An ear for Latin
excerpt in the photo taken from Wikipedia, Botanical Latin
The high school I chose to attend in Italy was a Science Lyceum, and although there was a Classical Studies one, focused on classical languages, mine involved 5 years of Latin too. The pronunciation we were taught was that of the Ecclesiastical Latin, which has strong links with the pronunciation of early and modern Italian, developed from Latin through the Middle Ages. I truly enjoyed studying it, as I did with English, I have always been a big languages geek. Dead or alive, I wanted to learn them all in the same way as I wanted to see every plant in the world, but due to a series of events I ended up continuing my studies choosing languages as my focus and graduated in Language Mediation and Cultural Communication adding Mandarin to the bag, although regrettably I’ve not had much of a chance to practice it since.
The point in this post is I am a languages geek as much as I am a plants geek and a part of me always cringes a bit when I hear Latin pronounced as if it was written English, but we learn something new everyday and if Wikipedia says there is no consistency in the pronounciation of New Latin or Botanical Latin then I’m fine with that, It makes sense why!
