With the hiring of a former Vatican translator, Cornell has become a hub of an unlikely field in the modern age: spoken Latin. This highlights the work of , a former Catholic monsignor who spent a decade working at the Vatican. He is now teaching conversational Latin to students who want to learn not only to read and write in Latin but how to speak the language.
鈥淟atin for me has this beautiful music鈥攏ot just the sound but the feel to it, the way it鈥檚 constructed, almost like a Beethoven or Mozart symphony,鈥 he says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 the ending of words that indicates the meaning, not the word order, so when you鈥檙e speaking or writing you have a lot of freedom on how to arrange words so they sound appealing鈥攂ut also to syntactically separate words, so your listener has to be patient, like listening for a theme in Beethoven to develop.鈥
Learn more about Gallagher and Cornell's Living Latin program by reading the entire y.
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