January 18, 2005
Latina est gaudium
So I'm learning Latin for fun and career advancement (Latin will help my application to Ph.D. programs and is a requirement for Medieval Studies, one of the fields I'm considering) and have to say, it's a lot of fun. Since it's the first inflected language I've learned, it's something almost entirely new, unlike the various Romance languages out there which are all highly similar. It's also surprisingly easy to get enough of a handle on it to be able to put it to use translating the random bits of Latin one comes across in reading. For all of you who are interested in languages, I highly recommend learning it if you don't already know it. You can just pick up a copy of Wheelock's and the workbook and manage to learn it fairly well on your own if you can't find a class somewhere. Quis linguam latinam intellegit?
Not trying to convert you or anything but if your love of Latin continues to grow you may be interested in observing a Mass celebrated entirely in Latin as it was before the 1960s. There should be one every weekday morning (6:30 am) near your current home at St. Thomas Aquinas Church. And another in Ft. Worth every Sunday at 5:30pm at St. Mary of the Assumption on Magnolia just a few block away from where Mad Hatters used to be located. Okay. This concludes my proselytizing.
Hehehe... I didn't know any of them still did Mass in Latin. If I get to the point where I feel like I could understand a fair amount, that sounds like it'd be interesting (though I'd have to watch everyone else to know when to kneel and such). There's a Brazilian church in Dallas that I want to go to, as well. The entire service is in Portuguese.