It was probably inevitable: Finland’s Yle radio axes Latin news show after 30 years.
Finland’s public broadcaster Yle has ended its weekly Latin language news bulletin, after three decades on the air, the broadcaster announced. Since its debut in 1989, Nuntii Latini has offered a five-minute summary of the week’s national and foreign news in the classical language. In later years the show was also made available online, garnering it around 40,000 listeners around the world, including some from the Vatican.
The last bulletin was broadcast on June 14, and detailed the agreement between the US and Mexico on immigration, talks between the presidents of China and Russia and the end of the Latin programme, which “post ferias aestivas non continuabuntur” (will not resume after the summer holiday). […]
Kaj Farm, head of programmes for Yle Radio 1, said they had decided to cancel the show since the producers were unable to continue. “The same people have been doing it week for week now for 30 years, and they are not that young anymore,” he told AFP. Farm said the show had originally started as somewhat of an “inside joke,” and since it was hard to find suitable replacements for the ageing staff they decided it was time to pull the plug.
In addition to Finnish and Swedish, Yle produces news in English, Russian, Sami, Roma, simplified Finnish, Karelian and sign language.
I first mentioned Nuntii Latini back in 2004; sic (as they say) transit. Thanks, Yoram!
I forgot to mention that the audio archive is here.
O tempora! O mores!
It so happens that just yesterday I attended a graduation ceremony in Cambridge, which I am happy to relate took place entirely in Latin. Pockets of resistance survive. Nil desperandum.
Loculi remorae rather than oppugnantiae, I suppose.
Sadly, yes: but at least lampada tradunt.
I feel like Lucia in the Mapp and Lucia novels, with her “un po’ di musica” and suchlike.
‘Sami’,’Karelian’ and ‘Roma’ are all a bit imprecise: Yle has news in North Saami, Inari Saami and Skolt Saami, whilst ‘Karelian’ is Olonets Karelian. ‘Roma’ is Finnish Roma/Kalo, which is pretty different from neighbouring varieties of Romani.
Would you call it “imprecise” to say that someone speaks “English” rather than “the English spoken by Brooklynites of Italian descent in Bensonhurst”?
No, I wouldn’t, but saying ‘Sami’ is in my view imprecise if there are 10 recognized Saami languages, of which eight have their own orthographies and of which six are official minority languages in three different countries. It’s true, though, that some Saami prefer to talk of one Saami language, as to do otherwise would additionally diminish the unity they are trying to achieve.
With regard to Karelian the situation is a bit different, as the ethnic self-awareness of the Karelians (at least in Russia) is much less strong; even so, ‘Karelian’ is still a vague umbrella term. I suppose I always want to know which variety is referred to when people talk of ‘Saami’ or ‘Karelian’, but maybe I’m just being picky.
I think you are. Consider that the vast majority of humanity has never heard of Saami, let alone Karelian; I’m pretty sure the mention of subdivisions of those languages would be seen as pointless ostentation by pretty much everyone reading the news story. An article in a linguistics journal would be a different matter, of course.
It’s my mistake (my pointless ostentation!): I didn’t realize the list was in a Guardian article and not on the English-language Yle website. Sorry about that. Or ‘Prostikkua!’, as they say in Olonets Karelian…
William Buckley Jr. was good at acanthous ostentation.
I, of course, am delighted to know about Olonets Karelian!
It so happens that just yesterday I attended a graduation ceremony in Cambridge, which I am happy to relate took place entirely in Latin
That’s how I got my undergraduate degree many years ago. At least, I assume I got a degree. I couldn’t tell you what they were actually saying. What’s Latin for “just kidding, guys”?
graduation ceremony in Cambridge, entirely in Latin
Cambridge, Cambs? Fun, but isn’t it a bit… you know. If they rotated Chinese & Kusaal with Latin, I’ll feel more confident that it’s about learning and not just more nostalgic public-school snobbery.
