Thanks to my friend Lawrence for pointing out Roman Rebound, an article about Latin in The Economist. Here's the first bit:
Posted on December 24, 2003 12:18 PM. Filed under: language.TO SCARY music, a furtive Jewish nationalist of the first century paints on a wall the words Romanes Eunt Domus. A centurion enters:
Centurion: What's this, then? ? ‘People called Romanes they go the house?’
Nationalist: It—it says, ‘Romans, go home’.
Centurion: No, it doesn't. ‘Go home’? This is motion towards. Isn't it, boy?
Nationalist (being savagely beaten): Ah. Ah, dative, sir! Ahh! No, not dative! Not the dative, sir! No! Ah! Oh, the...accusative! Domum, sir! Ah! Oooh! Ah!
Centurion: Except that takes the...?
Nationalist: The locative, sir!
The scene, from "Monty Python's Life of Brian", marked the apotheosis of Latin in film—until last March. At that point Mel Gibson, star-turned-director, announced that his new film "The Passion", about the last hours of Christ, would be made entirely in Latin and Aramaic. At first, the hero of "Thunderdome" and "Lethal Weapon" did not even want subtitles. When he realised that audiences needed to know, just roughly, what the characters were saying, he reluctantly backed down.
The milites1 in their caligae2 are now being coached in barrack-room conjugations by Father William Fulco, a professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. They are taking to it quickly, he says; sometimes too quickly, with a steep slide into Italian-waiter accents. Italian is in fact his rough guide for pronunciation of first-century Latin, about which there is much debate. Subtitles will still be waived for soldier-talk, which Father Fulco has derived from graffiti found in Roman camps. You could argue, as he does, that Greek would often be more appropriate, and that the conscripted troops in Judea spoke little Latin. But, as the language of an oppressive superpower, Latin can't be beat.
As for Mr Gibson, he positively brags about making a film "in two dead languages". Not dead enough, some may think, remembering tear-stained sessions with Sallust and those cloth-bound small books, blotted with blue ink, in which scouts were forever crossing rivers and winter camps being struck. No wonder the world has galloped so gratefully to English, which has little use for genders or gerunds and never, if it will have been able to help it, employs the future perfect.
Yet hold on a minute (festina lente, as Caesar would have said, while gripping some hapless Gaul by the neck). Latin has a surprising number of advocates in the modern world. And these are not merely classicists or arty types entranced by the glories of Virgil, the cockiness of Catullus or the breathtaking fall of the rhythms and words of Horace. They are people who believe Latin has a future, as well as a past. [continue]