News and computer geekness in Latin

[vilakins]

I knew Finnish radio did Latin broadcasts, but I didn't realise that they had a Latin news website too until communicator mentioned it. I wish my father (who taught me) were alive to see it; he was a classics scholar who used to chat to the local Greek community in classical Greek and taught me Latin in the school holidays. And I loved it; I've been left with an abiding interest in the Roman world. In fact, communicator, one of my unwritten novels concerns a world in which the Empire never fell.

The site has lots of interesting links for people more fluent in it than me, but I love the dictionary of Latin computer terms. Papae!

Comments

[communicator.livejournal.com]

one of my unwritten novels concerns a world in which the Empire never fell.

Cool. What is the religion of the Empire - did it stay as it was? Do you think the Romans would have expanded into Asia, or America?

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

They allow lots of different religions including the old gods, Judaism, the sect of it called Messianic Jews, pagans of different sorts, and other ideas as long as no-one gets politically seditious. Emperor-worship went out pretty much with Nero though. The empire includes all of Europe, the old USSR, and Africa, with colonies in parts of Asia and an alliance with India, a colony which was granted independence centuries before. Rome had much of Alaska, Canada and the States in the14-1600s but ceded it to the Aztecs after a series of wars. Other major empires are the Aztecs, Incas, and China but there are also smaller countries of varying degrees of independence.

The time is around now, but technology has developed differently--at a slower and much more even pace with no dark ages or the sudden fever of invention we've had since the 1900s. As the most technological society, they have a few research bases in the solar system (but no real colonies as terraforming is beyond them and supply too difficult) and satellites beaming down solar power to special receiving stations; these have been used as weapons in the past. People still walk around Rome though (wheeled vehicles being banned at night as well as day) and live a slower-paced life than we do, and warfare is still very 1800s with armies manoeuvring in battle. The societies in all the empires is fairly reactionary, as it was when they existed in our world, though slow changes have happened over 2000 years. My emperor is a woman who trained as an engineer.

There's a lot more to it than that as the Arthurian legend, our world, and my theory of alternative universes are mixed up in it too. Eh. Maybe I'll get round to writing it one day.

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

I wish I could pay you to stay at home and write, this sounds fascinating.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I wish you could too. :-)

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

Er, go us?:)

Wonderful writing idea. I'm already thinking of all the sociology of that sort of an empire and my brain is about to explode; it's all so vast and huge.

Interesting that you let Nero in. I would've perhaps left Caesar alive and seen where it progressed from there. Perhaps because if Cleopatra had been at his side, it would've had an amazing impact on the status of women and culture in general, considering the social reforms she did in Egypt.

BTW, did you see the link to the Latin jazz record translated by the editor of Nuntii Latini?:D

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Most of the trappings of empire (the titles, the structure) came after Caesar under whom it was still nominally a republic. Augustus was responsible for much of it, and I do want Nero's predecessor in there; Claudius is my favourite. :-) I'll have to look up dates to figure out when the split was--as it's all in my head, I've just left some details fuzzy and played in the more exciting areas. :-) My AUs split only at times of momentous decision (I wanted a reason to have a finite number of 'em) as in the Atlantis one where it never sank due to someone harnessing the power of magic instead of tech and skewing their universe that way. I have three in the story: Atlantis, Rome, and ours. My Rome diverges due to something involving Christianity so that in this world it never becomes the world religion it is in ours but is a Jewish sect. Constantine not making it the Empire's official religion is too late as the empire isn't the one I want by then. Maybe Nero got talked out of the persecutions.

Hee. They even have a Latin BB (Colloquia); check out this page (http://chat.yle.fi/yleradio1/latini/index.php). Topics include the film Troy, Harry Potter (in the correct case), Einstein, famous women...