© ErN 132 entry Oct.
2002
I hope this one is true. The paper
reports that two Neapolitan bank robbers trying to pull
a heist way up north in Modena were foiled by their
inability to speak standard Italian. They explained to
the teller that they had box cutters in their pockets
and were going to start slicing and dicing if they
didn't get lots of those brand new Euros —all of this in
a Neapolitan dialect about as intelligible to a bank
teller in Modena as Middle High Kurdish. After 3 or 4
more attempts, each one eliciting from the teller
responses like "I'm sorry. I don't understand you" or
"Do you want to open an account here, sir?" or "Has our
automatic teller machine outside gobbled up your credit
card? Sorry. Let me call the manager...", the speechless
bad-guys fled lootless in their stolen car, later
recovered. One witness reports that on the way out of
the bank, the one thief called his companion an idiot
for not being able to ask for money in real Italian. (Click here for an item on the
Neapolitan language.)That brings to mind a story about the great Senegalese scholar and poet, Léopold Sédar Senghor. He was also the first president of his nation, Senegal, from 1960–80. During his term of office, in October of 1962, he had occasion to pay a state visit to Italy. Unsure of his Italian, the erudite Senghor addressed the Italian senate in Latin! He was disappointed when he found out that these neo–Romans no longer had even rudimentary comprehension of the language of their forebears. The Italian press was mortified.
I was never much of a Latin scholar at school. I did, however, study a neo–Latin language called Spanish, but by the time the Spanish got around to the language there were no more ablatives, datives or passive participles. That stuff had all been replaced by bull–fights, red wine and Flamenco babes with roses between their teeth. My kind of language.
Later, many years out of school, I did discover an interest in Latin, however, when I came across my first Asterix comic book. Asterix is a Celt warrior who wages funny war against the Roman oppressors in Gaul. Depending on where you buy your comics, Asterix speaks German or French or English, etc. Some enterprising scholar decided to do it up right, because the version I picked up was in Latin. I couldn't read it, of course, but I was intrigued. Then, when I found my first Donald Duck comic in Latin, I became aware of the growing conspiracy to resurrect what to many is a useless language.
Useless? Well, in many European universities as late as the 18th century, Latin was still the language of instruction, and it was the lingua franca of the Roman Catholic church for a long, long time. Even today, the Vatican still generates significant numbers of documents in Latin, and, thus, keeps scholars at work updating the language in order to be able to deal with concepts Caesar never had to worry about. (At a recent Vatican congress dealing with the problems of keeping the language alive, at least as an ecclesiastical medium, reporters from RAI, the Italian State television network, were forced to ask their questions and get their answers in Latin — the interview was subtitled in Italian at the bottom of the screen.) An 18,000–word dictionary of recent coinages has recently been published by the Vatican. Some of the entries:
fax: exemplum simillime expressum
bestseller: liber maxime divenditus
gulag: campus captivis custodiensis
car wash: autocinetorum lavatrix
pinball machine: sphaeriludium electricum nomismate actum
The internet has a number of sites dedicated to the revival of Latin, and one local Neapolitan I know of has made said revival his labor of love. He answers the phone with "ego sum".
[This is vaguely related to a more serious entry on medieval Latin here.]
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to top of this pageadded Oct 1, 2018
How Do You Say "Shake, Rattle and Roll" in Latin?
--The answer? Quate, Crepa, Rota.
If you thought Asterix was a glorious waste of time, meet Dr. Jukka Ammondt (b. 1944) a professor of European Romantic literature at Finland's Jyväskylä University. He has made a name for himself in more scatterbrained academic circles (I agree that we need more of those!) by recording the music of Elvis Presley in Latin. And Sumerian, the language of ancient Mesopotamia. All you need to know about Sumerian is that it went extinct about 4,000 years ago because it was so hard that not even native speakers could learn it, or as Dr. Ammondt says in his classic Sumerian version of "Blue Suede Shoes" — "On my sandals of sky-blue leather do not step!").
Back to Latin. Jukka (I don't know him, but I like him, hence the first name) said that while he was going through a very painful divorce, Elvis appeared to him in a dream and told him to translate his songs into Latin. "I wanted to honor Elvis with something eternal,'' he explains. "Latin united the whole Western world.'' He has released albums with recordings of, among many others of:
Nunc hic aut numquam Tutti Frutti
Tenere me ama All shook up
Nunc distrahor Love Me Tender
Totus Potus It's Now or Never
Oh, those are not in order. Match them yourselves.
Hey, these people are all over. I refer you to the Wikipedia list of Modern Latin Authors.
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