In my irregular series on posts for people who wanted to learn enough Latin to get by in the Mass, one of the things I asserted was that you know more Latin than you think you do. The purpose of the last post was to give a more concrete demonstration of that assertion.
The Liturgy of the Eucharist of the 1970 Missal uses about 150 different words, if you exclude the Scriptural readings and the homily (a reasonable assumption is that the former would only be in Latin on special occasions and the latter never). Oh, and the Collect. About 100 of these words have clearly recognizable cognates in English. These cognates are what are listed in that post. The other 50 are in my judgment either words like etiam that do not have a cognate in English or words like rogare for which the cognate is obscure so that most people wouldn't recognize them immediately (but perhaps you know what "rogation days" are).
If this is helpful or interesting to people, it would not cost me that much effort to do a similar analysis for the Liturgy of the Eucharist (and I myself am curious). From what I've seen, I would hazard a guess that the vocabulary of the Mass does not exceed 350-400 words, especially if you use Eucharistic Prayer II; and that about 200-250 of them are "familiar" in the way described above. Four hundred words would not quite fill up a sheet of paper in single-spaced lines of 12 point font with normal margins (unless they were really long words). For comparison, I am told that most intro-level foreign language textbooks use a vocabulary of upwards of 2000 words.
Comments