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I actually took Latin in middle school, although it was far from being my favorite subject, and I didn’t exactly distinguish myself with marks. The old doggerel:

“Latin’s a dead language;
It’s very plain to see;
It killed off all the Romans;
And now it’s killing me.”

had a certain resonance. However, that rudimentary grounding in concepts like the declension of nouns stood me in good stead later on when I studied German. (Not that I ever became much of a German scholar, either).

Latin, which had humble beginnings as the local dialect of a small village on the Tiber River (which eventually grew into the city of Rome) became, along with Greek, one of the two great Classic languages of Western culture, and spread throughout the world, not least through the influence of the Roman Catholic Church.

And while Latin is popularly considered a “dead language,” in fact it lives on in many modern, Western languages -- Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Roman, Provençal, and Catalan; and also of course in English -- the post-modern global lingua franca which, in its present day form, is really a mongrelized amalgam of about half Germanic/Scandinavian and half romance (mainly French/Latin) derivation with plenty of Greek influence and substantial contributions from Eastern and African languages assimilated during the colonial period.

The ancient Britons would have had an indigenous dialect, but it was largely overwhelmed by the Teutonic dialects that were imported with waves of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians who invaded the British Isles in the fifth and sixth centuries. The Celtic peoples to the west and north where better able to preserve their ancient languages, which live on today in Irish, Welsh, and Scots Celtic.

However, the English language, per se, did not begin to dominate even in England until the late Middle Ages, being adopted by Parliament only in 1362. French and Latin remained the languages of Royalty, nobility, the Church, and most literature until nearly the time of the Renaissance.

Which is a roundabout way of illustrating that Latin is not irrelevant, and that some knowledge of Latin is a requirement for true English literacy.

An OS X tool that can help in a small way toward that objective is Latin Dictionary Version 1.0.0 -- a searchable dictionary of the classic Latin language written in Cocoa.

Latin Dictionary is easy to use. Just type the word that you’re looking for in the top text field and click on the search button. The results of any searches will appear in the lower text area.

The dictionary comes with pronunciation guides to help you figure out how to say things in Latin. But Latin isn’t normally written with these guides. In the preferences you can choose to have these pronunciation hits substituted by normal roman characters.

The Dictionary.rtf data file can be opened with Text Edit and edited or you can add more words. If you add material into the Dictionary.rtf file that doesn’t use standard Roman characters, you can use the Substitution.rtf file to change them. See the ReadMe documentation for details.

There are also instructions on setting up your keyboard to enter Latin characters.

Latin Dictionary is freeware (but donations are graciously accepted).

For more information, visit:
http://homepages.tig.com.au/~cthulhu/

From Andreas Weik

Hi Charles,

I really enjoy your reports once in a while... ;-)

I read your last report about Desktop pictures on AppleLinks. You were using TexEdit to do the manipulations to Collections.plist. As you can see the linebreaks didn’t got converted. That’s because they’re most likely UNIX linebreaks (LF character) instead of the regular Mac linebreak (CR character). I strongly suggest you use BBEdit Lite, as this texteditor is capable converting linefeeds between Mac, UNIX and Wintel worlds. Makes things much easier... :-)

BTW, why did you go through all this hassle just to get the Beach pictures? They should be available in a folder at the same location the Nature pictures are. Just select “Choose Folder...” from the dropdown menu, and select the picture from the filebrowser window that opens...

Greetings,
Andreas Weik

The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here:
http://www.applelinks.com/news/odyssey/

CM

Charles W. Moore