Day: January 29, 2022

So I was surfing the internet to random linguistics things – as one does – when I ran across this youtube video of a guy giving a passionate speech in seemingly entirely spontaneous Latin. He’s not what you would call a first-langage native speaker of Latin, obviously (there’s no such beast), but he’s definitely what one would classify as a fully fluent second language speaker of it. His Latin is “accented” by his first language (Italian) – but anyway, most fluent Latin speakers speak what is called “church Latin” which is essentially what we might think of as “Latin with an Italian accent”.

I suppose this intrigued me because I studied Latin while in high school, and subsequently was in essence a student of Romance Philology at the University of Pennsylvania, in my graduate program in Spanish Literature and Linguistics. I was required to take Spanish philology, which included being able to negotiate texts in late Iberian Latin and Old Spanish, as well as familiarize myself with other languages that influenced the Spanish Language’s evolution: Arabic, Gothic, “Celtiberian”, Basque, etc. I also had to take a “reading exam” in French (quite hard for me – my high school French was originally poor and rusty too) and Portuguese (less hard – I’d studied Portuguese some).

The epiphany that struck me as I watched this man speechifying in Latin was that in fact, I understood him better than I would a similar speech in Korean. The combination of my fluency in Spanish, my familiarity with other Romance languages like French, Portuguese and Italian, and my original fairly strong Latin from high school served well enough to make a lot of sense out of what the man was saying. I couldn’t necessarily give a summary of his ideas, but I could at least gather topic to some extent, and catch lots of individual concepts. My Korean comprehension isn’t quite that good – even though I lived in Korea for more than a decade and several times dedicated myself to formal instruction in Korean (maybe a cumulative of 2 years worth of college-level Korean).

This is of course a bit depressing, given my publicly visible “revised bucket list“. I haven’t been doing much Korean study, these days.