Kids nowadays. They slur so hard that it's almost incomprehensible. And too many vulgar loanwords from all the Celts and Saxons they hang out with! Uncouth, I say!
I'm native German and never learned French but I had 4 years of Latin in school. I'm amazed at how much I do understand in both languages. Such a great video!
@Busta von Nutz I would be careful with this Gaulish-Frankish assumption. As a linguistics student I was told there's only 500 gaulish words in the french language and all of them are related to agriculture so it's very limited. The franks had more influence on phonology than on the vocabulary so to speak (1000 germanic words from this period remain approximately) which might explain why french sounds different. The foreign words come from the arab language, we borrowed a lot of words from the Italians during the renaissance but also from classical latin and greek and yeah lately english turns out to but the first language to be borrowed from
@steamfunk19 That means that 1/5 French words don't though. That's heavy, & unlike English those non-Latin words are likely not as redundant or underutilized. Gaulish & Frankish are the biggest two, but now even English (e.g. Weekend, Email, etc) are worming their way into French ironically. Language is fascinating.
Can ScorpioMartianus speak ALL romance languages ? I mean since you've figured out the root latin words of each, applying the different "conversion templates" should not be hard for you. Right ?
Luke, may I ask you who the conversation partner was in the first Latin dialogue? The voice sounded quite similar to that of the Italian teacher who, together with you and a Polish professor, took part in the games with the Romanian teacher
I can vouch for what Luke said at the end about making this more difficult. I've been using LLPSI to learn Latin for the past few months and was a little bit surprised at how hard it to understand the Latin in this video, especially given that I could very easily understand everything he was saying in the other Latin videos on this channel. I breathed a sigh of relief when I heard him say he purposefully made it hard!
@Charles Kerkeson yes like comprar in portuguese, but when I'm in the Latin mindset 'comparare' doesnt come to my mind for 'to buy' but rather 'emere'. When I hear comparare, I think of its standard definition 'to compare' or 'to join together'. Comparare does actually become the word 'to buy' in many of the romance language but I guess where it differs is in idiomatic expression.
ya I was kind of confused when he used the verb 'comparare' instead of 'emere' for to buy when he translated that seinfeld joke, as "emere" is just that standard word you see often.
Yes, this! I learned Latin at school, and speak a little Spanish and French, and watch a lot of Luke's stuff, and I struggled *mightily* with most of these tasks!
I've been speaking French almost my whole (long) life. I had Latin classes at the University. Nevertheless, I understood only about 20% of everything. Donc, amis francophones, chapeau! Luke, excellent as always. Thank you all, thank you Norbert 🥰
That was fun! 😄 I have roughly the same level of understanding of Latin as the people in this video, so that was definitely interesting to watch. Thank you for the video! 🙏 Greetings from France 🇫🇷
Two of my favourite languages BRvidrs in one video 😍😍😍 I love Elisa's and Luke's channels!! I am always surprised at how much Latin I can understand from such videos, it was not my biggest strength at school 😅
Words can't describe how I'm happy to see latin series once again 🤩, great job as always Norbert and all participants!! Now what's missing is comparing Catalan, Occitan, Portuguese and Spanish varietes (other than Brazilian and Mexican respectively) with Latin😁!!
As a romanian, I' ve understood the number 1 around 95%. I just missed one or two words, and that scared me. So I got the word after the first sentence in latin.
@Cosmin A.M. i only speak English but i guessed apartment also, from the "habitant homines" and when the girl asked if it was a singular person or many people and he said "plurales"....i quite surprised myself haha
I don't speak any Romanca language and I managed to get roughly what he was talking about. I guessed house/apartment. Cognates and loanwords from Laitn and French in both English and my native Polish were enough hah
Me too. But I also know French and some Italian & Spanish. Edificiu, habitat - are recent loanwords in Romanian, from Latin thru French and/or Italian.
O latim soa maravilhosamente! Também ADORO ❤️ esses jogos linguísticos , são extremamente inteligentes e bem elaborados! Um dia quero participar, amigo 👍 saudações suíço- brasileiras 🇧🇷🇧🇷🇨🇭🇨🇭pozdrowienia 😉
I'm French but I agree with what two of them mentioned: I also know Spanish and it helped way more than French. Well, I still didn't get most of it 😅 but what I did understand was mostly based on Spanish knowledge.
