Quibusdam miris narratis, tres amici colloquium de amicitia instaurant. Etiam fabulam novam ‘radiophonicam’ ab amicis editam describunt laudantque.
Suntne dicta vel loci de amicitia (apud quemvis scriptorem) qui vobis placent? Certiores nos faciatis aut hac in pagina (infra) aut pipiando (“tweeting”) @QDicitur–adicite #QDPod65. Nolite oblivisci fabulam illam radiophonicam adire: http://steppingintoci.weebly.com/sonitus-mirabilis.html
Quomodo Dicitur? Podcast: Episode 65 by Justin Slocum Bailey, Gus Grissom, and Jason Slanga is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Non memini partis libris sed illud “Quid dulcius quam habere quicum omnia audeas sic loqui ut tecum?” mihi maxime placuit quum, magnis cum difficultatibus, hunc librum legere conatus sum.
Optime! Illa sententia invenitur apud Ciceronem in Laelio De Amicitia 22. Etiam mihi valde placet.
I would love to write this in Latin. But I have four kids and a wife I can ignore for only so long, so I appreciate your indulging my barbaric language. Please feel free to respond in Latin. In fact, I’d prefer it, and hopefully next time I’ll have less to say and more time to say it and can switch to Latin.
I have really enjoyed the podcasts, especially since, as someone who is neither a teacher nor (formally) a student of Latin, I don’t have a Latin-speaking community of my own. I work as a medieval historian, where Latin is a necessity, but the truth is I really just love the language for what it is. And that leads in to what I really wanted to say, which I can summarize as “Why does Medieval Latin get so little attention?” I was listening to the conversation in this podcast, and one brief portion concerned Latin as a “lingua franca”.
I work mostly in the fifteenth century, and there was probably no time in which Latin did indeed serve as a lingua franca in precisely the way discussed. One example is the Council of Basel, which lasted nearly two decades. At its height, there were thousands present at the same time, and all of them spoke with and understood one another in Latin. The debates were in Latin, the conversations over what to have for dinner were in Latin, or which brothels to attend. We have extant works which cover all of this and more. I had even thought of sending your way before Halloween some of the witch and demon stories contained in Book V of Johannes Nider’s work Formicarius, a work which he read aloud at the council. Although I do appreciate Seneca, Nider’s stories are a great deal more interesting and chilling. And only accessible in Latin.
Or another great work from the same century is the Manuale Scholarium, which was intended as a handbook for German University students. The dialogues take place in Heidelberg, and the rule there was that students could only speak in Latin. They even had student spies dubbed “wolves” who would report on students speaking the vernacular. Anyways, the dialogues, meant to give conversational Latin for everyday student life, are hilarious since they are so applicable today. What comes to mind in particular is the hazing ritual involving a pig costume. But this sort of stuff you find rarely, if at all, in the classical period. And the Latin of the fifteenth century is in many ways as good as the great ancient authors, some of the writers, I would argue, might even be better, if only because the medieval is so much nearer to our own. For example Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini, who after making a career writing, among others, soft porn novels, became Pope Pius II. But he left behind a wonderful history of Austria, which Iustus might find particularly appealing. And I haven’t even touched on the battle narratives like the Siege of Belgrade, or the Battle of Grunwald/Tannenberg, etc. And all of the works I have mentioned above are easily accessible online, since they were for the most part printed in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.
So why doesn’t anyone do much with Medieval Latin? It was a time when the Western World had succeeded in doing what you and others like you are attempting to do now, i.e. make Latin a living language of discourse to unite people across the world, at a time when it was no one’s mother tongue. I’ll bet you could get some good tips from them!
Thanks again for the podcasts. You are doing an amazing job.
Benigne nos laudasti consiliaque nobiscum communicasti! Litterae mediae aetatis seu medii aevi nos valde delectant. Mihi quidem, fortasse magis in recentioribus litteris versato quam in antiquis, maxime placent dialogi studentium cum corycaeos illos (“wolves” quos dixisti). Ut videris animadvertisse, Seneca factus est quasi locus communis apud nos, ne dicam iocus communis. Fortasse iam audivisti colloquium 72um (tanta enim mora facta est inter commentarium tuum et hoc responsum, quod doleo) in qua fabula quaedam ex media aetate sumpta narratur, quales in animo habemus plura posthac recitare et tractare!