What are you currently reading ?

[Leman]

Taught the same at school. Classical education - thought it was a waste of time, until I started to do crosswords or wanted to use a variety of words with similar meaning in both essays and conversation. Also very useful in a Doctor Who series in the late 60s when a Mr. Magister turned up and I spoilt it for everyone when I said that magister was the Latin for master!

[FierceKitty]

Magister - learned master, teacher, wise authority figure
Dominus - powerful master, lord

I'd have expected the bad Time Lord to have been the latter.

[fsn]

But which Latin? There are several variant including Ecclesiastical Latin  which pronounce things differently. I know this because Alexander Armstrong opined on the subject on Pointless - and he's posh so should know about these things. I mean proper posh. He's got breeding.

I'm sticking with "Sissy-row", along with "Dark Age" and "English Civil War". I shall do so until the French call our capital city "London", not "Londres", the Americans stop referring to Her Majesty as "The Queen of England" and an Englishman says "loch" not "lock".

[shireman]

A retired Latin master writes: unless one is speaking in Latin 'Kickero' is definitely in the  'pretentious, moi?' category, a bit like saying one is off to Firenze for one's holidays.

[pierre the shy]

Romanes eunt domus ?!? 

or how the Romans dealt with mispronounciations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIAdHEwiAy8

[Westmarcher]

But which Latin? There are several variant including Ecclesiastical Latin  which pronounce things differently. I know this because Alexander Armstrong opined on the subject on Pointless - and he's posh so should know about these things. I mean proper posh. He's got breeding.

Interesting to read that there were/are different types of spoken Latin, Nobby, but makes sense when you think of all the different regional accents English is spoken in. I'm not Catholic (or Roman), only going to church at weddings, christenings and funerals, so not sure how much Latin is spoken in church these days but of all the people who might get the pronunciation right, I would have thought it would be the Catholic clergy considering they have an almost unbroken line of Latin speakers all the way back to the Late Roman Empire. Is Ecclesiastical Latin the equivalent of the Queen's English?

Anyhoo, I've often wondered if Latin was spoken like modern day Italian but in Godfather tones.  

p.s. Yes, Alexander Armstrong is really posh. Isn't he related to royalty?

p.p.s. @ pierre the shy  

[Duke Speedy of Leighton]

Don't forget 'The Great Sixteenth Century Vowel Slip'
(yes, it is real - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift )

[Westmarcher]

     .... my brain is starting to hurt. 

...... meanwhile back in Italy, I like this pronounciation of Cicero (click on the speaker icon)

https://translate.google.co.uk/?client=safari&rls=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&client=tw-ob#la/en/Cicero

*Chee-cherro* 

[cameronian]

Kinda depends where and when you were educated. In my day we still had the latin Mass so we were speaking latin on a daily basis. Church latin is definitely italianate so 'Cicero' was 'sisero', caelis was 'chaeleece' and so forth. we had a young latin master who tried the 'kikero' stuff but he didn't last.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85seaghNrEo

[FierceKitty]

The aim of teaching kids Latin was never to get it right. It was a class thing, a discipline thing, an excuse for not admitting that there were a lot of living languages with more and better literature thing....pro di immortales! I really regret the time I wasted on it.

[Duke Speedy of Leighton]

I take great pride in the fact I was once introduced to the Head of Classics at Harvard by my MA in Classics supervisor with the phrase "This is Will Denham, the most lingustica incompetent person we have ever met, and he's having a pint of bitter!"

I had just got 33% in a Latin language module (pass rate was double that!).
My response was 'Oh well, that's the PhD out the window then!'

It was a good pint, and was followed by many, many more!

[Techno]

I was always the first to finish a Latin exam.....And I'd have an answer for every question.....And I usually got something around 22%.

I couldn't wait to drop Latin as an O level subject.....I did Art, instead. 

Cheers - Phil

[Ithoriel]

My grasp Latin was like my grasp of French.

I could get almost full marks for foreign language into English, usually dropping a few points for doing too good a job. Apparently rendering a colloquial French phrase, say, as an equivalent colloquial English one didn't display sufficient grasp of French??!

On the other hand English into the foreign language flummoxed me almost completely.

As a result I usually scraped through exams with a mark in the low fifties.

Being at school in Scotland we did "O Levels" and then "Highers." When we came to choose Highers subjects the French department suggested I do Maths. To be fair the Maths department suggested I do French. The French department lost and as a result I have a "C" grade Higher French qualification. The Latin master was rather more persuasive and so I only have "O Level" Latin.

[KTravlos]

Beyond the depression caused by my reading of "Kerenia Koukla (The Wax Doll)" my vacation was great.

Skimming the "Class Wargames" book which is now available for free. It is not per se a wargame, but more a political manifesto but it has its interesting points and is surprisingly well written. They do take the time to explain the choices they make, and even if you do not agree politically with the group, they do make some great points.

http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/classwargames-web.pdf

[KTravlos]

Here is an excerpt

"In an avant-garde homage to Takako Saito's  Liquid Chess , its infantry, cavalry and  artillery  pieces  were  represented  by  glasses  filled  with  red  or  white vodka. Honouring  Debord's  devotion  to  alcoholic  intoxication,  the
unfolding of this game was guaranteed to result in the players of North
and South becoming very drunk. Each time that they took an enemy
piece, they'd have to down the large shot of vodka in its symbolic glass. "

[KTravlos]

ok last post on "Class Warfare". This is a deceptively interesting book. Well worth giving a try.

[Ithoriel]

Got 49 pages in and found it incredibly dull and unutterably pretentious.

[KTravlos]

haha! That is the navel gazing part. It gets better when they go into the actual games/events/ludic subversions whatever (around page 100 and after I think). Of course they are pretentious! They are UK academic leftists.

[Westmarcher]

Here is an excerpt

"In an avant-garde homage to Takako Saito's  Liquid Chess , its infantry, cavalry and  artillery  pieces  were  represented  by  glasses  filled  with  red  or  white vodka. Honouring  Debord's  devotion  to  alcoholic  intoxication,  the
unfolding of this game was guaranteed to result in the players of North
and South becoming very drunk. Each time that they took an enemy
piece, they'd have to down the large shot of vodka in its symbolic glass. "

Makes me wonder what tactics to use. Do you give away pieces early to make your opponent drunk then try to move in for the kill or would that be counter-productive as you might then get hammered taking his pieces when trying to make up for lost ground?    

[KTravlos]

I did forget to say that I finally finished the Patrick O'Brien Aubrey-Maturin series. I believe I started reading it at some point in 2011. 20 books in 7 years is not bad. In general it took me some time to get used to his style of writing, but once I started I learned to love it. There are moments of exquisite beauty in his writing, and many memorable characters. And yet he never flinched from the reality of life and death in early 19th century society and war. I have not read any other books were death can come so sudden.

In the end the series is a masterpiece and classic. If you like historical fiction, whether military or social, or indeed scientific, or if you like good writing, I strongly recommend this series of books.

ps: not sure if I will buy 21. I had the Last Chevalier of Dumas gifted to me, and while I loved it, the fact that it was not finished was a bit of an irritant.