Another peculiar offering of YLE is Uutiset selkosuomeksi, news in very simple Finnish for learners of the language. Simplified news for learners has been offered in various languages over the years, but Selkouutiset stands out by having the announcer speak so very, very slowly. It is a real snail’s pace and even slower than the audio files that come with textbooks I know. I don’t think this is a helpful approach – learners would be better served by having the news read at normal speed, but accompanied by a transcript of what was said. I guess the method was established when most people tuned into a radio broadcast and there was no way to provide listeners with the text, but surely most people are now getting the content from YLE’s website.
For several years in the 1970s no CCNY College of Liberal Arts and Science graduates had in fact graduated, because it was found after the retirement of the dean of the college (American tertiary institutions have many deans) that he had failed to forward the records of graduation to the state capital as required by law. After this was cleaned up, the deanship was divided into four: a Dean of Liberal Arts, of Natural Science, of Social Science, and the “horizontal dean”, whose responsibility is for the first two years when students don’t necessarily know what their major subject will be yet.
Where can I tune in for newscasts carried out in “the English spoken by Brooklynites of Italian descent in Bensonhurst”? (To be fair, I do feel like these days the all-news or mostly-news AM stations in the NYC market have some on-air voices with accents that don’t impair comprehension but do sound like individual personalities who grew up in some specific regional/ethnic context w/o having been completely deracinated into some sort of completely standardized Newscaster English.
It should be narrated by Vinnie, who would intersperse the news with comments about how his grandmother made pastafazool.
Leon Bottstein, the longtime president of Bard College*, routinely mocks the diplomas at the college’s commencement ceremonies, for being inscribed in Latin at an Episcopalian school.
*An excellent school for smart people who tend to stand in their own light, as mathematician Daniel Kleitman put it.
Would you call it “imprecise” to say that someone speaks “English” rather than “the English spoken by Brooklynites of Italian descent in Bensonhurst”?
I would call it “imprecise” to say that someone speaks “English” rather than “US English, Australian English, and South African English”, or “Italian” rather than “Tuscan, Venetian, and Neapolitan”.
(…Wait, are there any people who can speak Tuscan, Venetian, and Neapolitan? A more plausible example is [standard language], [major regional dialect], and [minor local dialect] – like David Marjanovic, who speaks Standard German, Viennese, and whatever his local dialect is.)
IIRC, the level of divergence between the Sami varieties is comparable to that between Finnish and Karelian, or Swedish and Norwegian, so the only reason they’re considered “dialects” at all is historical inertia, with a side of “no separate army or navy”.
(Then again, the same goes for Tuscan, Venetian, and Neapolitan. On the other hand, English dialects are closer to each other, so there isn’t really anything* that counts as “English” but should really be its own language – or if there is, it’s probably moribund. I guess AAVE might count?)
That said, I can deal with this sort of thing in general-audience texts (though even then I would still have written something like “several dialects of Sami”, to avoid the impression that there’s only one version of Sami programming).
Incidentally, how the triangular heck do they do radio programs in sign language? Or does this refer to non-radio programs by the same broadcaster?
*) aside from Scots, which usually isn’t considered to be English, but, IIRC, sometimes is; several English-based creoles are in the same category
Pres. Botstein is being silly and/or historically ignorant. Latin fluency for the educated was not deprecated by the Reformation, and indeed daily chapel services at the Oxford and Cambridge colleges continued to be held in Latin after the Reformation (with the last straggler only switching over to English partway through the reign of Queen Victoria) — the point was to hold services in a language the congregation would understand (although implementing that concept in Celtic-speaking areas admittedly lagged) and the 16th-century switchover to English in most places was for the benefit of the majority of congregations where most attendees could not follow services in Latin without prejudice to the minority where most could. As recently as the year of my own baptism a bit over a half-century ago I expect the majority of Episopalian clergy in the U.S. had a passing acquaintance with high-school Latin, certainly enough to read a diploma, although with that as with so many other things, it may have then turned into apres les Sixties, le deluge.
