The Roman poet Ovid may have put it best when he said ”Rident stolidi verba Latina” – Fools laugh at the Latin language. Indeed, after centuries of decline and declarations of being dead, Latin as a living, spoken language is making a comeback of sorts.
Take the recent scene in the mountains near Rome, where 30 Latin aficionados cavorted together, chanting odes by Horace and pouring wine into a stream.
Before them was their guru, the Reverend Reginald Foster, a papal Latinist and a Carmelite monk from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who was barking commands in English and Latin.
Foster (63) is a professor at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, where he takes the unusual approach of teaching Latin as a living language.
He also runs a separate intense eight-week summer session for advanced students, which included the recent romp in the Roman hills at Horace’s villa.
While Latin has not been spoken casually for over a thousand years and only its grammar and literature are typically studied today, the sounds of Cicero and Virgil are resurging among an increasingly wider audience, largely because of schools like his.
”I don’t like certain methods, memorising and jamming it, treating the language like a dead frog, or something like that,” Foster said. Instead, his students learn sight reading, listening comprehension and Latin conversation.
Other schools using a similar approach include the University of Louvain in Belgium, a high school in Campania, Italy, and the University of Notre Dame and the University of Kentucky in the United States.
Dirk Sacre, a professor and neo-Latin expert at the University of Louvain, said spoken Latin is growing in popularity, citing an increase in the number of high school teachers signing up for courses.
”I don’t think there’s a general tendency to say that we’re talking in Latin these days in schools or universities,” Sacre said. ”But, it’s an acceleration, certainly. Seminars are happening more and more in Europe and the US, and there are more and more people trying to teach Latin as a living language.”
But he added that ”hostilities and repugnances” still exist among traditionalists.
Among Latin fans, however, expressions slip their way into everyday conversations, said Nicholas Sylvester, an undergraduate at Harvard who studied with Foster this summer.
”Hello” becomes ”salve,” ”I don’t know” is ”nescio,” and ”ne fle” is ”don’t worry,” or literally, ”don’t cry.”
Still, it’s not for everyone, and Foster’s classes do attract a diverse group.
This summer’s group included Gretchen Triulzi (62) a mother of six who decided to return to a language she loved studying as a child, and Sophie Hanina, an 18-year-old medical student from London who couldn’t imagine being a doctor without first studying Roman epic writers first.
”It’s the most eccentric bunch I’ve ever met,” Sylvester said. ”People are exaggerations of themselves. Think about the person who leaves their kids home, their family, their job, their lives. Think about people who come to Rome on their honeymoons – to study Latin. That is the type of person in this class!”
For newlyweds Sarah and Patrick Miller of North Carolina, Foster’s class was a natural culmination of their courtship. They met while studying Latin in college.
”We have romantic dinners where we talk in Latin,” Patrick
Miller (31) said. A possible pickup line? Try ”Accipe vinum, puella pulchella” or ”Have some wine, pretty lady.”
Spoken Latin peaked in the second century, when the Roman empire spread from modern-day England to Iran. After the empire fell, local languages developed and then completely displaced it everywhere but schools and universities.
Although for centuries Latin found an enclave in the Roman Catholic Church, its decline there began after the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council, which allowed the use of the vernacular in place of Latin in the celebration of Mass.
Sylvester said that today, chatting in the language of ancient poets is ”very pretentious” but that the method brings him closer to understanding the texts he wants to read.
”There’s no need to justify to the hoi polloi,” Sylvester said. ”The world wouldn’t be interesting without academics.” – Sapa-AP