He was a really cool guy and teacher of some really cool students, many of whom are still teaching Latin with their own spins on it.
This article was published in 2017, so it doesn't mention that Foster subsequently died in 2020.
https://www.youtube.com/@latintalk9556/videos
He had a lot more energy earlier in his life (of course), but you can still see a lot of his ideas and passion.
In the classroom in earlier decades he was sometimes a lot louder than this. :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBIZEkTKuq4 [LatinTalk: 045 Duo suadeo, duo propono]
Foster's work is based in the classical and English schooling tradition. When a boy was sent to school he would typically be introduced to the paradigms of Latin. Only having mastered it would Greek forms be introduced.
Father Reginald Foster has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25539292 - Dec 2020 (51 comments)
The Vatican's Latinist - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14769758 - July 2017 (61 comments)
The Vatican’s Latinist - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13789097 - March 2017 (23 comments)
Striking contrast with the most well known classicist in the UK being unable, by their own admission, to comfortably read Latin text basically at all.
Abandoning the old ways has cost us a lot in almost every area of human endeavour. Especially in pedagogy.
That's hard to believe. A friend was a Latin teacher; high school students read actual Roman Latin in their second year.
I've heard that few can speak Latin 'correctly', because the skill is almost useless - you can't talk to Romans or almost anyone else; it's all written. (I don't know about the Catholic or other churches, but I do recall that 'church Latin' differs from classical Latin.)
I studied Latin from 7th grade through my early undergraduate years (1990s to early 00s), and that dynamic didn’t change as much as you might expect - the focus remains on deeply reading a few texts, rather than building the fluency required to quickly read and understand new texts on unfamiliar subjects. The corpus of texts for standardized exams is also relatively small and well-known - I didn’t see a single unfamiliar passage on either AP Latin exam.
Perhaps some classics professors read Latin as fluently as the average Spanish literature professor reads a Madrid newspaper, but I certainly never met any outside Reginaldus’s orbit.
I've no proof, but my assumption is there are students of Latin casually speaking the language to show off at places like Cambridge University.
There isn't a firehose of new text being created in Latin, and you never (or very rarely) scan over something to find out what it's about, extract a quick fact from it, or decide if it's worth reading. You know what's in it, you know the standard take-away from it, there's a good chance you've read the highlights in translation already, you may even know one or two hair-splitting academic controversies about it, and you are sitting down for a good hour or several hours with it. It's a completely different kind of reading from scanning a web site or a newspaper to find something worth reading more closely, looking for the answer to a concrete question, or scanning something to decide if you can afford to not really read it.
The best analogy I can give is this: imagine taking Spanish from grades 7-12, culminating in a full year reading and understanding selections of Don Quixote. The entire curriculum builds towards this capstone year, and other areas of inquiry get very short shrift. Nobody cares if you can live comfortably in a Spanish-speaking country or watch Spanish-language TV. Nobody cares about modern idiom, or any more recent works of literature, or technical writing. s/Don Quixote/Aeneid + a small corpus of Roman poems/g and you have the bulk of my Latin education.
This sounds negative - we weren’t fluent in Latin! But for a teenager, it was a wonderfully deep exploration of Rome’s greatest hits. I loved it.
Humans naturally learn languages when they are immersed in the language. It sounds like Latin instruction was more focused on rules, and didn't provide that immersion before Foster. I can attest that many other foreign language classes also don't provide enough immersion to really learn the language, although being limited to ~10 hours a week makes that virtually impossible.
I can read German moderately well (can get through newspaper articles pretty easily, and novels with some effort), but I have very little ability to synthesize it (it'd take me quite a lot of effort to construct a sentence in writing, and I can't really speak at all). But the lack of ability to produce the language doesn't seem to negatively impact my reading ability.
... in the first few years of life. Beyond that, it's an intentional, conscious and often challenging effort for many.
Some people, even as adults, are far more adept at learning new languages than others. For the rest of us, it typically requires devotion to the subject for years.