As a French speaker, I am very impressed at the performance of the three "contestants". With the little I remember from Latin and Italian, I could recognize some words here and there but the rythm and the tones were too unsettling to understand anything meaningful. With regards to Luke's comment, I doubt anyone without any knowledge of Latin or any other romance language would fare that well.
As Spanish speaker, Latin was strangely very familiar to my ears. I could not get everything but in general, I could understand what Luke was saying. Some of the sentences were really close to the Spanish. "Aedificium in quo homines habitant" = Edificio en el que los hombres habitan Tam felix sum! = Tan feliz soy! French, however, sounds really different but written is easy to catch. It was a great video. Thanks for it :)
@Guillermo Rivas Junto con saludar, creo que tu afirmación es objetable: es difícil realizar una comparación objetiva, especialmente cuando el español y el italiano perdieron el sistema de casos y declinaciones tan característico del latín. Indudablemente ambas lenguas descienden del latín, pero afirmar que una a veces es más cercana al latín que otra parece provenir más bien de un sesgo de selección (cherry-picking) que de un consenso entre especialistas, más aún al compararlo con el latín clásico que debe haber sido hablado por una minoría culta muy reducida dentro de todo el imperio. Y aún si lo fuera, no tendría ninguna relevancia práctica aparte de la anecdótica. Saludos.
Aedificium in quo homines habitant = Un édifice dans lequel les hommes habitent Maybe it seem different for a foreigner, but as a french speaker these 2 look higgggghly similar :)
Spanish is not as distant to Latin. It's arguably the 2nd closest language to Latin overall but, at times, it is even closer to Latin than Italian -- especially in the verb conjugation and ossified words.
"Aedificium in quo homines habitant" also easy for anyone who speaks French. You're right about reading French over understanding it spoken. I'm the same way with Spanish. I was able to get around in Mexico because many of the words looked familiar enough to me.
I also think it depends on how they approach the language, French is my mother tongue and the only romance lanquage I speak but I was surprised by how difficult it is for them to understand as I could make sense of what was said on the first listening. I think it is because of the way by which I learnt to write french, ortographe did not make sense when I was little until I started thinking about the whole semantic field of the words I wanted to write before puting them on the paper so I trained myself into knowing word declinaisons which are closer to latin.
I'm French and learned some Latin at school although it was a long time ago and frankly I found the challenge really difficult, it's much more difficult for us than understanding Italian for instance which is fairly easy for me. I got the first one right (I thought of a multifamily housing building, and even remembered it was called "insula", I think from some Asterix comic). I got part of the second one, thought it was in a restaurant or a dining room and that the guest was talking to a boy (puer) bringing him food. The other ones were hard: I got that in one case it was windy but that was about all, thought the fourth one was in the airport or something and I heard something about the military, but frankly I could not figure out the story. The last one escaped me entirely, I just understood it was a married couple because the man said "salve uxor" and I vaguely remembered that "uxor" was a married woman. Of course with individual words like the first one it would have been much easier, but still it shows that there is a big gap between understanding individual words, often fairly similar to their French equivalents, and actually understanding a real dialogue in Latin. Veni, vidi, non vici !
I always love these Latin challenges. Great job all around! I recognised the Seinfeld quote as soon as you said "I could sell my mother" And during the 3rd challenge I was "screaming" the seaside until Eliza mentioned it.
I felt good about the first two challenges. Figured out the second by the word cibum. Two years of Latin in high school 30 years ago. And being married to a Latin teacher helped me absorb a bit.
Let me know if the French title is translated correctly. I used last minute google translation to be able to publish the video today. :) Also if you spot any issues with the captions please let me know. I hope you're going to enjoy this video as much as I did! 🤗
@paradoxmo To make it easier to switch from one language to the other you can open the transcript of the video (three dots menu under the video). It will be displayed next to the video along with subtitles and you can change the language displayed there so it's different from the captions displayed in the video.
Hi Norbert. I found the lack of transcriptions burnt into the video (as was normal in previous videos) a bit distracting as I had to keep switching subtitle tracks whenever the language changed. The translated subtitles were also much less accurate, which makes sense since you used machine transcription and translation. Since a lot of people use these for language learning, I think it’s important for the translations to be accurate and complete. Just my preference, but I would rather wait for the video to come out with these features rather than see the video sooner- a lot of people watch these videos years later, and I think quality for the long term is better than expediency in the short term. If you need people to help transcribe or translate in order to put out the video faster, I’m sure you could ask Patreons for assistance.
