Language nights
I finally got to go to a cena Latina in Berkeley, and had a wonderful time. It's been quite some time since I had a chance to speak Latin, but I found that I was much more fluent than I expected. I managed to express sentiments such as
- Many women work in nonprofit organizations.
- Evildoers fear EFF legal director Cindy Cohn.
- I need to study Portuguese and German because I'm about to go to Brazil and later to Germany. Because I've been studying Portuguese, I was worried that I would start to use Portuguese vocabulary by mistake while speaking Latin.
- Portuguese is very similar to Latin. (response: You shouldn't say "persimilis" because it's too strong in this context; I'd just say that they're quite similar.)
- The DVB Forum is having a meeting of television engineers in Rio de Janeiro even though it is a European organization.
- I work for an organization that protects Internet freedom, and I'm writing a book about computer security.
- A battery is called a "pile" because Volta, the scientist who discovered batteries, stacked up layers of iron, copper, and acidic media.
- I wanted to go to college in California partly because my mother used to live in San Francisco and constantly told me when I was growing up that it was the best place to live and that people who live there were incredibly lucky.
- My family is from Germany; a newspaper in my family's hometown wrote an article about my visit and suggested that I return and meet with the official historian of the town (but I can't do that without learning German, because I doubt that the historian speaks English or Latin).
- After learning how to say "I work with lawyers" in various languages, I should probably also learn how to say "but I'm not here to sue you!" in those same languages.
- Who was responsible for the recent practice of teaching Latin only as a written language when all other languages are taught as written and spoken language? (ans.: "The Germans!")
with relative ease in Latin. I also made a couple of jokes about the fact that the modern Latin word for "juice" is the same as the classical (and modern) Latin word for "law" or "rights". Those jokes don't translate particularly well.
We also had an interesting discussion when the founder of SALVI received a cell phone call in Latin. One question was whether all her friends speak Latin ("if they did, I wouldn't have very many friends") and another, after she had to go because her battery was running out, was why a battery is called a pila in modern Latin. (See above, but a simpler answer might be that the word is borrowed from Spanish.)
I had a lovely time and would certainly go again to future cenae Latinae; I'm also going to join SALVI and buy a contemporary Latin dictionary. And I'm even tempted to try to go to an intensive Latin immersion program such as the SALVI-sponsored rusticatio or the class taught by Reginald Foster.
Immediately after the cena Latina, I went to Michelle's house and started studying Portuguese with her. Somehow I managed to avoid any particular degree of linguistic confusion; the only cross-linguistic error I made all night was when describing the cena Latina to Michelle and discussing the names of languages; I said that Latin-speakers call Portuguese "lingua Lusitanica" and that they call Latin "lingua Latina", but that if "lingua" were masculine it would be "Latino". (Nope -- that's Portuguese; it would be "Latinus", like the Aeneid character.)
I understand that a number of Brazilians have studied Latin, so perhaps if I get a negative answer to "fala Ingles?" I should try "fala Latim?".
Anyway, I had a great time studying with Michelle, and she helped me improve my Portuguese accent a bit. Michelle has a tremendous facility with accents and speaks Brazilian Portuguese beautifully, even though she hasn't been to Brazil yet. Michelle pointed out that Brazilian Portuguese does have a real future tense; the guidebooks suggest "vou +
My most complicated Portuguese sentence yet was something like "O Consulado-Geral do Brasil, que fica na Rua Montgomery (perto da Rua do Mercado), deu-me um visto". (Why not "deu para mim"? What preposition would you use if you weren't using a personal pronoun? Is it "a"? Please don't answer that if you're reading this after October 2004.) Esta frase é a verdade!
