Hello, I am a mezzo-soprano studying Latin required in music school in Prague.
My Latin teacher encouraged and motivated me to study Latin (Latin is compulsory) because I will be able to understand most romance languages !
I have been studying Classical Latin for 2 years and I can speak and sing it ! But I still don’t understand Italian for example or Spanish
I am very depressed speaking and singing in a dead language…
How come I don’t understand Italian or Spanish ? Are Italian and Spanish so different from Latin ?
Well, for starters, Spanish and Italian have lost the case system of Latin, and many word-forms that are common in them are not word-forms which are common in classical Latin, but rather word-forms which replaced classical Latin terms in vulgar Latin, and hence why many words may not be familiar to you. Anyways, you would probably have to separately study any given Romance language itself to be able to understand such to any real extent; just knowing classical Latin will not enable such in itself.
On top of that, Romance languages took Old Germanic loanwords resulting in Fr <blanc>, Sp <blanco> and It <bianco> vs La <albus> = En <white> or in Fr <guerre>, Sp & It <guerra> vs La <bellum> = En <war>.
Plus phonological change that has had French or Portuguese differentiated from more 'conservative' languages (Spanish, Occitan) and of course from Latin.
Plus the use of prepositions to replace Latin case-inventory and declension-system.
Plus neology from 500 up to 2005...
Anezka:
Latin is still the official language of the Vatican state. You can, of course, practice it with willing nuns, monks, priests, nuns, bishops, archbishops and the pope of Rome himself.
Furthermore there are a few thousand scholars all over the world who can speak it.
How can you possibly say Latin is a dead language? Sung by you it must be a live beautiful language, unless all those who speak Latin are ghosts.
Lots of luck in your singing career :-)
Latin is so dead, even I don't speak it!
Anezka : do you sing German too ? If so, do you like it ?
Aren't most operas sung in Italian?
Sure, but there is a lot of religious classical music sung in Latin.
Spanish, Italian, French , portuguese, romanian, catalan, etc.. Are derived from "vulgar latin", wich was the spoken form of that language, quite different from the classical written latin.
Romance languages are much more close together than they are from latin.
On the other hand, a knowledge of Latin grammar is an excellent foundation for tackling other languages.
I discovered that an understanding of the concept of "declension" gave me a distinct advantage over my classmates in learning German.
Man! You can't spell in any language, Sander, can you? Jeez.
Anezka,
It's true that if you know Classical Latin you won't be able to understand any of the Romance languages. However, you will still be able to recognize the meaning or approximate meaning of thousands of words in these languages and won't have to 'relearn' them.
Some Classical Latin words disappeared from the Romance languages altogether. For example, Os "mouth" yielded to bucca ("cheek" in Classical Latin) which became the words for "mouth" in French (bouche), Spanish (boca) and Italian (bocca). Romanian rejected os for another word gur@ from Classical Latin gula meaning "throat". Still, many Classical Latin words survived in Romance like amicus, corvus, lupus, taurus, terra, victoria, aedificium, librum, canere /cantare, volare, nasci (friend, raven, wolf, bull, land, victory, building, book, to sing, to fly, to be born) ) and are nearly the same in all or most of the Romance languages.
If you look at many Classical Latin sentences you will eventually recognize more Romance cognates than first meets the eye:
1) Inimici nos viderunt "The enemies saw us"
Los enemigos nos vieron (Spanish)
2) Leo tamen ferox est "The lion is also fierce"
El león también es feroz (Spanish)
3) Mel ab apiculis provenit "Honey comes from little bees"
Le miel provient des abeilles "Honey comes from bees" (French)
4) Vidisne arcum caelestem? Do you see the rainbow?
Voyez-vous l'arc-en-ciel? (French)
5) Cave canem / Attendite canem "Beware of the dog"
Attendi al cane (Italian)
6) Penna (illius) corvi "The raven's feather"
Pan@ corbului (Romanian).
If you google in Vulgar Latin Wikipedia it will take you to a site which has a section that shows what Classical Latin words did not survive in Vulgar Latin & Romance and what later Latin words they were replaced with.
Pana corbului "The raven's feather" or "Feather of the raven."
Brennus,
I am able to recognize many Latin words in Romanian for instance (There is a small Romanian community in Prague and some students as well) Living in central Europe I am more familiar with Romanian diversus Italian or Spanish
After understanding Romanian I was very excited in understanding Italian and Spanish …But it just didn’t happen :-( I thought Italian and Spanish are closer to Classical Latin than Romanian is and that is why I believed that I will be able to understand Italian better…But unfortunately now I think is the other way :-(
greg wrote …” White = Fr <blanc>, Sp <blanco> and It <bianco> vs Latin <albus>” in Romanian is albu
But I don’t want to speak or learn Romanian ! Is not an international language like Spanish for example :-( I just wanted to understand Spanish more…Unfortunately I don’t study Latin Vulgaris or Medieval Latin …
Thank you very much for your replies !
