Learn to SPEAK Latin camp? Ita vero!
Dear Spies,
I alas am too old for this (and also I don't live in the USA) - but what a truly wonderful idea. An immersion camp for high school Latin students where you actually learn to SPEAK the language,not just read it! http://www.latinperdiem.com/tusculum17/
Camp activities will include:Reading and discussing in Latin a wide variety of authors from all eras of the languageSharing meals, games, athletics, and campfires all in LatinRecitations, competitions, dramatic interpretations, and lots of hilarity in LatinThe formation of abiding, literary friendships with other young people your own age who are learning Latin and loving the humanities
Sigh. O quam felices sunt illos iuvenes!!! (Visne mihi dare salem?)
yours, jealously,
Explorator Verborum
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Hello Karen - thanks for this message and well, good question! As a school girl I remember when I saw on the news the announcement of the new Pope, I couldn't help noticing the way they spoke Latin in the Vatican was not how we were taught it at school. It sounded totally Italian - and dare one say the Romans probably did sound more like Italians than Australians. Hem.I also remember a scene in the film "Goodbye Mr Chips" about the new "modern" way Latin words were ordered to be pronounced in English schools. Here's an excerpt from the dialogue:
Headmaster: I told you I wanted the new style of Latin pronunciation taught and you totally ignored it.
Mr Chips: Oh, that. Nonsense, in my opinion. What's the good of teaching boys to say "Kikero" when they'll still say Cicero? Instead of vicissim, you'd make them say "wekissem."
Headmaster: I'm trying to make Brookfield an up to date school and you insist on clinging to the past!
(I was definitely taught to say "Kikero" and "wekissem" - what a terribly modern and up-to-date institution I must have attended...)
Thanks for the tip re "A Company of Swans" which I have not (yet!) read but will seek it out.
In the meantime, some enlightenment from this little video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_enn7...
Interea, vale! best wishes, Ursula
This sounds really fun. I still remember competing in the Latin Reading Competition at high school.
I do love Latin in a really nerdy way... in one of my favourite books (A Company of Swans by Eva Ibbotson) there is a memorable passage where the heroine (daughter of a Cambridge don) met some natives in an Amazonian village, and they managed to communicate using a little Latin (gained through living on a mission station)