Brilliant!! I love French, I wish I knew it better and and I'm always interested in hearing native speakers. And Luke❤️ I love his Latin content, he is the best, so encouraging and talented. Thank you for this, Norbert.
this is always great! really great! my french is not that good, so I struggled a bit with the speed of the spoken french-quebec parts, but it was fun as always!
What a wonderful video! Well, any video with Luke is just excellent. Lucius valdē inteligentes est et perbenē Latīne loquitur! J’ai bien aimé l’entendre parler un peu de français. Et les concurrents étaient supers aussi !
I'm French without any knowledge of Spanish and a bit of knowledge of Latin, and I think I understood less than them, most of the time (the last challenge is the only one that I understood better than them, not because of my knowledge of French but actually from my knowledge of Latin). I think that this challenge would have been more interesting with French people without any knowledge of other romance languages. Because they all say at the end of the video that their knowledge of Spanish helped them a lot.
This was great, I loved it. I did two years of latin in high school, I don"t remember much of it but I was able to get some of then words. In the beach story I got arena (sand in Spanish). Like Stephanie said, I think that me knowing Spanish helped more than knowing French.
Embarrassed to say I didn't make the link between "harena" and Spanish "arena". But yeah, Spanish was definitely an easier route in than French for me, even though I speak it less well. The phonology has undergone far less change, and I think the vocabulary too is closer.
@ARGENTVM This is wrong. Primarily because the only element the Gauls left is a few words of vocab. And the language was essentially exstinguished when old French developed. Concerning the Frankish influence, if You consider a Map of the Frankish settlements with a Map of the developpent of old French You will see what happened. But what is true though is that their influence wasn't on what WE imagine now (the -R for instance isn't from them). And i don't know why You talked about Prussia
This is amazing! But may I request-for next time-a multilingual caption track that shows what each person says, whether in English ou en français aut latine? I can make sense of any of those, I just can't always hear the words well!
me encanto muchisimo norbert ...... y de los francofonos entendi bastante a elisa y a toni pero me costo muchisimo entender a stephany se que el frances de quebec es complicado.
@w花b Yes, it's the accent. I speak French as a third language, and the French girl and African guy were easy to understand. The Quebec girl was a bit harder.
The vocabulary is roughly the same as the others but maybe it's the accent or which word they choose to use because in that regard, it's a bit different.
Third challenge: harena is met only as a regional and/or archaic word in Romanian (arină), meaning sand or beach. It gave name to the city of Reni (former in Moldavia, now in Ukraine) - which was along a Danube beach.
As a French i found it almost impossible to understand, my explanation would be : 1. We kept many latin archaïsms and modified them our way 2. We were geographically cut off the rest of the latin world (Alps and Pyrenees mountains) 3. We initially spoke a Celtic language that probably left traces and later came various Germanic tribes especially in the North were the old French was born So i guess all of this combined makes French quite far from Latin and the other Romance languages...
I mean it makes perfect sense. Modern French originated from essentially hillbilly Germanics who were far away from major Latin urban areas. It certainly is interesting how similar middle French sounds too Latin though. As only recently has French become heavy in the accent.
@joey C W Yes but the French variety that prevailed was the gallo-romance speach of the Paris region which was influenced by Germanic presence. Moreover before the great migration, northern Gauls was already relatively cut off from the rest of the empire for geographic, economic and military reasons so they were probably diverging before the arrival of the Franks.
As a Spanish speaker I understood Latin far greater than French. French sounds like a genuine foreign language whereas Latin sounds like something not so foreign at all. I also understood the gist of what Luke was saying in Latin. Unum, duo, tres = Latin Uno, dos, tres = Spanish Tam felix sum = Latin Tan feliz soy (soy tan feliz) = Spanish
@AcirkA productions Il y a un problème avec le français. Le français écris est artificiel. Les nombres en français realmente sont /ã/ /dœ/ /truá/. La phonologie française fait très difficile la compréhension pour la reste des gens qui parlent d’autres langues romaniques.
@sans_h W El problema con el francés es su pronunciación. Su fonología, como el portugués europeo, resulta extraña para el resto de los hablantes de lenguas romances. El francés mantiene, artificialmente, una escritura etimológica que lo hace comprensible, pero a la hora de la verdad, en su forma escrita, resulta casi ininteligible.
