Peter Sinclair: The internet's latin renaissance

A mo ... amas ... amat ... The ancient Romans had a word for it — and quite a few more besides, but this is a family newspaper.

I only raise the matter because — after studying it for 10 long years, from the age of 8 to 18 — this is about as much Latin as I can remember. All that suffering was in vain ...

Yet the world's liveliest and most contemporary means of communication, the internet, is responsible for reviving this most moribund of tongues, the language of the greatest empire the world has ever known.

Its renaissance comes just in time. From being the West's most universal written language for well over 1000 years — the choice of pedagogues and princes, of scholarship and politics and diplomacy and religion — Latin slipped gradually from the curricula of most schools in the course of last century.

Displaced largely by English, the Esperanto of its day remains the official language of the Vatican, survives fitfully in the legal profession — obscuring matters rather than clarifying them as far as the average punter is concerned — and in the Linnaean system of taxonomy, which pigeonholes every living thing in a way that any scholar can understand.

Yet it remains the infrastructure of a dozen mother-tongues, and knowing how it works makes it much easier to grasp how they work, too.

These days, learning it on the web is way more fun than it was in my day when we were bored out of our brains by the pronouncements of tedious old men in tablecloths.

There's a lively proliferation of Latin-only newsgroups, chat-rooms and bulletin-boards — get together in Latin-only forums like LatnChatn, a gateway to the classical experience, with its Latin log-in, FAQs and how-to guidelines.

Just bowl in and say "Quid agis?" ("how are you?") or "Quid novi?" ("what's new?"). If you'd like to check out a copy of the e-zine of the same name, email latin.guide@miningco.com with "Sample Quid Novi" as the subject-line and "Please send sample Quid Novi" in the body.

Using emoticons in Latin chat-rooms, incidentally, isn't done — at most, type PJD ("per jocum dixit" — "I said it in jest").

And while you're welcome to swot up Latin phrases or Roman maths made easy (bear in mind that, then as now, "easy" was a highly relative term — mightn't it be more fun to acquire your classics somewhere like V-Roma where you can experience text-based virtual-reality adventures in ancient Rome itself?

And by all means, if you must, revisit Allen and Greenough's famous or, to generations of schoolboys, notorious, Latin Dictionary and Grammar, now online, but you're on your own. I'm heading over to Cornell University ("Latin can be fun if you make it fun!").

Its Tips for Learning Latin with Less Stress, friendly self-help quizzes and relaxed vocab, verb and adjective drills might just possibly rekindle the interest of that poor little 10-year-old kid with his brain going numb as he puzzled over gerunds and pored over Ovid all those years ago ...

* petersinclair@email.com


Links

Esperanto

Roman Empire

linnaean system of taxonomy

LatnChatn
Swot up Latin phrases

VRoma

Latin Dictionary and Grammar

Tips for Learning Latin with Less Stress