Not long ago, Mary Beard graced us with a bit of honorable honesty in the Times Literary Supplement, in which she confessed to what is a bit of an open secret among most classicists. She can’t sight-read a complex Latin text all that well. Most classicists can’t. This admission — from someone like Beard — is good to have out there.
What irritates me is that —again like most classicists — she treats this as a self-evident fact to be just accepted rather than a problem to be dealt with, as if nobody could hope to actually read Cicero with ease. It always strikes me as bizarre and a bit embarrassing to see classicists insisting that it is impossible to acquire fluid or fluent command of Latin or Greek, that “we” can never do this. It’s not just that this assumption would be news to people like Galileo, Kepler or Descartes. It’s that people do actually acquire this kind of competence. Today. Anyone who pokes around at, say, the Conventiculum Bostoniense, will find proficient Latin-speakers as readily as Zeus finds incestuous booty-calls.
Take Msgr. Daniel Gallagher who worked for a decade at the Vatican Secretariat’s Latin Office. Here’s him delivering a lecture about the possibility of a manned mission to Mars in Latin. Here’s Jorge Tárrega teaching one of Horace’s most famous poems through the medium of Latin. Here’s Justin Slocum Bailey talking about Aulus Gellius in Latin. If you want something literary, here’s a lovely poem by Cäcilie Koch (AKA Caecilia) inspired by the discovery of the jaw-bone of a Neanderthal boy, and another poem by Alanus Divutius dedicated to the 9/11 victims. Here’s a Latin Wikipedia article about special relativity. Here’s a scene from Jurassic Park dubbed into Latin. Here’s the Quomodo Dicitur podcast in which three people (not always the same people) have unscripted conversations about various topics in Latin. I could keep spouting these links till either I or you, dear reader, die of boredom. There are plenty of people who read Latin as easily as any “modern” language that they have acquired as adults. There are entire internet forums written in it.