@sans_h W , El latin es un idioma mas complicado que todas las lenguas romances. No obstante, el latin hablado es entendible para nosotros quienes hablamos el espanol -- hasta se oye muy parecido al nuestro idioma tal y como nos sucede con el italiano. Es verdad que el latin basico es mas entendible. El frances hablado casi ni entendemos nada mientras en escrito si lo entendemos mas.
Merci beaucoup! C'était vraiment intéressant.... Le latin est tellement difficile mais quand on regarde les sous-titres, on peut comprendre un p'tit peu plus ...
Moi qui connais un peu de latin, j'ai eu bien des difficultés à comprendre les dialogues, surtout le dernier, peut-être aussi à cause du rithme accéléré du discours ou la qualité du son de mon téléphone. De toute façon il y a un abîme du latin au français, il est étrange que les participants aient compris qqch. Mais en même temps cela a été très enthousiasment et intéressant. Suadeo pergite quod facitis, omnibus salutem calidam dico, praecipue Lucio.
So, how again didn’t you show them the written text? At least after the second listen… It would’ve been so much easier for them to understand, though still not too easy… would’ve been so interesting to see how much of a difference it makes! As a scholar of French linguistics and lit, I can tell you that sound is the most difficult for francophone speakers, not written language.
Indeed! And it could have been a bit easier if Luke spoke in ecclesiastical Latin. Classical Latin is more "authentic", but to a French speakers all these v, c and g are hard to understand. Take "vita" or "coeli". Pronounce them in ecclesiastical Latin and it is suddenly much closer to French : "wita" vs "vita" (French "vie") or "koelus" vs "tchelus" (ciel).
i hated latin most through most of my school years. where i live we just translate from latin to our language and thats it. we never actually spoke latin or had the goal of learning it. after 5 years of latin lessons in school (and being very bad at it) i found a teacher who could actually speak latin and showed me how easy it can be and what a great language it is. that teacher was not working at my school, but i took private lessons with in order to not fail the class and not getting a degree. anyways i went from being very bad at latin to being very good at latin in less then 6 month. teachers at my school even thought i was cheating until i explained to them in latin that i wasnt cheating. i used to hate latin with a passion but that changed and i still love it. such a beautiful language and actually pretty easy compared to other languages.
I am russian, who is studying french and this is very interesting experience for me, because I can understand pretty clearly first two quests and guess it right Great format, wish it would be more)))
As a French learning Latin, I understood most of what was said (albeit with some gaps preventing me from understanding the details), except the last one, which I still recognized to be from Amphitryō. Otherwise, I think the beach scene was a little misleading because I don't feel like Lūcius and Īrēnē took any acting courses. :)
This is weird. Usually I don't understand Latin too well, but I understood the first challenge immediately (apartment building). In the second, I understood that he was surprised because it was so expensive (I thought it was a market).
For some time I have been a great admirer of your work. You managed an amazing thing: bring a "dead language" to life with your channel. Our society needs more people like you. I have just one thing to say, that might be wrong, and it is about pronunciation. Please, keep in mind I am of Romanian origin and I learned Latin in school and highchool. Always top grades but forgot most of it. Anyway, Romanian, like Italian, has these two combinations "che/chi" and "ce/ci". We pronunce the first as in the word "chemistry" for example and the second as in the word "Cheddar". If that is so for 2 Latin-derived languages, why would we not use them the same in the root language. The word "aedificium" that you used I would pronounce with "ci" not "chi". What is your opinion? PS. Thanks again for your efforts! Amazing!!!
@Kelly Mcbright Indeed! But when every available description by ancient grammarians and every transcription into other languages and all of the philological evidence from the romance languages are in agreement, it's no wonder this has been a settled question for over a hundred years. Arguing this point today is a bit like trying to argue for geocentrism - maybe that was an open question once upon a time, but that time has long passed. It is true that people who dislike the findings of linguists and philologists tend to accuse them of being ideologues, but the reality is that linguists and philologists have extreme disagreements over fundamental aspects of linguistics, so the notion that the areas where agreement have long been reached are just because of academic orthodoxy really has very little basis.
@Kelly Mcbright There is no evidence for a soft articulation of C until the 5th century or so. It's not really a debate - this is a completely settled matter which some people refuse to accept for ideological reasons.
Great video Norbert! I believe there are some issues with the subtitles :) whenever Latin is spoken, it still shows the text in Latin. Other than that, great video!