Because Latin has died out as a spoken language, it doesn't really change over time like modern languages do. If you find a sentence written 2000 years ago and another elsewhere written 1500 years ago, it's likely they mean the exact same thing.
"Latin is a dead language" is actually a positive statement about the continued use of Latin, especially in the church; so much of the writing of the early church and the church fathers was in Latin, and we can know that we're interpreting it faithfully (or at least as faithfully as we have done for centuries) because the language is static.
Until around the beginning of the 19th century, Latin had remained the most important language for the publication of scientific works and for international correspondence between well-educated people, and during this time many words have been added for naming things unknown to the Romans.
Also the preference for various grammatical variants or for certain word orders has been strongly influenced by some features common to the evolution of European languages, so a Latin text written during the Middle Ages feels quite different from a text written during the Roman Empire.
... and important to the Catholic Church.
In general, I strongly recommend to read carefully in original the scientific literature of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, even if that requires the ability to read at least Latin, German, French and English, because by reading the original sources you can find frequently that the authors have said things quite different (and wiser) than what it is claimed that they have said in many university textbooks or popular science books.
In science and technology, there is very little that becomes truly obsolete, because the optimal solutions for solving practical problems often cycle through the space of solutions during the years, depending on how the balance between various advantages and disadvantages changes with the evolution of the available technologies. So those who believe that it is enough to read the up-to-date literature are typically wrong, because the miracle new solution of tomorrow is frequently again the same that was best 50 years ago, or even earlier, but which had become forgotten in recent years.
Documents that contain administrative minutiae or legal rulings or whatever may only have value for historical study, yes, but one major reason for the very existence and authority of the Catholic Church is to serve as guardian of her doctrines and their development, and to communicate them faithfully across generations. Meaning, the doctrines of the faith are never made obsolete, or else the faith, and certainly the authority of the Church, is undermined. The understanding of them can be deepened and expanded over time, but the doctrines themselves are fixed.
I think of it as reading the very best writing, e.g., Charles Darwin, and not just another paper or book. Wouldn't you love to have a conversation with Darwin? That's what you get when you engage with their writing.
But post-classical Latin unhelpfully covers Rome from ~200 CE into the 20th century, including the Catholic Church and all those scholars and scientists. I'm not sure what differences arose before or after the fall of Rome in 476 CE, which began the Middle Ages.
It evolved into Italian, Spanish, etc:
Not useless at all - speaking Latin helps you to better appreciate both prose and poetry. Understanding the sound of the language helps you to appreciate the word play and nuance. Also as children we learn language mostly by listening and speaking, not by reading, so it makes sense to learn Latin in that way.
There's been significant research on reconstructing classical pronunciation. But Latin was spoken as a primary language for over a thousand years, so the pronunciation naturally changed over that time and there were of course regional dialects - some of which evolved into Romance languages.
In reading Latin, it doesn't have a lot of silent letters (it does have some), so it's quite easy to read aloud a Latin sentence once you understand the basic phonetics. In classical times poems like the Aeneid were recited aloud, so doing so today makes sense.
Fluency is a somewhat subjective concept, but the growth of the internet has spawned a growing community of Latin speakers internationally. (I speak Latin at roughly a B2 level and am constantly improving).
The essayist Sydney Smith, himself an Anglican clergyman, said something teasing about "false quantities" in Roman Catholic services. I can tell you that the pronunciation varies in church Latin: c and g can be "softened" when followed by e or i; v is v, not w.
You don't hear a great deal of Latin in Catholic services these days: in the Tridentine rite the congregation doesn't get much to say. The Novus Ordo Latin Mass is awfully rare.
I understand why you'd feel that way but classics departments aren't what they used to be. It's pretty common for even elite universities these days to not require grad students to understand the languages of the cultures they purportedly study across the board, let alone for Latin.
https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignor...
