Vytautas Šaltenis
Scary AustinI've helped fellow travelers in fluent French, okay Spanish, and even my sketchy Russian, but I will never be as badass as this person.
Independently Broke@MaryAustinBooks my 2 years of high school Latin did not prepare me for that level. I’ve forgotten it all now anyway.
@Social_Recluse2
I never took Latin and am really wondering WTF is the Latin word for "airport."
I never took Latin and am really wondering WTF is the Latin word for "airport."
@MaryAustinBooks aer porta, portus, portum? One of those. Airport is a Latin based word, I believe.
Lydia Trivia@Social_Recluse2 @MaryAustinBooks according to the Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis it's *aerinavium portus* https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/institutions_connected/latinitas/documents/rc_latinitas_20040601_lexicon_it.html#1
Roy -- the dull one@MaryAustinBooks @Social_Recluse2
I'm not fluent, but maybe it's
irport-aWay?
@oldclumsy_nowmad @MaryAustinBooks could be! I’m the opposite of fluent.
Mel@MaryAustinBooks Same here... speak English and German fluently and fairly good French. Can understand various others.
KimSo cool! I had 4 years of high school Latin, 35+ years as a med unit sec. (you remember when docs orders had Latin instructions for dosage et al).
Universal language.
JimTheWhyGuy ❌👑@MaryAustinBooks The only Latin phrase I know and employ often is "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur" which means "Everything sounds more profound in Latin." 🤣
@jimthewhyguy
It's not a dead language. It's only mostly dead, and as we learned in the Princess Bride, mostly dead is still barely alive.
It's not a dead language. It's only mostly dead, and as we learned in the Princess Bride, mostly dead is still barely alive.
Simon dē Gulielmō 🐧@MaryAustinBooks I've used German to help a traveller in Thailand and somewhat faulty Spanish to explain what was wrong with my leg to someone in Korea. However, nothing as impressive as Latin.
Flippin' 'eck, Tucker!@MaryAustinBooks A good demonstration of how rather like today English is a lingua franca so once was Latin. Ironically, French has never had that status!
@losttourist
And the ghost of Napoleon is somewhere going "WTF, did I not get enough guys killed??"
And the ghost of Napoleon is somewhere going "WTF, did I not get enough guys killed??"
Account has movedFrench definitely had that status, but only for a brief window, mostly in the 18th century. Frederick the Great for example preferred to speak French and complained that German was a language for peasants.
Gerbrand van Dieyen@alessandro @losttourist @MaryAustinBooks also in the 19th century in The Netherlands. The elite used French as a second language.
Oblomov@losttourist @MaryAustinBooks French absolutely did have its time, largely between the 18th and 19th centuries
@oblomov @MaryAustinBooks Yep, so I have found out. Every day is a school day on Mastodon 😄
Owainski@losttourist @MaryAustinBooks Didn’t the Franks speak a form of German?
Alex Hoffmann@MaryAustinBooks @wendynather that is indeed badass.
@mangochutney @wendynather
Right?? The first thing you learn in normal language courses is talking about modern travel and tourism. From what I heard from friends, Latin class is mostly erotic poetry. How do you even discuss a normal modern business trip in a dead language??
Right?? The first thing you learn in normal language courses is talking about modern travel and tourism. From what I heard from friends, Latin class is mostly erotic poetry. How do you even discuss a normal modern business trip in a dead language??
@MaryAustinBooks @wendynather I couldn’t even imagine. The closest frame of reference I have are my courses in classical Chinese philology but even that doesn’t fully work as certain newspapers in China still use classical grammar because simplified Chinese is simply ill-equipped to efficiently frame complex thoughts.
With Latin I‘d be more worried about the vocabulary for any piece of relevant technology.
Enola Knezevic@mangochutney @MaryAustinBooks @wendynather The word you are looking for is "computatrum". BTW, Linux, -cis, f.
