It’s a frightening day for most Latin teachers when they are first askt by their students to “say something” in Latin. The often stutter around before throwing out whatever sentence first comes to their mind, oft quite Anglicized and simple. The secret is of course that nearly no Latin teacher can actually speak any Latin and those that can pump out several phrases do so in deep shadows of their native English. Of course as time and fervor for the defunct language go on, some teachers have garnered semi-fluency and even might teach their classes in Latin, but is not only rare, but solitary and often again Anglicized.
Of course for the vast majority of Latin teachers, for all their years of learning, Latin seems to remain a puzzle, a math problem that was to be solved every time seen and the idea that teachers could produce their own Latin is unspeakable. Learning of Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, and any other living language is aided daily by pronunciation and dialog; Latin is not. Of course that may be the difference in goal between living tongues and Latin; it might be fruitless to perfect Latin composition for it is no longer the standard of intellectual thought, and speech be even more inutile. Reading, more often than not, is the only form of communication taught along with translation which is often reviled by the professors of other languages.
My purpose here is not to represent that Latin should be spoken in the classroom; I want to speak about spoken Latin in its rare occurrences in general. I do however find it self-evident that in a learning environment, students would be able to read and translate with higher proficiency if these skill are taught in conjunction with speech, listening, and composition. Oral and productive language skills seem to me obvious compliments of reading, and I think it is not ridiculous to say that students taught all skills will advance faster even if the point of the evaluation of their progress is gone exclusively on their translation skills.
So let the topic of discussion be moved to the Latin actually spoken in its semi-fluent varieties, most of which in these days can be found in the English speaking world, particularly in the United States.
There is also still this idea that Latin is still spoken in the Vatican in ecclesiastical varieties, but this really isn’t true either. A minor working knowledge of Latin may be present in Catholic clergy around the world, but they must still enlist the help of Latinists (Reginald Foster being most well-known) to actually produce Latin edicts. The fact that automatic teller machines in the Vatican as a novelty can be in Latin does not bear away from the fact that none conversate and none grow up acquiring the language natively.
A Standard
Latin
is of
course not an amorphous blob of speech and writing; it has boundaries
that are too often transgrest. Some more "eclectic" teachers have the
will, which I think naīve, to teach Latin as if it were a single
constant chain between antiquity and the Enlightenment, but its
variations, syntactical and phonetic are irreconcilable. Medievalisms
in Latin bear an unmistakable similarity to languages extant today; in
my experiences, Latin students favor medevalisms to classical "purity"
simply because such familiar medievalisms seem to function as a crutch.
Vocabulary
Where classical and medieval Latin placed on equal setting in the classroom, it seems most probable that modern students would develop a more evident affinity for the medieval dialects bearing the most tenacious similarities with their own native languages. The vocabulary and grammatical constructions everywhere apparent in classical Latin are replaced along with new idioms which in all limit the student of medieval Latin from dedevolving the language into the classical form. The worst possibility, as has happened before during medieval times with scant Latin fluency, is that an amateur writer ends composing nothing but his native language with Latinate inflections, verb endings, and if lucky, word order. This produces a variance in Latin communication that has arisen many times in the past in which alien "speakers" of Latin are as unable to communicate with each other as if they had be working in their own respective native tongues.
This is not dissimilar to
what occurs in immigrant minority languages in the process of being
overwhelmed by the common tongue of the land. Spanish speakers of the
United States often use the words asistir and atender in the English sense of the words; these are native speakers! We can even more easily see a native English speaker using assistere and attendere in
Latin in the same meanings they have acquired in English. Of course
individual words in Latin have hundreds of years of this type of
semantic change to account for, and the idea that students should be
taught the classical and non-classical lexicon simultaneously is
incredibly if not unreasonably demanding. If Latin is ever to be used
in even remote societies, the precise semantic worth of every word must
be identified, especially speaking of words which had changed
significantly since the classical era.
Usage and Pragmatics
So we may not be able to know precisely how common men greeted each other in person; they most certainly did not do so as in their letters, “Si vales bene est, ego valeo.” We don’t know for sure how people communicated common love or anger or any manner of feelings. We are largely ignorant of the vocabulary and style common men spoke of politics. The closest viewpoints we have to a truly conversational tone are either correspondence, which remains more often than not a semi-formal ideal, and graffiti, which may be hardly amicable and more obscene than the desirable colloquia.
So a reconstructive
Latinist seeking a coherent standard for modern speech must decided on
with phrases to lexicalize into platitudes and which to use for standard
greetings and social negotiation. The painful thing is that due to the
lack of information of popular speech, such decisions may often be
arbitrary.
Pronunciation
"Anglorum etiam doctissimi tam prave Latine efferunt, ut in hac urbe, quum quidam ex ea gente per quadrantem horae integrum apud me verba fecisset, hominem rogaverim ut excusatum me haberet, quod Anglica non bene intelligerem."
Joseph Scaliger
Of course besides vocabulary, syntax and pragmatics, we have to remember that speakers, and as it seems to me especially native speakers of English, have not shown any considerable regard for adjusting the destructive touch of their native phonology to the production of Latin speech. Even honorably fluent speakers of Latin demonstrate absolutely atrocious accents. This does not imply, as many amateur Latinists seem to believe, that a good pronunciation is refraining from /v/ for /w/ or the Ecclesiastical palatalization; it does imply that a good accent should if not imitate the reproduced standard of Latin, at least imitate the more appropriate neo-Romance phonology.
A good Latin pronunciation for an English speaker would imply at least the following:
- An absolute lack of the initial aspiration of [p], [k], [t], and if using Eccesiastical speech [tʃ]
- An absolute lack of vowel off gliding, that is, [e] instead of [eɪ] and [o] instead of [oʊ] and [i] instead of [ij]
- An absolute lack of final schwas for the letter <A> in English
- An absolute lack of vowel rhotisism
- The pronunciation of /r/ as [r] and not [ɹ]
- The pronunciation of /h/, even in words English speakers seem to not like it in, such as hora and honor