http://ukadventureracing.co.uk/uk-adventure-racing-championships/uk-adventure-racing-championships-results/ [From Jan. 10, 1971. By Louis B. Fleming, who wrote a column called “From Cicero’s View.”]
http://cakebysadiesmith.co.uk/2016/09/20/naked-wedding-cakes/ Latinist Chronicles Lunar Adventure
By Louis B. Fleming
ROME – All systems are “A-OK” and the navicula speculatoria is on the moon.
If that’s Greek to you, it’s Latin to the Rev. Reginald Thomas Foster, and there’s nothing dead about what he does with the language, either.
To prove it, Father Foster borrowed 997 words from the Living Age of Latin – that is, from 200 BC to AD 400 – and told the story of man’s first landing on the moon.
He told the story without a single concession to contemporary words of the space age, although he later admitted that there comes a time when Latin scholars sometimes are forced to compromise. Cicero simply is no help in describing communism and Maoism so he writes them communismus and Maoismus.
Father Foster, without apology, admits that he is a Latin fanatic. He has been at the subject every day for the last 17 of his 31 years.
Even more surprising than his youth is the fact that he is an American.
Doubting Roman
“This is Father Foster,” a Latin professor in Rome said, introducing his star pupil. “And to think he is an American!”
But that is one of the reasons he can be such a purist, according to Father Foster. His Latin is not corrupted by a modern Romance language, which is always a problem for Latinists whose native tongue is Italian, French or Spanish.
Of course, English has its Latin origins, too. But they are not much help to Father Foster’s adventures in keeping Latin alive.
“I had to ask myself, what shall I call the lunar module,” he explained. “Now, it would have been very simple just to convert the name into its Latin origins: modulus lunaris. But it wouldn’t have made sense. It would mean ‘little moon measure.’”
So Father Foster went back to the Golden Age of Latin.
“I came up with ‘navicula speculatoria.’ I took two words of Cicero and Caesar which literally mean ‘little reconaissance ship.’”
‘Slavery’ Module
He had the same trouble finding a name for the service module which, literally translated into “servitii modulus” would have meant “a little bit of slavery.” He used instead, “cylindrus variae utilitatis” – cylinders with various services.
So Apollo Undecimus was ready for launch.
Father Foster didn’t want anyone to think he was tongue-tied, however. So he ran 22 different words for ship into the yarn, but all of them were classical Latin, no modern corruptions, and many of them had been used by Julius Caesar to describe more earthly activities.
It is no wonder that he won the professors’ division, even though he is still a student, in the Certamen Vaticanum international contest sponsored by Latinitas, the Vatican’s Latin magazine.
And he also ended up with the secretaryship of the magazine.
Papal Translator
But that is just part of his work. Father Foster is still a student at the Pontifical Institue for Advanced Latin Studies, hoping to earn both master’s and doctoral degrees, but already embarrassed when some professors come to him with questions.
And he is one of four priests working in the Latin language section of the Vatican Secretariat of State, putting into Latin the Pope’s correspondence, speeches, and Vatican reports.
Father Foster is where he is despite the misgivings of some of the leaders of the Carmelite Order, to which he belongs, and because of an inspired nun back home in Milwaukee who taught him English grammar.
“I loved English grammar to begin with, its structures, diagramming sentences, learning participles. Then, when I was 14, I was introduced to Latin. It was the first foreign language I had met up with. I had an immediate interest in how to say things in this foreign language.”
Father Foster finds particular pleasure in conversing in Latin. He corresponds all over the world with other Latinists, able to communicate in the phrases of Cicero even though he cannot speak the native tongues of the people to whom he writes.
“Don’t you see Latin is a machine all oiled up and ready to be used. Anyone can do it just as it has been done for centuries.”
New News
Father Foster is now carrying his Latin demonstration a step farther. The next issue of Latinitas will introduce his current events column written, of course, in nothing else but.
He has chosen for the column title: “Ego si quid hic novi cognoro, scies,” which is what Cicero wrote to a friend in 49 BC, reporting, “If I learn anything new here you will know about it.”
Airplane hijacking will be reported in the inaugural column. Read all about it: “Piratae caelestes. Praedones aerii.”
Not everyone finds that Father Foster’s experiments work because not everyone has done as much homework as he has.
A school teacher sent for his Apollo 11 article and couldn’t grasp much of it because the teacher didn’t know the full vocabulary of those 600 fabulous years of Latin literature.
“I must confess that describing a moon mission in Latin may be a little bit like trying to describe snow to someone in Africa who has always lived in the jungle,” Father Foster said.
Irate Booster
He does not appear to be a violent man, as he sits in his brown habit, his round, ruddy face wreathed in smiles. But he becomes agitated when the subject of modern Latin instruction comes up.
“If they would just teach it like any other language, to be spoken and used and enjoyed,” he said, almost shouting, as he conversed with an American university student who made the mistake of admitting that she had dropped out of Latin after two years.
“For me to learn Latin and not to speak it is inconceivable,” he said.
Look out below. Here comes the command module, “gubernaculi conclave” (control room). It has unleashed its parachutes, “umbellae adapertiles” (expandable umbrellas).
“Stellula veluti crinita aeris tritu candescens solum nunc gubernaculi illud conclave stato tempore gaseum orbis terrarum involucrum penetrat inauditaque velocitate pervolat angustissime petens circumscriptum Maris Magni propatulum locum.”
“At a determined time the command module, now all alone, glowing because of air friction like a shooting star, enters into the earth’s atmosphere and flies through it at an unheard of speed heading for an extremely narrowly circumscribed open place in the Pacific Ocean.”
What a splashdown.
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