IchMeine@MaryAustinBooks
Reminds me of my language learning book in school which also tried to have some more modern topics. I really can not remember what it was, but it led to having a Latin word for escalator.
Reminds me of my language learning book in school which also tried to have some more modern topics. I really can not remember what it was, but it led to having a Latin word for escalator.
AMS@MaryAustinBooks @mangochutney @wendynather International travel and business are surprisingly well covered in basic latin courses. Airplanes and computers less so.
your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦@MaryAustinBooks he totally wins.
Em & future cats 🇺🇦🐈🏳️🌈@MaryAustinBooks thank god it’s not a “dead” language 😹
(being very sarcastic here 😹)
But that’s sweet that guy was able to help him with that knowledge 😹
(being very sarcastic here 😹)
But that’s sweet that guy was able to help him with that knowledge 😹
George BI helped a guy fill out his form at the DMV once (he was speaking Egyptian Arabic on the phone with someone to figure out how to fill it and I offered to help instead) but it was self centered: I forgot to bring a pen and he had one so I was able to borrow his after he filled the form.
@gbargoud
Heh, I was at DC Reagan once and the American Airlines bag check-in staff had no French speaker. It was clearly a fluke, but I got to call out from way, way back in line "I speak French!" I went up to the front and translated, and then they checked me in because I only had one bag. Turns out education is worth something after all!
Heh, I was at DC Reagan once and the American Airlines bag check-in staff had no French speaker. It was clearly a fluke, but I got to call out from way, way back in line "I speak French!" I went up to the front and translated, and then they checked me in because I only had one bag. Turns out education is worth something after all!
hanktank61@MaryAustinBooks I can manage in Dutch, English , German and a little bit of French. The museum-volunteer team is much more diverse. Not all present at once always. But often some of Arab, Ukraine-Russian, Polish, Arab several dialects besides the Western languages available.It can be funny, when unsuspecting visitors from far away regions enter. Calling the colleague somewhere else in the building , "Can you please help us out for a moment ?¨.
MidgePhoto@MaryAustinBooks conversational Latin as a Lingua Franca.
Orrock LXXXVI XLVII@MaryAustinBooks Well kind of on topic: A small club that my late father belonged to in Baltimore when he was well-launched in his career as a lawyer regularly hosted talks by new members. One such new member gave his talk in Latin. He came up to my father and asked him how my father thought the talk had gone. My father, who had a very good deadpan, said, “Not bad.” He paused and said gently, “Too bad about your Etruscan accent.”
flocc @JuniorsWelt
Schau mal, bezüglich Latein 😄
Schau mal, bezüglich Latein 😄
Larry Clapp:)
I logged in to X for the first time in months to read the rest of that thread. :) (Alas, there wasn't much more than that.) Anyway, thanks!
Bradalot “
”The fellow is legend, his poetry readings are the best. Check out his YouTube channel.
Here he is reading (in his own reconstruction of ancient Ugaritic, with English subtitles): Anat's Battle from the Baal Cycle
Anat's Battle from the Baal Cycle, read in Ugaritic
Kalle Kniivilä@lclapp @MaryAustinBooks So it's in THAT PLACE.
🫣
That's why I couldn't find it in the @azforeman Mastodon account.
😞
Virginicus@kallekn @lclapp @MaryAustinBooks I haven’t seen @azforeman around in a while, but I think he’d appreciate knowing so many of us respect his badassitude.
Erik Ableson@MaryAustinBooks There is badass and there is *badass*. Hat’s off to this guy
mbpaz@erik @MaryAustinBooks To all native speakers of germanic languages, I would like to humbly remind you that Latin is different to modern romance languages... but NOT HUGELY different.
If you can speak Portuguese, Italian etc you can recognize quite a bit of Latin (with some imagination)
@MaryAustinBooks @erik The alternative to reading outlandish phallic references is reading Caesar, whose prose is something like "Caesar is great. Caesar travels to Gallia. Caesar defeats his enemies. Caesar makes Rome great", so phallic references may be preferable.