Latin as She is Spoke: How Classicists Tricked Themselves Jan 2022 (171 points, 191 comments)
Sorry, what? Who is this? Even the PhD students I knew in classics, the ones who were specializing in history or literature, were comfortable reading texts written during their time periods of interest.
To start off, there is a textbook that I think really resonates with hackers. It's called "Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata" (The Latin Language Illustrated through itself) and it teaches Latin in a fun and mind-altering way. The entire book is in Latin, but it starts of with very simple sentences that anyone who speaks English or a Romance language can intuit with a bit of effort. There are very clever marginal illustrations that help drive the meaning home. It builds an understanding in Latin brick by brick, and eventually you find yourself understanding complex sentences and ideas. Furthermore the book is just fun and often funny, it tells a story of a Roman family and strikes an excellent balance between teaching and entertaining. Contrast this approach with dense Latin texts that have a heavy focus on grammar and translation.
So that's one way to learn the language, but what about speaking it? Well, that's where the Legentibus app comes in. It's a Latin language podcast application which has wealth of well recorded stories in classical Latin at a bunch of different difficulty levels. It also has has the Latin language text of the stories that are highlighted as the audio is read, with optional interlinear English translations. I find these really help at first to help me understand the content. I turn them off later once I get the gist of what is being said, or just listen without reading. You can also do dictionary lookups of individual words without turning on the translation.
Here are the reasons why I think this is one of the most enjoyable and useful things I do as a newbie Latin language learner:
1) The stories themselves are engaging. Some of my favorites are from "Gesta Romanorum" (Deeds of the Romans) which is a 13th or 14th century collection of stories often with a moral allegorical themes. These were rewritten in a beginner friendly style, but use classical Latin idioms, some of which are explicitly pointed out in the text as clickable footnotes.
2) Daniel (the co-founder of the app and Latin scholar) does an excellent job as a reader. I listen to a lot of audio books, and I especially like it when the reader consistently does memorable character voices. Be it an extortionist dog slyly claiming "Omnēs canēs amant" (everyone loves dogs) or Pluto, King of the Underworld, commanding "Eurydicē accēde hūc!" in a booming voice, Daniel nails it.
3) You can listen to these while folding laundry, cooking dinner, or doing whatever. I manage to squeeze in 40 minutes a day or so of these stories, and I'm always happy to do it.
4) Often times when I learn a new bit of grammar or learn the precise meaning of a word, my mind often will replay in my head a phrase (in Daniel's voice) from one of the stories that uses that word or grammatical concept. This happens more than you might expect.
Finally, there is a pretty vibrant online community of Latin language learners out there, from the /r/Latin subreddit, to the LLPSI (Lingua Latina per se Illustrata) Discord (https://discord.gg/uXSwq9r4) to the Latin & Ancient Greek) Discord (https://discord.gg/latin) and others.
It's never been easier to pick up Latin.
I've read the criticisms of it, and it could well be it works worse for others, but for me it worked very well - and I utterly failed to learn German to anything like the same level, despite ~8 years of classes in it. My German teachers were hardly consistent in their methods (some were very classicist-latin-grammarian types), but none of them used the direct method.
I had four years of Latin in junior high school and high school, and have been trying to revive my skills using Duolingo for five minutes a day for a few years. It will be fun to try something new.
I recommend learning them concurrently. It'll be easier than you might think!
I’ve always imagined the Recurse Center being similar-ish for programming.
The tl;dr with Ancient Greek as I understand it (warning) is that dramatically less content was written and over a much larger time period. Homer's works are even described as their own (Homeric) and as such it makes "Ancient Greek" a more nebulous term than "Latin," even when you account for Old/Classical/Late branches. In turn, making it in my estimation harder to have a Fr. Foster equivalent.
Look into it and let me know.
(105 points, 23 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13789097
https://insidethevatican.com/magazine/pope-benedicts-resigna...
1. Foster died in 2020 (he tested positive for Covid at the time of his death, but it’s unclear whether that was the cause).
2. The promised second volume to the bones is available now.
3. There is a third volume coming out in August.