I would call it “imprecise” to say that someone speaks “English” rather than “US English, Australian English, and South African English”, or “Italian” rather than “Tuscan, Venetian, and Neapolitan”.
You should reconsider your standards of precision when you find yourself accusing almost everyone on earth of imprecision.
You should reconsider your standards of precision when you find yourself accusing almost everyone on earth of imprecision.
Well, to be fair, both of those examples involve several distinct versions; most cases would only involve one. I note that I did not agree with your example (or indeed with the Karelian case).
I also note that I did not mention what would be sufficiently precise – and I’d say that something like “several/multiple versions/dialects/varieties of X” would be enough, at least in texts not explicitly intended for linguists (and even then it probably wouldn’t need that much precision – after all, “Tuscan”, “Venetian” and “Neapolitan” are themselves groupings of multiple languages).
But yes, I admit that most people probably typically wouldn’t reach even this level of precision (and, in fact, I suspect that I am likely among them). I just fail to see why this would be a problem.
I don’t think it would be a problem at all, but I’m not the one who brought it up. I think people generally use just as much precision as they need at the moment.
John C.: IIRC, the level of divergence between the Sami varieties is comparable to that between Finnish and Karelian, or Swedish and Norwegian, so the only reason they’re considered “dialects” at all is historical inertia, with a side of “no separate army or navy”.
Yes and No. It’s not one dialect continuum but at least two, Western and Eastern Sami. The variation within Western Sami can be compared to German. South and North Sami at opposite ends are far removed from eachother also linguistically, but there is (used to be) an unbroken continuum of intermediate dialects. Inari Sami doesn’t really fit in either group, but may be a remnant of a third continuum, the Southeastern, of which the southernmost members would possibly have been intermediate to Karelian. So the three Sami languages in Finland are actually not very mutually intelligible.
Why there are such sharp divides is an interesting question. Part of the answer is that the Inari Sami are traditionally settled at the shores of lake Inari, while the semi-nomadic reindeer herders, including the North Sami, expanded northwards after being incorporated into the Swedish military-industrial complex in the 16th century. The dialects of the settled Sea Sami, fishermen on the coast, are said to have more Eastern features than that of their reindeer-herding neighbours. In the other direction it’s hardly a coincidence that the western limit of Skolt is within the blurry old line between Swedish and Russian dominance. Westward expansion of Skolts could be a similar response to incentives from Russian trade in the Kola peninsula. The result would have been loss of intermediate dialects among semi-nomads on both sides, while the more settled and self-sufficient Inari Sami (and to some extent the Sea Sami) kept theirs.
I would call it “imprecise” to say that someone speaks “English”
I was born and grew up in England and it’s precise to say I speak English. I dislike the American expression “British English”, a dialect that doesn’t exist except in the minds of Americans who want to define their own language. I’d say “American English” rather than “American” is imprecise and though it’s not my problem to sort that out you can maybe see that ‘precision’ can be subjective.
It’s very nice to be precise,
And wise when all is wild surmise.
Any discussion of Latin education is incomplete without this quote from Eugene Onegin (~ early 1820s, 1,VI):
Латынь из моды вышла ныне:
Так, если правду вам сказать,
Он знал довольно по-латыне,
Чтоб эпиграфы разбирать,
Потолковать об Ювенале,
В конце письма поставить vale,
Да помнил, хоть не без греха,
Из Энеиды два стиха.
Latin is now out of fashion
And truth be told
He [Onegin] knew enough Latin
To understand an epigraph,
To make small-talk about Juvenal,
To end a letter with vale,
And remembered, not exactly though,
Two lines from Aeneid
I speak Standard and my dialect (uh… central Upper Austrian innovative something). I totally could speak Viennese mesolect, but, fun fact, I’ve never tried, because just about everyone in Vienna understands my dialect anyway.
I think I could fake Viennese dialect for a while, but not long; the vocabulary would trip me up pretty soon, at least to the extent that I’d sound peculiarly unidiomatic after maybe a minute.
