Never Give Up

[Godmy]

First thing: I advocate this method, because it also boosts your passive skills: it boosts your language competence. And (when talking about other languages) usually every normal human has a very good (no matter his intelligence) language competence, even a child not being able to speak understands quite everything, all the complex syntax, all the layers... everything.

But lot of people are poor performers (google "language competence" vs. "performance"). But by developing your own Latin idiolect and forcing yourself to use it actively and in a constant manner, is an efficient (natural) way to get your linguistic competence to another level compared with seeing and learning the language as just some strange, mute, unfamiliar and remote written code containing "maybe" some familiar words that make together an information... (I'm not saying that the other methods teach it this way, but a lot of students understand it that way). And your goal doesn't have to be speaking.

Second:

• any dialect you learn to produce automatically and use constantly at least with one person in communication, you produce then naturally (mentally on a different level than a child would of course), not construct artificially (people who speak Esperanto well and for many years also do it in a way naturally, even though there weren't any first native speakers before, or first speakers of creole languages - who are however already fully natural, but their parents weren't), so the resulting thing for your brain (linguistically) is a real, normal, non-artificial language, which however may be historically inaccurate
• if it exists in your brain, if you developed it as some kind of -lect, as a language, then the its active production is far from a translation, is natural... (I mention the bad side of this later)
• if you care and refine your idiolect based on what is really written in the corpora or by a dialogue with somebody you are able to understand and want to imitate, then the resulting language (a real language for your brain, no matter the corpora) can get very close to what is written
• unidiomatic and a distant dialect can look as an artificial Latin, but being produced naturally by the speaker However such speaker should probably make effort to change it
• translating tends to destroy this: only a very good translator (usually that happens if the target language is his native or very close to) will probably produce an unmistakably idiomatic version of the same thought in the language - I'm not talking about translating

 

[Pacifica]

Ok, I get your point: someone speaking Latin can get to speaking the kind of Latin he's gotten used to speaking (however "correct" or whatever it may be) in a natural way - that is words will come to him naturally, he's no longer going to think before each sentence - so this is the kind of "natural" you mean. Then yes, I agree it's surely possible (though not easy, because you'd have to find some Latin speaking community to speak with regularly - which isn't found at every corner street - and durably enough, not in a "forced" context but one that could look like natural). What I mean isn't possible is "real" natural Latin, i.e. as true Latin was back then; the person "naturally" speaking Latin as above will speak an artificial language in a natural way, I guess!

 

[Godmy]

It will sound artificial to somebody having a very good language competence in the original Latin (whether he performs the language or not), but it may sound natural to a friend that the person has been learning the language with through speaking

Yes, of course...

My original potential objection was that new Latin can be as non-artificial as possible (and very refined) and even if you find there something "strange", it can be just a part of the dialect the author spoke naturally and not just with his friends...

Let's say you will find something a bit strange in Erasmus: does that mean he was artificially making some translation? Veeeeeery probably not. We have all proofs to think that what Erasmus spoke, he spoke with ease, naturally and with real living people who spoke the same. Then... ok, it is a bit artificial in a view of the original Latin, but probably very natural and perfect in a view of the "substrate" that has originated from it after its death. And of course from the view of the speaker himself, it was a natural language performance.

 

[Godmy]

And this is for me, personally, why it is worth to learn Latin

Because there are enough materials (medieval dictionaries, medieval phrase-books.. etc) that just count that it is possible to learn a dialect, a real living language with rigid rules (no matter what rules, but they must be rigid, or chaos happens), that will approximate to the original Latin as much as it can even though it will never be the same (or maybe it will? ) ) - people always counted with this fact and do up to now in some places in the world (e.g. Vivarium Novum).

 

[Pacifica]

It will sound artificial to somebody having a very good language competence in the original Latin (whether he performs the language or not), but it may sound natural to a friend that the person has been learning the language with through speaking

Yes, of course...

My original potential objection was that new Latin can be as non-artificial as possible (and very refined) and even if you find there something "strange", it can be just a part of the dialect the author spoke naturally and not just with his friends...

Let's say you will find something a bit strange in Erasmus: does that mean he was artificially making some translation? Veeeeeery probably not. We have all proofs to think that what Erasmus spoke, he spoke with ease, naturally and with real living people who spoke the same. Then... ok, it is a bit artificial in a view of the original Latin, but probably very natural and perfect in a view of the "substrate" that has originated from it after its death. And of course from the view of the speaker himself, it was a natural language performance.

Agreed.

 

[Sylo]

So I have read though this entire thread and have decided on the variation I would like to use. I just have a few questions:

Noli Umquam Reccedere

1.) How do I pronounce the whole phrase
2.) Iv'e noticed in some text the "u"s are replaced with "v"s are both ways correct? Or is one more proper than the other?

 

[Pacifica]

Noli Umquam Reccedere.

It's wrong. There's one c that shouldn't be there. Then noli umquam recedere would mean something like "don't ever withdraw".

If "never give up" is what you want to say, then numquam (or nunquam) cesseris is ok.

U's like V's is only if you write in caps.

 

[Sylo]

It's wrong. There's one c that shouldn't be there. Then noli umquam recedere would mean something like "don't ever withdraw".

If "never give up" is what you want to say, then numquam (or nunquam) cesseris is ok.

U's like V's is only if you write in caps.

Ahh okay thank you, there was such discussion on this topic its quite hard to follow what is right and what is wrong. Is there a different way of saying it given the circumstances of how it is being used, or context?

 

[Pacifica]

Haha this thread is so persistent

Never-ending you mean? And you were already saying that four years ago...

Is there a different way of saying it given the circumstances of how it is being used, or context?

Well for now I have no idea how to say it otherwise if it's to be a stand-alone sentence, but maybe. You can still explain the context and see reactions.

 

[Sylo]

Never-ending you mean? And you were already saying that four years ago...Well for now I have no idea how to say it otherwise if it's to be a stand-alone sentence, but maybe. You can still explain the context and see reactions.

Okay thank you for your help

 

[lonesome]

Hello everybody

I have found "numquam desistas" for translation but i wondering if a future form would'nt be more appropriate ? Thank you for your advices