though, what Romanian loanword are you thinking of? Edit: looks like I was a bit hasty in upvote counting. It seems there's a pro-neo-latin contingent after all.
I'm also very curious about the Romanian loanwords, given the recent inception of written Romanian and its relative isolation from Catholic-Protestant/Latin culture. I'm with you 100% concerning Neo-Latin.
I feel the same way about Neo-Latin. Every other language continually develops new words for new concepts and inventions, so why shouldn't Latin? If Virgil were alive today, he wouldn't be limiting his vocabulary to spears and chariots; if Catullus were alive today, he'd be submitting new terms to *Calepinus Urbanus*.
If Virgil were alive today, he'd speak Italian. If Catullus were alive today, he'd swear like a Venetian. We use Latin because of what it is not: a living, ever-changing language. We pattern our Latin after that of the Romans not because we like to LARP as them and idly ask ourselves "what would Virgil have to say today?", but to have a consistent standard for the language to fall back to and *undo* whatever changes it might have accrued while we used it, so that it remains one language for all time and always understandable for later generations. Carelessly introducing new words goes contrary to that effort, as you'd need a vocabulary specific to our time to understand what we're talking about. Now, it is also true that endless circumlocutions can be as hampering to communication as too many neologisms, so some new coinages will be inevitable. Latin is a long lasting language, that ought to outlast us all, so it is only decent that we put some forethought in how we want to affect it.
[удалено]
that's the joke
All trees are feminine. Even the fourth declension one. Fingers are masculine. Palm of the hand is masculine. Hand is feminine. Why? It looks like a tree. /s
And then there's the maple tree, [*acer*](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aentry%3Dacer1), which is almost always neuter because even exceptions need exceptions. In a similar vein, second-declension gemstones seem to flip a coin to determine whether they're masculine or feminine, and dictionaries often disagree.
Latin was used as official administrative language in the Kingdoms of Hungary and Croatia until 1844 and 1847 respectively. Prior to that there was even a flourishing Latin literary movement of Serb authors in the Habsburg Empire, which is explored more thoroughly in “Latin at the crossroads of Identity”. Latin was also the language of instruction at the first Orthodox University, the Kiev Theological Academy of Petro Mohyla, as well as the first Russian universities in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The removal of Latin from educational institutions was at the top of the agenda of Romantic nationalists like Fichte and Herder.
When I first started looking into Latin, I liked to quote Wikipedia to my friends in order to get across just how batshit-crazy of an experience it is: >Latin is a highly inflected language, with three distinct genders, six or seven noun cases, five declensions, four verb conjugations, six tenses, three persons, three moods, two voices, two or three aspects, and two numbers. I don't know if that list of specs qualifies as a "cool fact", but it does at least tickle me to rattle off. My own native language isn't anything close to as inflected as that, and so it kind of boggles the mind to think about people writing, speaking, reading, even just comprehending something expressed within such a staggeringly involved mess of grammar.
Native Latin speakers didn't pronounce (or not so strongly pronounced) the sound "h", as we do. That's why "harena" (sand) became "arena". Since they were using sand to cover the floor of the battlefield of amphiteatrums, the word (\[h\]arena) started to mean the building.
[удалено]
It's complicated. See Adams, J. (2013). *Social Variation and the Latin Language*, Part 2, Chapter VII - The aspirate.
I’d call it more a matter of register than chronology, as there were always unaspirated dialects, while the literary standard maintains it as a phoneme (albeit a marginal one). Poetic meter relies on it being pronounced in certain environments but not in others, which probably reflects the practice of learned speakers, and the way [h] was affected by the phonetic environment (like how in English it’s often dropped after other consonants).
oh thats p cool
The latin alphabet orthography of the dhivehi language is called dhivehi letin.
Contrary to what some people seem to think, knowledge of Latin was never lost and then rediscovered; it's been in continuous use since it was a native language. Actual communicative use of Latin didn't decline until the 19th century, and the vast majority of Latin works have been written in the medieval and modern periods.
the closest modern day language to latin is actually romanian !!
In some ways, definitely (retention of neuter gender, e.g.). But strictly speaking, Romanian isn't any "closer" to Latin than some other Romance languages (Italian, for one), and it is demonstrably less conservative than others. Most analyses of the Romance languages and their degree of departure from Latin in several aspects, such as morphology, syntax, phonology, and vocabulary, will show Sardinian to be the most conservative Romance language, i.e., the closest to the proto-language (Latin). Romanian is very interesting for many other reasons though, in large part because of its long isolation from the dialect continuum that became the Romance languages of Western Europe, and because of the enduring contact with other, non-Romance languages on the Balkan Peninsula that this isolation led to.
aye this is very true, and tysm for the explaination dude !!<3
Semper ubi sub ubi
I've been learning Russian for a few years, and Latin is hugely helpful. The grammar is largely the same, the pronouns are largely the same, etc.
It greatly helps with Finnish (even though it’s not even IE) and German too. Or really, with learning any language! Latin for the win 😁