The Ark and The Dove

Translation

What is it with English-speaking translators?

Someone pointed out to me that a portion of the Latin version (the official version) of the Pope's Apostolic Exhortation (which I still haven't read yet) is noticeably different than the English translation.

There is a section where it says:

In order to express more clearly the unity and universality of the Church, I wish to endorse the proposal made by the Synod of Bishops, in harmony with the directives of the Second Vatican Council, (182) that, with the exception of the readings, the homily and the prayer of the faithful, such liturgies could be celebrated in Latin. 

The Latin one says,

Ad melius ostendendam unitatem et universalitatem Ecclesiae, cupimus commendare suasiones Synodi Episcoporum, consonantes cum normis Concilii Vaticani II: (182) exceptis lectionibus, homilia et oratione fidelium, aequum est ut huiusmodi celebrationes fiant lingua Latina.

This says that it is aequum - right, just, fitting - that these celebrations be done in Latin.  In the English translation of the Mass, when it says in the Preface that it is aequum to give God thanks, there it is rendered that it is our duty to give Him thanks.  I looked in other languages I know something of, and they all seem to say, instead of "they could...be in Latin," some variation of "it is good...that they be in Latin."  The next sentence says that in general, priests should be able to celebrate Mass in Latin, and the people should know at least the more common prayers.

As long as I'm picking on things, "wish" is a not incorrect translation of cupio, which is the verb the Latin uses for the things the Pope wants in this doc, including in this instance.  However, there is another perfectly good verb that merely means "wish" or "want" - volo.  The word cupio (actually, it says "cupimus," the plural), has the connotations of "to long for, be eager for, to desire," or even to covet.

Learning Latin - the Pater Noster

Some of my friends whom I taught to chant some of the Mass parts in Latin reported to me that at World Youth Day they celebrated Mass in Latin because the Mass was attended by people from all different countries, and that they were very pleased that they were able to join in the chants.  I was happy that they were able to put what I shared with them to good practical use.

Even though perhaps I could start with something very short to build confidence or whatever, I want to do the Our Father first.  First, because I seem to remember one or more of the popes saying that this should be a part of everyone's minimum repertoire, second, because it's not that hard (not the least because you already know it so thoroughly in English), third, because it's good to know anyway, and fourth, because I found a good resource that compensates for the fact you would ideally be learning this by oral tradition rather than written.

Here is a link to a page I found that has the text and a recording of a priest chanting the Pater Noster, along with sheet music.  If a word-by-word breakdown would help your memory or understanding, you may find one in the extended post. 

P.S. The "short prayer" referred to is the priest's introduction to the prayer (praeceptis salutaribus moniti, et divina institutione formati, audemus dicere, approximately "[having been] taught by the saving precepts and formed by divine instruction, we are so bold as to pray:")

Learning Latin

Ok, for the last month or so I'd been thinking on-and-off of some way of getting started that would be maximally helpful while being minimally effort-intensive.  My original idea was to start at the beginning and go through piece-by-piece, but on further reflection that didn't seem to be nearly as practical as I had thought.

Recalling that the point of this is active and conscious participation, I had an idea: why not start with the parts that pertain most to us, the laity - the responses.

Looking at the responses by themselves was really interesting because although they are certainly not dumbed-down by any means, the parts that the people or the people and the priest have together are on the whole a lot simpler than the parts the priest says by himself.  This helps you and me out, because you don't have to be an expert Latinist (or even know that much) to participate actively in Latin.

Think about it in English - apart from the Gloria and the Creed and a few other things, most of them are quite short - Amen, alleluia (these are Hebrew anyway), thanks be to God, etc."  There are 33* responses total in a Sunday Mass, and only a few of them are of any length (nine of them are "amen").  A list is below the fold.  Next post on this topic will talk about one of them specifically.

Artistic distributivism

Perhaps you have heard of Chesterton's theory of distributivism.  I don't really have developed enough ideas about it to talk about the economic version of it, but I'm all for the knowledge/skill/art analog of it.   Furthermore, I think it's more workable and realistic than the money version, because if everyone can sing or dance or paint or whatever, that makes everyone's life all the richer rather than everyone equally poor, whereas money is largely about determining who gets what of scarce resources, so that inflation would kick in if everyone was enriched.

But in any case, Chesterton is always dismayed when the means of production or enjoyment of something good and human that belong to everyone become concentrated in the hands of a small elite, as when nobody will bother to sing, but will only listen to those with big recording label deals.  Not that he or I are against the idea of really talented individuals or professional artists, but that we are both saddened more than a little when ordinary people like us give up on something we all should enjoy doing and cede the privilege to a few simply because we won't bother if we can't be the guy at the top (or whatever reason).  This concentration, though, is neither natural nor inevitable.

The thing that started this train of thought just now was reading Chesterton on Latin while I was thinking about Latin; he was lamenting the changeover from a more democratic thing to a more aristocratic thing that occurred around Milton's time when it came to be that Latin was monopolized by a small elite circle that spoke it very artfully, instead of everyone talking at least a little Latin badly, the way it had been for ages.

What's the fun if a chunk of the Church's riches are left to a few classics nerds to appreciate?  Especially when the threshold for conscious and active participation at Mass with Latin is so low, comparatively speaking with any other really meaningful thing in any language - you don't need to be Cicero to get in on it.  As I'll demonstrate tomorrow.