Karelian is Finnic. Finnic is probably more closely related to Mordvinic than to Sami(c) – the arguments to the contrary, now that the many etymologically nativized loans have been identified, seem to be limited to “individually, each of the common innovations of Mordvinic and Finnic is in principle capable of having evolved more than once, so the evidence is, like, totally weak”.
I dislike the American expression “British English”, a dialect that doesn’t exist except in the minds of Americans who want to define their own language.
The English of England, to say nothing of Britain or the UK, is more internally diverse than the difference between RP-ish and American varieties of the standard dialect.
Wait, are there any people who can speak Tuscan, Venetian, and Neapolitan?
Well, my great grandmother could speak « every » Italian dialect, according to my grandmother. Hard to prove, or believe, but I am fairly confident she could speak her native Lombard, her husband’s family’s Marchesan, Neapolitan and Sicilian, which she would have learned from other immigrant families in New Britain, CT. And «book Italian« . That arsenal would be enough to cover most of the major dialect groups of the peninsula. I have no idea if she knew Venetian though or how she would have learned it. My guess is probably not, and I also doubt very much she ever learned Friulian or Sardinian.
J: The English of England, to say nothing of Britain or the UK, is more internally diverse
So it’s harder to use as a standard of reference than ‘British English’ is? Well, the OED manages ok. And for the purpose of comparison with other dialectal usage it’s by definition more accurate that ‘British English’, which sometimes but not always includes the English of Ireland, Guernsey and New Zealand. As I say, ‘British’ is really only useable as a comparison to ‘American’. It exists mostly to contrast Webster’s spelling to everyone else’s, and he wanted an American language.
I admit that when I say AmE or BrE, I am often talking about spelling, but divergence in word choice and idiom is important too, and AmE (and to some extent CanE) are more deeply diverged in those respects than any other English outside the Irish Isles, yet not so much that mutual intelligibility is threatened. Much. Yet.
CanE and the Irish Isles, I’d like to see more of both of these expressions.
‘British’ … exists mostly to contrast Webster’s spelling to everyone else’s
Hardly! Go read Separated by a Common Language. Lynne Murphy’s book The Prodigal Tongue is excellent: I rate it top of the scale on *both* “fun to read” and “backed up with research”.
AFAICT Irish Isles has been strictly yours until now, though I had actually forgotten its origin. Exceptions are the terms British-Irish Isles and British and Irish Isles, which have seen some use but which are much too clunky, and the occasional use of Irish isles to mean the small islands off the coast of Ireland. (Britain is not small, it’s great.)
Great Ireland has possibilities, come the Brexeunt.
kt, It seems like a good blog and book. I enjoy the reading about the differences, whatever they’re called.
We could always rename England to “West Frisia”.
That would please Des. He’s already become a Frisian, with a passport (Dutch) and everything, due to Brexit.
Cambria Irredenta.
Australian technical terminology is very divergent from American (and likely from British too).
Someone will make good money translating mining operation manuals from Australian to American and vice versa.
(and likely from British too)
I wouldn’t be too sure. My English great uncle Reggie (d.1924) was a mining engineer in Australia.
Inari Sami doesn’t really fit in either group, but may be a remnant of a third continuum, the Southeastern
While extinct at least since ~1900, several varieties of “Kemi Sami” (a geographical term) from the more southern parts of Finland are still attested. Some of them connect Inari Sami to Skolt and (more recently extinct) Akkala Sami, others seem to have been their own lineages entirely.
Also Western Sami is in more like a linkage than a live continuum: there are some reasons to think that the oldest sub-division within Sami is Southern Sami vs. everything else, and I don’t think the relative dating of most of the West/East versus inner-West isoglosses has been established too well either.
