Follow that sentence with something like Aqua bibita, puellis gratias agit and suddenly we can determine what the first sentence meant regardless of which options we're given. If I'm going to be asked to do translation exercises, I'd rather have questions that I need to answer by understanding the text, as opposed to questions that I need to answer by referring to the construction of the question. Unmentioned but possible readings include "The farmers give water to the daughter" and "The farmer's daughters give water ". You have to make the assumption that the correct translation is given as one of the options. This is answerable, but only because three of the answers are impossible. The farmers give (their) daughters water. > Select the English phrase that correctly translates the Latin. But Cicero's Latin is further removed from French then modern day Italian.
Over the course of several centuries, local changes and influences forged distinct languages.įor sure, classical Latin and modern romance language are all of the same family. That's where you find the common root of modern romance languages. As Roman influenced waned, people across the European peninsula fragmented. The decline of the Roman Empire coincided with an age of mass migrations. That's when classical Latin became a dead language. It diverged from classical Latin to a point where both lost out being mutual intelligible (7th century). Vulgar Latin also saw active evolution during late antiquity. Vulgar Latin developed first in Italy and was subsequently adopted throughout the Empire. The Late-Roman republic and the Roman Empire saw the emergence of vulgar Latin next to classical Latin. I would like to add that that's not a coincidence either.
And with regard to classical languages in particular, the Anglosphere has been mocked for reviving 'spotless' classical pronunciations instead of simply using, for example, modern Italian or Greek pronunciation. That "uneducated, rude gringos" are a long-standing negative trope in popular American media reflects this insecurity. I don't know if this holds true elsewhere in the Anglosphere, but in my experience Americans who are interested in learning foreign languages are generally eager to perfect their pronunciation (whether or not they succeed is another question entirely, though to be fair the same is true about most English learners).
#PRAISE FOR LINGUA LATINA PER SE ILLUSTRATA HOW TO#
> Moreover, but this is a personal sidenote: why do people outside of the Anglosphere need to learn how to speak perfect English (and get the usual banter about pronunciation not being spotless), while the Anglosphere generally doesn't bother returning the favour (while at the same time complaining about being treated as uneducated, rude gringos) My grandfather's first language was an obscure French dialect, and he's able to communicate with Mexican Spanish speakers without much trouble. > By learning Latin you multiply the speed at which you learn romance languages, which will allow you to understand and communicate with a much larger share of the world.Īs someone else said, you can just as well learn a Romance language and you'll have the same benefit when learning a second. This approach has quite a bit to recommend it, most prominently that it's easy to find fluent models of the pronunciation of a living language. You can find similar conventions for other dead languages - it's the only option available for Chinese where we just plain don't know what the pronunciation was in 600 BC, and it's "Reuchlinian pronunciation" in Greek. The rest of Italy has a better claim to be speaking "some derivative of medieval Latin" than the Vatican does the Vatican's version presumably reflects mostly-arrested development after a certain point, as far as syntax goes.Īs for pronunciation, I tend to assume (without any relevant knowledge) that the Vatican's Latin pronunciation is just how the same written words would be pronounced in standard Italian. This is vague the syntax and pronunciation of Latin change continuously into Italian. > I assume that at the Vatican they speak some derivative of mediaeval Latin Something similar holds for ancient jokes. For example, it's much easier to make sense of ancient misspellings if you can recognize that the misspelling and the target word would have sounded the same. That is true, but there are questions for which you want to know what the historical pronunciation was.
I think that none of these require historically correct Latin pronunciation.
0 kommentar(er)
