New answers tagged language
2
This has never been a common term, so few uses can make a large spike in the graph. Google Books (and therefore, Google NGrams) knows about three works from 1930 that apparently use it. Their concentration in time was not immediately obvious because above, you did not turn off the curve smoothing. Here are the text fragments:
... superstitions about the ...
0
No, most did not understand Latin.
My mother grew up in a very strict RC family in the 1920's. The background is lower middle class. Her brothers had a good education. Some became priests (obviously they learned Latin), most of her other brothers learned some Latin in school.
She told me they had to learn and memorize the phrases they spoke in church. ...
1
Some did, yes.
Fr. Anscar J. Chupungco, in his What, Then, Is Liturgy?: Musings and Memoir p. 3 (quoted here), gives an anecdote of how one of his parishioners reacted to the post-Vatican II change of the priest's prayer when distributing Communion from the traditional "Corpus Domini nostri Iesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam æternam. Amen." ("May ...
21
Literate people can carry dual-language missals. My father did first communion in the old rite. Even as a child/young teen, he could follow the gestures, context and more or less the Latin sound/text, and read the Portuguese text.
After some years, it was really easy. I have been at masses in Latin and other languages myself. After all, it is easy, by the ...
12
It varied in degree depending on the period and the location.
As explained in this podcast on the emergence of Romance languages from Patrick Wyman's Tides of History, the line between Latin and the variety of secular Romance languages that appeared during the Middle Ages was extremely blurry for several centuries.
Essentially, for several centuries people ...
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