It's easy to see latin as an academic exercise, existing only for intellectual purposes. A toy language useful only as an exercise of the mind. In many ways, this is what it is taught as in school. There's a problem with this perspective, though. Latin is real, and was real. People grew up speaking this language. Beggars in the streets spoke it. Average people spoke it. So many people spoke it that it became the lingua franca for centuries to come. Latin was used for everyday conversation. If you want to learn latin and become proficient with it, you will need to speak it.
A question that comes up very early regarding conversation latin is that of saying 'yes' and 'no'. Things in latin don't really work that way, chiefly due to cultural differences between us and ancient Rome. In Rome, one would answer yes by repeating the question in the affirmative. If I were to ask you, "Are you going out for dinner tonight?", instead of saying yes, a roman would say "I am going out for dinner tonight", or he would say, "I am not going out for dinner tonight." The closest you will get to no in latin is the word non. This, however, is usually translated more as 'not'. If we wrote, non seruus sum, it would translate as "I am not a slave."
No comments:
Post a Comment