Olonets Karelian is meanwhile definitely just one dialect among several, though due to the splintering of the speaker base, last I checked there are four competing proposed literary standards for Karelian, The others are Northern, Southern, and Tver, all within the “Karelian proper” dialects as distinct from Olonets. It’s all in a bit of flux, given that even the notion of Karelian as a distinct language (rather than the eastern wing of a common dialect continuum with Finnish varieties) has only stabilized post-WW2.
Tver Karelian – another 17th century settler dialect/language (like American English, South American Spanishes and Afrikaans).
Though given its historical fate, perhaps better analogy would be New York Dutch
Cambria Irredenta
While that’s certainly historically true, I fear that that ancient Lloegyr has been irreversibly contaminated by Frisian, ummm, brightening.
lloegr a’i thyner iaith hen, – er gwaetha’
Pob gwth a chenfigen,
A dybiaf, byth ei diben,
Er drygau a saethau sen
When I graduated from the University of Wales in 1975, the ceremony was in Welsh, but my certificate in Latin.
@SFReader:
An unusual sentiment. The poet perhaps felt that the English (and their language) were at least preferable to those horrid revolutionary French. Unless he means Welsh when he talks about the old language of Lloegr, which I suppose he might.
Well, I got an impression that for this patriotic Welsh poet England and Wales were inseparable. And his poetic diatribe was not really about language, but against “the democrats, or the men who speak cruelly against the king and a large part of our government”
I’m sure you’re right; it just seems odd to praise English specifically in an englyn. Still, I suppose all men are brothers in the face of the democratic threat to our way of life.
Only those on the island of Britain. For the rest of the world,
Duw lwyddo arfau Lloegr yn ddychryn i’r holl fyd
Why stop there? To Infinity, and Beyond! Crumpets on Mars!
(Possibly Welsh cakes, too, if the Saxon is pleased with our loyalty.)
I suppose a more positive attitude to the English language is partly explicable from the fact that the poem antedates by a good half-century the decision by the English to try to eradicate the native language of the Welsh altogether (for their own good.)
Crumpets on Mars!
Ma’s Bar is the name of the Dewis breastfeeding support group in north Wales (“Dewis Cymru – The place for wellbeing in Wales. Language: English only.”)
They seem to have got bored even in providing the Welsh version of the website, most of which is in fact in English.
I’m actually a bit surprised: there are laws about providing services in Welsh for public bodies in Wales, with quite exciting penalties for non-compliance.
Ironically, dewis means “choice.”
AJP: Wow! I’ve heard of two rhotic Mars Bars in the United States. I had no idea that the candy was well-known enough in the British Isles for the pun to work.
Oh, yes! The deep-fried Mars Bar is an ancient traditional Glaswegian delicacy.
(For real)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-fried_Mars_bar
I had no idea that the candy was well-known enough in the British Isles
But why? O, Y. It is British. From Wiki:
Foolish me.
The Mars Bar was a storied dive bar in Manhattan, on 1st and 1st. The Mars Bar in San Francisco is a bar-and-grill kind of affair.
Many a British University Union had a Mars Bar back in the 1970’s (which was when the legendary 1960’s actually happened.)
Second Avenue and 1st Street, actually. I remember it, but would never have gone in.
The Mars Bar was a storied dive bar in Manhattan, on 1st and 1st.
Some of the stories (as well as photos) here.
I remember it, but would never have gone in.
I remember it too, and probably went in at least once, but my dive bar memories have puddled and evaporated…
There was also the Red Bar and then later the Gold Bar.
The generic term is color bar. It’s contentious candy.
All over western Europe, actually, and by now most likely eastern, too. I think the complete inventory is Mars, Twix, Bounty, Milky Way and KitKat. Oh, and this Lion thing or whatever.
I don’t know if there are almonds in it over here.
I think the complete inventory is Mars, Twix, Bounty, Milky Way and KitKat.
I’m surprised that Snickers isn’t on this list. Unless it’s the “Lion thing or whatever”.
I just forgot about Snickers.
