Altum Videtur: Difference between revisions

** Actually Latin was heavy on simplifications, the Romans elided everything they could from their sentences, perhaps in an effort to sound more laconic and no-nonsense, perhaps they had more pressing things to do (like building an empire) than wasting time uttering too many words. They often elided the subject of a phrase when it was apparent who was taking the described action and they hadn't a fixed word for 'yes' but made 'hoc' double for it, other examples could take several pages. This tendency was not merely a quirk of spoken tongue, but had literary dignity and was taken to extremes by people like Julius Caesar, who famously sent the Roman Senate an iconic three words message about his Gallic Campaign: "Veni, Vidi, Vici" (I came, I saw, I conquered); hence Corvus Corax motto could be better rendered as: "Omnia dicta fortiora, si latina".

* Latin is a favorite language of many classical and modern choral composers. For a singer, it may seem difficult to learn the pronounciations at first - anyone who's ever tried to teach Latin pronunciation to an Anglican church choir can tell you that it ''is'' difficult to learn properly after you've been singing it wrong for your entire life. "Veh-'''night'''-ee," indeed.<ref>That's how they'll give you ''Venite'' (Pronounced correctly: Wen-ee-tay). Seriously.</ref> It's called "Church Latin," and while the words are there, its pronunciation is something akin to [[Canis Latinicus]].

* One section of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" is titled "Con mortuis in lingua mortua," meaning "with the dead in a dead language" (though the first word should be "cum", rather than "con" as it would be in Italian).

* ''[[Carmina Burana]]'' has a lot of Latin songs in it, mingling with courtly French and mediaeval German.