I once was sitting in O’Hare airport reading a book of Latin poetry when a guy looking like a monk walks up to me looking utterly lost and asks “Loquerisne Latine”? (Do you speak Latin?) To which I answer “Ita, possumne te adiuvare?” (Yes, can I help you?.)
Turned out he was indeed a Polish monk and knew only Polish and Latin. Had never been outside Poland before, or even seen the inside of an airport, and needed help finding his way. That is my personal story of Latin as an auxlang.
The ironic part is that in Chicago of all places he came upon a Latin speaker before a Polish speaker
By the by, there are still plenty of people who can and do speak Latin conversationally. I don't mean to suggest that spoken Latin in and of itself is a freakish thing. https://youtu.be/xj-zCfVC2Zg
Though there are much weirder things you can do with Latin than talk to monks. https://x.com/azforeman/status...
Since this blew up I might as well append here my brief salvo on why it really is possible to learn Latin and Greek for active use, and on how the difficulty of the languages is often overblown and exacerbated by bad pedagogy. https://blogicarian.blogspot.c...
@azforeman This absolutely 100% needs to be a scene in a movie.
@GrammarTable If it were a movie, the monk would be on the run from the law and I'd somehow get sucked into a crazy plotline as helpless interpreter after being mistake for his accomplice.
@azforeman For a brief moment in time, between the two of you, it was once again alive ❤️
@merm_a_lerm Conversations in Latin happen regularly though wherever you get enough proficient speakers together https://youtu.be/xj-zCfVC2Zg
@azforeman We had a cousin who was a missionary bishop. Every time he had to go to the Vatican for a conference, everybody spoke Latin because it was the one language they all knew.
@azforeman I have never studied Latin, but I work in an environment where it is treated as a living language, and I am so heartened to read this tale ☺️🎓 #Placet
@azforeman @AliceFromQueens Inject this thread into my veins. I took 12 years of Latin, and this has never ever happened to me in the wild.
@azforeman I had a Latin conversation with two visitors from Sicily in about 1986 when I’d only been learning the language for a couple of years: they spoke no English; I no Italian. It was the happy medium…
@azforeman Sadly, no. But once I was on a bus, reviewing my flash cards for Biblical Hebrew. There’s a guy sitting next to me. He leans over and asks, “Say, are you studying … Tibetan?” Possibly my imagination, but he seemed disappointed to learn it was Hebrew.
@azforeman @juliagalef My daughters study Latin. This pleases me.
@azforeman One of my Bucket List ambitions is to wrangle a visit to the part of the Vatican that contains the ATM programmed in Latin. I really want to frame a receipt for C€
@azforeman Great story :) makes me wonder, what happened to the -ne particle in modern Romance languages? E.g. Chinese has "X不X/X唔X?" and I love it – is there a name for this pattern, what other languages have it, and why/when did it disappear in Europe?
@azforeman @yuanyi_z This is an unexpectedly wholesome story.
@azforeman Is there Latin twitter for the crew in Vatican or other catholic personnel?
@azforeman The only Latin I have is drawn from the Law, music and Royal Navy ship mottos, my favourite being "Quis eripet dentes" of HMS Tiger.
@azforeman @TalullasMom That is just ancient language badass.
@azforeman Latin, Chinese, English, the languages of the future
@azforeman I learned some Latin in Catholic school. No one understood, but I'm a weirdo, and it entertained me. Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam. (I have a catapult. Give me all the money, or I will fling an enormous rock at your head.)