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Contemporary Latin

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Contemporary Latin is the form of the Latin language used to compose texts from the end of the 19th century down to the present. Three kinds of contemporary Latin can be distinguished:

  • New Latin, formerly the dominant secular form of Latin used as an international lingua franca down to the 19th century, and as a significant professional language in academic and scientific fields such as medicine, pharmacy, zoology, and veterinary medicine, where many periodicals, itineraries, and important monographs were written in Latin. Today New Latin is still used in the nomenclature of animals, drugs, illnesses, anatomy, and botany, where Latin nomenclature is still required.[1]
  • Living or Spoken Latin, an effort to revive Latin as a spoken language and as the vehicle for new and entertaining dialogues and publications. Involvement in this Latin revival can be a mere hobby, or extend to projects for restoring its former role as an international auxiliary language. Living or Spoken Latin is the primary subject of this article. Contemporary Latin is characterized by the general adoption of the classical pronunciation of Latin as restored by specialists in Latin historical phonology. [2]
A contemporary Latin inscription at Salamanca University commemorating the visit of the then-Prince Akihito and Princess Michiko of Japan

Contents

[edit] Emergence

Reform of Latin instruction and writing to more closely approximate classical Roman usage was an ongoing academic project throughout the 19th century. There was, however, much initial resistance to any change in traditional methods. For instance, the essentials of the classical pronunciation had been defined since the early 19th century (e.g. in K.L. Schneider's Elementarlehre der Lateinischen Sprache, 1819), but in many countries there was strong resistance to adopting it in instruction. In English-speaking countries, where the academic pronunciation diverged most markedly from the restored classical model, the struggle between the two pronunciations lasted for the entire 19th century. The transition between Latin pronunciations was sudden and drastic (the "new pronunciation" was adopted throughout the schools in England in 1907),[3] but the older pronunciation, as found in the nomenclature and terminology of various professions, continued to be used for many decades, and, in some spheres, to the present day.

In the late nineteenth century, Latin periodicals advocating the revived use of Latin as an international language appeared. Between 1889 and 1895 Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published in Italy his Alaudæ[4]; this publication was followed by the Vox Urbis: de litteris et bonis artibus commentarius[5], published by the architect and engineer Aristide Leonori from 1898, twice a month, until 1913, one year before the outbreak of World War I.

The early 20th century, marked by warfare and by drastic social and technological changes, saw few advances in the use of Latin outside of the academy. Following the beginnings of the re-integration of postwar Europe, however, Latin revivalism gained some strength. The first International Conference for living Latin (Congrès international pour le Latin vivant), held in Avignon in 1956, marked the beginning of a new era for the active use of Latin.

At the present time, several periodicals and social networking web sites are published in Latin; see external links below.

Latin has also been used as a spoken language in numerous summer conferences throughout Europe, and more recently in America.

[edit] Spoken Latin

Many users of contemporary Latin promote its use as a spoken language, a movement that dubs itself "Living Latin". Among the proponents of spoken Latin, some promote the active use of the language to make learning Latin both more enjoyable and more efficient, in this respect drawing upon the methodologies of instructors of modern languages. Others pursue a more radical approach, supporting the revival of Latin as a language of international academic, perhaps even scientific and diplomatic, communications (as it was in Europe and European colonies through Middle Ages until the mid-18th century), or as an international auxiliary language. However, as a language native to no people, this movement has not received support from any government, national or supranational.

A substantial group of institutions (particularly in Europe, but also in North and South America) has emerged to support the use of Latin as a spoken language.

Notable proponents of spoken Latin today include A. Gratius Avitus, Gaius Licoppe, Luigi Miraglia, and Terentius Tunberg.

[edit] Original literary production

[edit] Poetry

Recent writers of Latin poetry include Arrius Nurus, Geneviève Immè, Alanus Divutius, Anna Elissa Radke, Ianus Novak, Thomas Pekkanen, and others.

[edit] Translations

Various texts—usually children's books—have been translated into Latin in the twentieth century, for various purposes, including use as a teaching tool or simply to demonstrate the author's command of Latin in a popular context.

Contemporary Latin texts include:

2009 - over 80 illustrated children's books in Latin have been published on the Tar Heel Reader website.

[edit] Other examples

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ "International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (Saint Louis Code), Electronic Version". http://www.bgbm.fu-berlin.de/iapt/nomenclature/code/SaintLouis/0040Ch4Sec2a036.htm. Retrieved on 2008-08-05. 
  2. ^ E.g. Prof. Edgar H. Sturtevant (The Pronunciation of Greek and Latin, Chicago Ares Publishers Inc. 1940) and Prof. W. Sidney Allen (Vox Latina, A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin, Cambridge University Press 1965), who followed in the tradition of previous pronunciation reformers; cf. Erasmus's De recta Latini Græcique sermonis pronuntiatione dialogus and even Alcuin's De orthographia.
  3. ^ The School world, Macmillan & Co., 1907
  4. ^ Cf. Wielfried Stroh (ed.), Alaudæ. Eine lateinische Zeitschrift 1889-1895 herausgegeben von Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. Nachdruck mit einer Einleitung von Wielfried Stroh, Hamburg, MännerschwarmSkript Verlag, 2004.
  5. ^ Cf. Volfgangus Jenniges, "Vox Urbis (1898-1913) quid sibi proposuerit", Melissa, 139 (2007) 8-11.
  6. ^ Asterix in Latin.

[edit] External links

 This article's external links may not follow Wikipedia's content policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links. (May 2009)

[edit] Dictionaries and glossaries

[edit] Groups

[edit] Lessons

  • Latinum — Latinum is an online audio course in spoken Latin, based on George Adler's A Practical Grammar of the Latin Language (1858).

[edit] News

[edit] Social

[edit] Other


Ages of Latin
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—75 BC 75 BC – 200 200 – 900 900 – 1300 1300 – 1500 1500 – present 1900 – present
Old Latin Classical Latin Late Latin Medieval Latin Renaissance Latin New Latin Contemporary Latin
See also: History of Latin, Latin literature, Vulgar Latin, Ecclesiastical Latin, Romance languages, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum
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