MercutioI do know his De Bello Gallico and the sentences in it spanning half of a page -- I had Latin classes for more than three years.
I just wondered where you took your simple-minded examples from.
@Mercutio @MaryAustinBooks @erik Reminiscences from my single course of Latin, close to 40 years ago. OK, maybe exaggerating a bit, but you do get the point. We teenagers could translate paragraphs from Caesar after few months of classes - and I swear Latin was not among our top interests.
Neither among mine.
But it has proven useful later, at least for learning other Romanian languages, and for understanding technical terms.
Same for ancient Greek.
AlexanderVIHey, you can also read Cicero fussing about his art collection and real estate deals!
\u1f0a1@MaryAustinBooks @mbpaz @erik The case system is very similar to the German case system (as we're talking Germanic languages)
CrazyDogLadySezPEACE@mbpaz @erik @MaryAustinBooks Native English-speaker here, had Spanish through the 400-level in college in the 80’s, which should’ve made me fluent but I didn’t have anyone to speak it with so it’s mostly gone. I can still read it a bit, or well if I have time and a Spanish dictionary for unfamiliar vocabulary.
I’ve watched Polish shows on Netflix (thankfully not all tv is as dumbed-down as USA tv), in Polish with English subtitles, and I was pleased to learn how much Polish is very like Spanish, I assume bc of Latin and the Catholic Church.
(I know it is not a Germanic language. Just chiming in in the Latin-is-(almost)everywhere-if-you-know-how-to-look theme.)
@Heartofcoyote @erik @MaryAustinBooks Native Spanish speaker here - can confirm after some traveling to Poland that I cannot understand a single word of Polish 😂
As far as I can tell, Polish is fundamentally slavic, but with significant Latin and Germanic influence. OK, a word here and there may resemble something I know, but it's definitely very unlike romance languages.
@mbpaz @erik @MaryAustinBooks Huh. Maybe it had something to do with accents? I would literally hear what sounded like Spanish words and see from the caption text that yeah, I had heard what I thought. Maybe it wasn’t so much, though, and just made an outsized impression. 🤷🏻♀️
@Heartofcoyote @mbpaz @erik
I was surprised how many French loan words there are in Russian (until I thought about it for a hot second and then I wasn't surprised). I was expecting my French background to be no use at all for a Slavic language, but it helped more than I thought it would.
I was surprised how many French loan words there are in Russian (until I thought about it for a hot second and then I wasn't surprised). I was expecting my French background to be no use at all for a Slavic language, but it helped more than I thought it would.
@MaryAustinBooks @Heartofcoyote @erik modern and not so modern loan words do help a lot - once you hear "machina" and "technika" it's easy to associate the words with vehicles.
On the other hand, the very literal transcriptions may sometimes shock you - It took me a while to understand "hemenex" meant... ham and eggs.
(And yes, in Spanish we write "fútbol", I know)
Nu Modular@MaryAustinBooks Are you sure he wasn't just telling you he is a po' lad?..
Latin tends to get to the root of things... ;-)
Aknavah Allim@MaryAustinBooks
Did you know that we used to have news in Latin here in Finland until quite recently
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuntii_Latini
Did you know that we used to have news in Latin here in Finland until quite recently
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuntii_Latini
Markus Redeker 🐘@immersfer @MaryAustinBooks I had listened to them sometimes and now I like to imagine Latin spoken with a Finnish accent. 🙂
Trifolium@mrdk @immersfer @MaryAustinBooks
The Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE ended the weekly news bulletin Nuntii Latini in June 2019, but the old 383 weekly episodes continue to be available, both as text and audio.
Full list: https://areena.yle.fi/1-1931339
One example case, schools end their academic year etc.: https://areena.yle.fi/1-50138644 (Hint: more text through link ”Näytä lisää”.)
