Who speaks Latin In the 21st Century anyway?

Well, I do, more or less.

Quite badly, probably, compared to someone like Erasmus of Rotterdam, he of the beloved Adagia, but at least well enough to explain a passage of Virgil to students in essentially grammatical Latin or to converse freely with strangers at a conventiculum, without having to revert to a modern language for the sake of clarity. Nor am I alone. There are at least hundreds of us more-or-less Latin speakers, possibly thousands, although there are at most dozens of truly competent and eloquent speakers who can give a great Ciceronian oration without much preparation. There are many more who can comprehend aurally than speak, of course, who might listen to audiobooks of Cicero’s letters or Caesar’s De bello gallico without being capable of actually producing more than a few simple phrases. I don’t know what would happen if we could all take a time machine and go chat with Cicero. I wouldn’t get my hopes up, even if such a thing were possible. First of all, he might have some difficulty with our accents, particularly my awful Anglophone vowels.

Although that’s not really the point of any of this. I don’t speak Latin with the aim of speaking (well, officially - I have since made friends, for example in summer schools or through the Circulus Latinus in Rome, with whom I mostly speak Latin even though in some cases English or Italian would be equally appropriate). Rather, I have found that the active use of Latin, when implemented correctly (see this blog post for more - Carfagni explains better than I ever could), allows for a stronger and fuller grasp of the language itself, particularly in respect to grammar, vocabulary and idiomatic phrases, the knowledge of which is crucial for reading the authors themselves. The mere memorization of charts, phrases, and words, without exercises in speaking and writing with a teacher at hand to correct, is not itself sufficient to gain a good understanding of Latin, in my view, but best combined with speaking, writing, and as much reading as one has time for. Every new word or phrase discovered while reading Cicero or even someone like Apuleius may be written in a notebook, used in sentences both written and spoken, and later added to one’s Anki or analog flashcard deck. In our studies, we can draw on various methods and combine them as we see fit.

It’s not quite so mad as it sounds at first.

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