I was one of those 'unfortunate' kids who went through the 'amo, amas, amat' process at 11 years old, and contrary to any claims otherwise, it never did me any harm. Far from it, it set me up for an understanding and appreciation of European languages that I am sure would not have come about otherwise. I have an abiding passion in particular for Italian, surely the widest-spread of the nearest to Latin's surviving relatives.
I wish I could hear what colloquial spoken Latin sounded like spoken by Romans, and whether the strict rules of grammar as taught at school were ignored as widely as they are in modern languages - I'm sure they must have been. I wonder if those very rules were imposed by the Roman Catholic church, rather than by native Romans?

Sam

I believe the language taught as Latin in modern schools was strictly a formal upper class literary language. The language spoken on the street was Vulgar Latin with a much different grammar. The Roman Catholic church was definitely a Johnny-come-lately on the Latin language scene.

I wish I could hear what colloquial spoken Latin sounded like spoken by Romans, and whether the strict rules of grammar as taught at school were ignored as widely as they are in modern languages - I'm sure they must have been.

You might want to find a copy of WS Allen's Vox Latina – a Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin.

I wonder if those very rules were imposed by the Roman Catholic church, rather than by native Romans? If you look at the plays by Plautus, you'll see a bunch of dialogue that is quite different from Cicero's speeches. The pronunciation of Latin in the Middle Ages pretty much followed how the local vernacular language was pronounced. In the 19th century, philologists and linguists started to reconstruct how Classical Latin might've sounded.

The history of Latin is rather long and interesting. I am currently reading a book on the Pompeii inscriptions. The grammar is all over the place from literary quotations to things like "Lucius got laid here". Also, as I mentioned other places, Romans used a hell of a lot of abbreviations. It was txting that brought down the Roman Empire.

I had Latin imposed as well from age 13, for eight years
I studied it, or passed tests pretending to study. I guess
it never hurt me, and it definitely helped in my
understanding of Spanish, Italian, and French.

"You might want to find a copy of WS Allen's Vox Latina – a Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin."

Excellent book. It asks, and answers, those burning questions: How do we know? and Who cares?