Nuntii Latini

» see yle.fi as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Latin is not a school subject in Turkey, so whatever I have of it arrived sideways, through loanwords and the parts of science that kept their old names. In Finland, from September 1989, the national broadcaster read the week's world news in it on the radio.

Nuntii Latini was started by Tuomo Pekkanen, a professor of Latin at Jyväskylä, together with Reijo Pitkäranta and Virpi Seppälä-Pekkanen from Helsinki. The format never really changed: about five minutes of international news in classical pronunciation, read by alternating announcers, with a short glossary at the end that translated the week's harder terms out of Latin and into Finnish for the home audience, plus English and German for everyone else.

The audience was never Finnish in any normal sense. The BBC counted 75,000 listeners in 2006 and Yle put the figure near 40,000 by the end. Once the bulletins went online the audience stopped being a national quantity at all. Classics departments used it as teaching material. The producers said the Vatican listened. For thirty years this was the only regularly broadcast news bulletin in classical Latin anywhere in the world, made in a country the Romans never reached.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ five minutes a week ~

The hard part was never the reading. It was that the news arrives in modern vocabulary and classical Latin has no words for most of it, so every bulletin was a week of translation decisions by people who had to agree with each other about what the language would allow. Thirty years of that adds up to a working vocabulary for the twentieth century, assembled five minutes at a time by a handful of Finnish Latinists.

The glossary at the end of each program was the visible edge of that work. Six to ten terms per bulletin, each one listed with its equivalents.

~ the reprieve ~

Yle first announced the end in 2017. What followed was not the usual petition that nobody signs: more than 3,000 listeners wrote to the broadcaster, many of them in Latin, and Yle backed down far enough to extend the program by about eighteen months. That bought the last season, and the final broadcast went out on 14 June 2019.

~ what a broadcaster is for ~

Yle's reasoning was public and reasonable, which is what makes it the interesting kind of death. Creative director Ville Vilén said the broadcaster had put a lot of resources into a language practiced by hobbyists worldwide, and that Yle's responsibility rests with serving a Finnish audience. Underneath that sat the staffing problem: the people who had been writing the bulletins since 1989 were getting old, and nobody in the pipeline could do the job.

So the world's only Latin news service closed because it had succeeded at the wrong thing. It had built a global audience out of a license fee collected in one country of five and a half million people. The Latin internet survived it, mostly as Vicipaedia and a handful of podcasts, with no broadcaster behind any of it.

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