More wired than a Roman Internet café
Thoughts on Latinum
The way I see it, the Latinum project is a Language Revival Project, similar to that put together for Hawaiian, and other dead languages, such as the Miami language.
The project has specifically been modelled after successful aspects of these revival projects - including now children's literature on the http://tarheelreader.org site, the chatrooms on http://schola.ning.com , the visual vocabulary sites on the http://imaginumvocabularium.blogspot.com , news aggregation sites such as http://actapopuli.ning.com/ , the new http://collegiumpoetarum.ning.com and linking to as much other Latin audio and video online as possible, to build up the community so that real social communication in Latin is possible, and where, if desired, a student can immerse themselves in Latin. An example of what we are doing on the ground in London can be seen here: http://circuluslatinuslondiniensis.co.uk
Huge advances have taken place over the past 2 years, and now we have thousands of students studying conversational latin - Latinum has over 5 000 regular users - given that there are fewer than 20 fully fluent speakers alive on the planet, this represents a huge sea change, as even if only 1% of those 5000 get total command of Latin, that will represent a doubling of capacity. Moreover, Father Foster says, that of those 20 who are at or near his level of proficiency, almost all are over 65 years old. The age profile of those using Latinum is much younger....I am hopeful we will once again build up a small community of Latinists - remember, at the height of the Renaissance, there were probably only 20 000 or so who had true command of the language - this is an achievable goal, I believe.
I just hope the mypodcast site manages to weather the recession........otherwise, providing the course for free will be rather tricky.
Evan.
The project has specifically been modelled after successful aspects of these revival projects - including now children's literature on the http://tarheelreader.org site, the chatrooms on http://schola.ning.com , the visual vocabulary sites on the http://imaginumvocabularium.blogspot.com , news aggregation sites such as http://actapopuli.ning.com/ , the new http://collegiumpoetarum.ning.com and linking to as much other Latin audio and video online as possible, to build up the community so that real social communication in Latin is possible, and where, if desired, a student can immerse themselves in Latin. An example of what we are doing on the ground in London can be seen here: http://circuluslatinuslondiniensis.co.uk
Huge advances have taken place over the past 2 years, and now we have thousands of students studying conversational latin - Latinum has over 5 000 regular users - given that there are fewer than 20 fully fluent speakers alive on the planet, this represents a huge sea change, as even if only 1% of those 5000 get total command of Latin, that will represent a doubling of capacity. Moreover, Father Foster says, that of those 20 who are at or near his level of proficiency, almost all are over 65 years old. The age profile of those using Latinum is much younger....I am hopeful we will once again build up a small community of Latinists - remember, at the height of the Renaissance, there were probably only 20 000 or so who had true command of the language - this is an achievable goal, I believe.
I just hope the mypodcast site manages to weather the recession........otherwise, providing the course for free will be rather tricky.
Evan.
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