@Ecolinguist it keeps happening throughout the whole video :( so it's either Latin audio with English captions activated = Latin text Or Latin audio with English captions activated = no text at all
What do you mean? Which part of the video are you referring to? :) It's quite possible you have your Latin captions enabled and that's why they show. Check your video settings and let me know. :)
It seemed that several of the guests replied in English, even though they were supposed to talk in French. I can see that being a natural social response, especially if they would have to focus on a third, mostly foreign, language, separately...
@Jean Alex Penso o mesmo. Estudei francês por alguns meses na faculdade e consigo entender muita coisa, mesmo estudando só o básico. Parece que quando a gente estuda um pouco da fonética do francês, quase tudo fica mais claro aos ouvidos e o vocabulário ainda é bastante românico/latino.
Quanto mais você aprende francês mais você nota que o francês na verdade não é tão diferente das outras línguas latinas. Eu acho uma língua relativamente fácil
Background: A Finn that speaks fluent English, and non-fluent Swedish and German. Elementary French. 1) That was easy, I guessed it right away. 2) I thought it was a street-food booth at a marketplace, pretty close. 3) I thought they were having a picnic in a park but didn't understand it was on a beach. I heard the word "flatus" and I got that it has to be something else, like a blow of wind. ;) 4-5) Simply too difficult.
I don’t speak any Romance language at all but I was able to guess the answer to the first challenge on the spot thanks to all the Romanisms in English. When, shortly before the 2nd challenge started, Luke said “you’ll hear it twice”, it immediately gave me flashbacks to language exams 😂
I think it's interesting how English is the modern "latin" language, like it's the language of the imperium haha universal language. I wonder if In 1000 years they'll be doing similar videos with whatever language descendents English will have.
@Your Creepy Uncle i don't think you got what i meant 😅 it's like Latin in the sense that it was become the lingua franca of the world. Like Latin was but more wide spread. You can now find English loan words in almost all languages really. At least the major ones. Latin led to romance languages, I'm curious to what languages English will lead too since it's dominance is honestly equal or more to the dominance that Latin had in that age.
Even I got the first question. The second one I only heard the word for mother. The third one I heard the word for catch. For the last two questions, I drew completely blank.
It seems like the French speakers got the basic gist of what was said in Latin, but not much details. You can see the Latin in French on paper in written French much more easily than hearing it spoken. French went through a few dramatic shifts in its pronunciation that makes it difficult for one with a Latin or other Romance language speaker to understand spoken French. But reading written French is much easier. The woman from Quebec seem to have an easier time understanding the spoken Latin. I wonder if perhaps that's because Canadian French may still retain some older forms of the French language that the two other French speakers are not familiar with.
In the first few seconds, I thought I was hear some sort of Provençal or other Galloromance language. But no, it was just mr Ranieri trying his best X)
@Manuel Ludantulo The ONLY official language of San Marino is Italian and Romagol is used by the elderly population. Romangol is estimated to go extinct in 2040.
@wyqtor In Spanish we have feliz (felix in Latin)= happy, felicitar (verb)= to congratulate, to wish, felicidad (noun) = happiness. We use the plural to wish in general: ¡Felicidades! and Feliz + sustantive (cumpleaños, aniversario, año, navidad, etc...) to wish something specific. I know that what in Spanish (felicitar) or Italian (felicitare) would be an infinitive, in Romanian words ended in -are, -ere, -ire are sustantives, right?
@Adán Peña 3rd one is more like fericire (=happiness), we also have the word felicitare (=greeting, congratulations - borrowed more recently from French, that's why the 'l' is still there).
I loved the previous iterations so much! But I was disappointed in this one because when Luke is speaking Latin, there's no English translation. That's an essential part of the appeal, when you understand what he's talking about and you see the guests struggling to guess the word. I didn't finish the video. Sigh 😢
3. They are at the beach, talking about the beautiful day, the sun shining, the wind blowing. She says it's perfect for sandals. She asks if he will open the umbrella. He asks her to help. A gust of wind blows at the umbrella and she tells him to hold on to it. It blows away. She tells him to run to get it, but he complains that the sand is as hot as fire.
That's just mean, throwing Plautus at them. That's already hard enough to read for those of us who have studied 1st century Latin, as Plautus's word choice are rather archaic. (In fact I think his work is usually classified as Old Latin, rather than Classical Latin.)
Versus is also Latin. Means “towards”. Contra is “against” in Latin. We say “contra” in: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan,…. In French is “contre”
As a Portuguese, that also happened to me, and I had some French classes years ago in school. I think the French from Elisa is the best to understand if you are outside of the French realm.