In North American, Mars produces a sequence of chocolate bars. Three Musketeers is chocolate surrounding nougat. Milky Way adds a caramel layer on top of the nougat. Snickers adds peanut butter and peanut layer. (I still remember their commercials: “Packed with peanuts, peanut bullet, nougat, caramel and milk chocolate, Snickers really satisfies.” I generally prefer the bars without the peanut elements though.) The flavoring of the nougat is also different between the various versions. (There was also the American Mars bar, now discontinued, which had nougat, caramel, and almonds—nearly intermediate between Milky Way and Snickers).
One traditional way of eating Three Musketeers was to freeze it. This is also done with other candy bars that are just nougat surrounded by chocolate, such as Tootsie Roll Industries’ Charleston Chew (which comes in three different nougat flavors: banana, chocolate, strawberry—I remember a jingle for that too). It think the other bars, particularly the Snickers, run you too much rich of chipping a tooth on a frozen peanut.
Supposedly, Charleston Chew is named after the dance, but I have long been a bit dubious about that, since for decades, the main factory where the candy bars were made was in Charlestown, Boston. (Like seemingly all candy factories in Cambridge and Charlestown, it eventually closed and was turned into an office park.)
To straighten out the question of national chocolate, Mars Inc. is and always has been an American company, founded in Minneapolis in 1920. The son of the founder was the chief inventor of chocolate products, including the Milky Way (1923) and Snickers (1930). He wanted to expand to the UK, but his father did not, so his father bought him out and he moved to the UK where he sold Milky Ways under the new name of Mars Bars (1933). He also acquired a pet food line and founded Uncle Ben’s (instant) Rice, expanding back to the U.S., where he started to sell M & M’s (1941) modeled on Smarties, then as now pretty much unknown in the U.S. The other “M” was Bruce Murrie, son of the then president of Hershey, because Hershey had the monopoly on rationed chocolate in the U.S. during the war. When his father died, the surviving Mars merged all the companies.
Here’s a list of all Mars Inc. products, excluding ones from acquired companies and permanently discontinued products. Not all products are sold in all countries, and there are many variants.
3 Musketeers, Bounty, Celebrations, Cirku, CocoaVia, Combos, Dolmio, Dove, Ebly, Ethel M, FLAVIA, Fling, Flyte, Galaxy, Galaxy Bubbles, Galaxy Minstrels, goodnessKNOWS, Kudos, M-Azing, M&M’s, Maltesers, Marathon, Mars, Masterfoods, Milky Way, Munch, Promite, Revels, Seeds of Change, Snickers, Topic, Tracker, Treets, Twix, Uncle Ben’s Rice.
OBTW, Canadian Mars products are of the “worldwide” rather than the “American” type. Australia has some slightly different formulations to comply with Australian law against over-sugared snack food.
Sez here that Dove and Galaxy are two brands for the same product (Dove sells in the US). They should not be on your list, since they were made by Dove Candies & Ice Cream, a Chicago company acquired by Mars in 1986.
To straighten out the question of national chocolate,
Thank God.
There’s also the question of Kit-Kat (not a cat food) and whether it was invented before the Norwegian so-called Qvikk-Lunsj. Because they’re otherwise exactly the same. I don’t mind but others do. They say that Wittgenstein, whose house in Norway has just been restored, using his old Manchester connections copied the top secret Rowntree recipe and brought it over one summer in the 1930s.
All the British companies like Cadbury’s and Rowntree are nowadays owned by Nestlé and the other usual suspects, who mess about with the chemistry. I’ve no idea why they do that.
I am revolted by those coprosaccharids. I imagine consumers don’t care much about the exact composition, as long as their teeth stick together. That gives Nestlé an opportunity to mess about with the chemistry.
Your search – coprosaccharids – did not match any documents.
Did you mean: prosoccerkids
Fecal sugars? No thanks, I just remembered I’m a diabetic.
Or did Stu mean that they use shit chemistry in general?
I meant everything disobliging that the word suggests.
Oh, that explains a few things.