Learning a Little Latin

PurpleFlower · Jul 14, 2026 at 6:50 AM

orangina said: ↑

We are part of the territory of the former Roman Empire. Latin was used here as an official language for over 2,000 years. In the Croatian Parliament, Latin was the official language for centuries. The Church especially, as well as government offices and public administration, used Latin until the beginning of the 20th century, while the Church continued using it until the 1960s.

So perhaps that is why they put us through such intensive Latin instruction. Personally, I find Latin exceptionally difficult...

This is what I meant when I said that Latin was one of the most demanding subjects in our grammar school, which is attended by the top students from the entire county (over 130,000 inhabitants). Croatian, Latin, and most Slavic languages are synthetic (inflected) languages, whereas English is primarily an analytic language. Croatian has seven grammatical cases, while Latin traditionally has six. Cases indicate grammatical functions such as the subject, object, possession, recipient, and other relationships within a sentence. Each case answers a specific question—for example, the nominative answers "who?" or "what?", the genitive "of whom?" or "of what?", the dative "to whom?" or "to what?", and the accusative "whom?" or "what?" for the direct object.

For example, in English you have to say, "The dog bit the man." If you change the word order to "The man bit the dog," the meaning changes completely because English relies heavily on word order.

In Croatian, however, we can say:

Pas je ugrizao čovjeka.
Čovjeka je ugrizao pas.
Ugrizao je pas čovjeka.

All three sentences mean "The dog bit the man." The meaning does not change because the grammatical cases tell us who is the subject and who is the object. Word order is used mainly for emphasis rather than grammar.

Latin works in a very similar way. For example:

Canis virum momordit.
Virum canis momordit.
Momordit canis virum.

All three sentences still mean "The dog bit the man." The ending -um in virum shows that the man is the object, regardless of where the word appears in the sentence.

Now you can probably understand why I said that Latin was exceptionally difficult from a grammatical point of view in Croatia and we have grammatical cases like Latin. You have to learn grammatical cases, noun declensions according to gender, number, and case, verb conjugations, numerous verb tenses, the subjunctive mood, and a relatively free word order. In reality, you do not learn Latin the way you learn a modern foreign language because there are no native speakers. Instead, you spend almost all your time studying grammar, parsing and analyzing sentences, and translating texts, which makes it an extremely demanding subject.

You have to memorize endings such as -a, -ae, -ae, -am, -ā, -ā for the singular, and -ae, -ārum, -īs, -ās, -īs, -ae for the plural. The same ending can have several different meanings, and once you add all the verb tenses, it becomes a complete nightmare.

We started learning this during the very first week of Latin classes. After only two months I was already struggling to keep up, and six months later about 90% of us barely understood what was going on. By the end of the second year, I hardly even knew what was happening in class anymore. Once you lose the thread especially when you're only 14 years old it's incredibly difficult to catch up in Latin...

Of course, nowadays we have tools and AI systems like ChatGPT that can help when you lose track. Back then, it was much harder because once you fell behind, you were simply lost in all that grammar as the course kept moving forward.

Very few people are truly fluent in Latin. I would say that about 95% of those experts are in Church circles, while most of the rest are university professors.

As you probably know, Latin is the official language of the Vatican. They even have ATMs with a Latin interface there. I think I'd end up leaving with empty pockets!
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I'm only a few months in, but I find translating Latin to be like solving puzzles. I actually love it! Memorizing the endings of various declensions and conjugations seemed mind-numbing until I started understanding better the "why" behind everything.

My son is ahead of me and doing pretty well. He's going to have to keep going, because his dream is to be an FSSP priest. He must know his Latin!

Sanctus · Jul 14, 2026 at 5:39 PM

"Pacem in Terris." Peace on earth. That was an encyclical.

Dave Fagan · Jul 15, 2026 at 9:19 AM

Integrōs accēdere fōntes —
“Approach the pure springs.”

Dave Fagan · Jul 15, 2026 at 9:20 AM

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Learning a Little Latin

PurpleFlower Powers

Sanctus "Jesus I trust in you!"

Dave Fagan Ave Maria

Dave Fagan Ave Maria

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