Latin Words of the Day

Deus, Dominus, Christus

1.) Deus is the regular Latin word for "god;" used as a proper name it means God.  Unlike English nouns, which retain their same spelling and pronunciation regardless of their position in the sentence, Latin nouns change their endings to tell you their role in the sentence.  "Dei" means "of God."  "Deo" (without a preposition) usually means "to God," as in "Gloria in excelsis Deo" or "Deo gratias."  "Deum" means "God," when God is the object of a sentence rather than the subject.  So in a sentence like "God so loved the world," you would say Deus, but in a sentence like "I believe in God," you would say Deum.  You can tell which to use by who it is who is doing the action of the verb.

2.) Dominus means "lord" or "The Lord."  Domini means "of the Lord," Domino "to the Lord," Dominum, "the Lord" as the object of a sentence.

3.) Christus is the Latin version of the Greek Christos, which is the Greek version of Messiah, "the anointed one [of God]."  Christi means "of Christ"... you get the picture.  This pattern holds for most any noun that ends in -us, with a few exceptions.  There are two such I can think of that turn up in the Mass - spiritus (spirit) and Jesus follow a different pattern.

Language acquisition

In learning Latin, you should not be afraid of a little memorization.  I have the feeling like some people think that they might as well not bother with Latin in the liturgy until they have a thorough theoretical command of Latin grammar.  If this is your attitude, you will probably never start, because you will get bogged down trying to memorize dry charts from textbooks.

But that wasn't the way you learned English, was it?  You didn't sit down with books and learn the rules of English grammar, then try to fit words into the system, did you?  If so, you were a most unusual child.  I'll bet that what you did was you listened to how people (such as your parents, or people on tv) used a word or phrase, memorized it, and then used it yourself when you were in a similar situation.  So why not learn Latin that way?

But, you may object, that worked for English because as a child I didn't have any self-image problems being humble and operating on a simple level.  Think about that for a second and get back to me.  But, you may object, that worked for English because I was constantly exposed to English and opportunities to learn these phrases; I'll never learn as much Latin that way as I did English.  I reply that while that may be true, you don't have to have as comprehensive a knowledge of Latin as you do English.  You don't have to be prepared to chat about the weather in Latin.  You only have to acquire a very circumscribed vocabulary for one situation where you always know exactly what is going to happen and what needs to be said.  So it balances out.

Anyway, the reason I'm suggesting this is that it seems to work ok for me.  I memorized the rosary prayers before I learned any Latin grammar formally, and besides the devotional benefit, they served as a sort of a beachhead to understanding the language.  Besides, the Catechism says you should at least be able to say your basic prayers in Latin.  So when I just tell you what something means without worrying about the grammar, think about it in this light.

Aha!

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.

Nota bene

Consider the following:

Am, is, are, were, was, being.

Are these A.) six different words OR B.) six different forms of the same word?

I suppose that in English one way of thinking doesn't necessarily have a clear advantage over the other; I think the latter is much more logical, but I had grammar textbooks in school that assumed the former.  I am guessing that many or most English speakers think about it the first way, although if they were pressed, they might acknowledge the second way.

In Latin, the second way of thinking makes a great deal more sense, because Latin has fewer words and more forms of each word.  I do not know whether ancient Roman children grew up thinking of eo and ibam as two completely different words related in meaning (though I suspect they had schoolteachers who taught them otherwise).  As far as learning Latin for the Mass goes, I suppose you may think about it whichever way you find the most natural and comfortable, since there are not that many forms to learn, and that may be the way your brain is accustomed to processing language.

However, keep in mind that in counting the number of vocabulary words, I count "I go," "you go," "he goes," and "she goes" as four instances of the same word and not four different words.  This makes even more sense for nouns.

Do you know these words?

Adjudicate, adore, advent, agnus, alleluia, altitude, amen, angel, apostolic, apt, ascend, audio, baptism, beatific, benediction, bonus, catholic, celebrate, celestial, Christ, cogitate, cum or con- or co-, confess, consubstantial, creed, crucifix, culpable, descend, Deus or deity, dominus or dominion or dominate, ecclesiastical, ego, et or et cetera or &, evangelium or  evangelical, ex, excelsior, expect, fact, factory or manufacture, filial, finis or finish, fraternity, glorify, glory, gracias, homo sapiens, in, incarnate, invisible, Jesus, Kyrie eleison, laud, loquacity, luminary, magna or magnificent or magnate, Maria, maximum, [rigor] mortis or mortuary, mystery, natal, nominate, non, omission, omnipotent, opus, passion, patriarch, pax, Pontius Pilate, procede, prophet, regal, reign, remission, resurrection, sacred, saint, scripture, semper, sepulchre, solo, spirit, sub, terra, thou, unit, verbal, verity or verily or verify, virgin, visible, vital, vobiscum, voluntary.

I'm guessing that maybe with a couple of exceptions, the answer is yes.

The next question is, what is it that these words have in common?

"People called Romanes they go the house?"

We had a little debate about Monty Python's Life of Brian a while ago on this site, but one thing that's not up for debate is how great this portion of the movie is - the Latin lesson.