People who have done in situ experiments know how tricky they are. But how many have thought twice, or hesitated to pronounce in situ? Should it be /in si tu/, or /in sai tu/? It is perhaps more confusing to foreigners because it is probably not listed in most vocabularies when we learn English. For weird words like this, we usually inherit the pronunciation from the first person we hear the words from. My college teacher pronounced myc as /mai c/, which I did, too, for a couple of years until my first rotation lab, where people used myc a lot. The first thing I learned in graduate school then was that myc should be called /mik/. How enlightening! What about in situ then? While most people I’ve heard say /in si tu/, I did sometimes wonder why it could not be /in sai tu/, to which the rules in English seem to point. Well, the answer is, it’s not English. It’s Latin. Like in vivo, in vitro, and bona fide, the letter i in in situ is not an English vowel i, but a Roman short /i/.

Latin, once spoken by ancient Romans in a vast empire, long survived the Romans themselves. It was kept in Europe as the written script before European languages were fully developed in literature, and then remained as a language which well-educated people usually mastered. It has been perhaps only less than a hundred years since the end of the era when many books were still published in Latin although more and more people have ceased to speak it, even in churches. Nowadays, there are still many people who can read Latin, but no community uses it for conversations. Alas! 1,530 years after the fall of the Roman Empire, it is perhaps now safe to say that Latin is dead.

Or maybe not completely. We still have in situ, de novo, and others in biology, don’t we? And many words in other areas as well such as law terms. However, they are not just Latin now. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary acknowledges both /in si tu/ and /in sai tu/, as it gives the plural form of millennium to be both millennia and millenniums. It seems that Latin heritage is getting English-styled.

In the opposite trend, on the other hand, there are still people who are trying to speak it. Some of those people are in Finland. Nuntii Latini (News in Latin) is a weekly review of world news in classical Latin produced by YLE, the Finnish Broadcasting Company. The Latin broadcast gets some 75,000 listeners worldwide according to the BBC. It is certainly significant because few people in the world speak Finnish, yet Latin gets further and wider. And besides, it is the eternal language, as Professor Tuomo Pekkanen, who does the translations for the broadcast, believes.

Nuntii Latini (http://www.yleradio1.fi/nuntii/) can be heard online now. One piece of their news review recently was that Rumsfeld munus deposuit, literally translated as Rumsfeld laid down office, as you might have guessed by identifying the person’s name. If you are also a lover of Latin, it may be pleasant to take in a weekly dose of Latin broadcasting.

There is one thing that I have doubts about, though. We don’t quite know how to speak Latin. Well, yes, we know the rules of vowels and consonants, but are they all we need to speak a language? Apparently not. /In si tu/ is the closest way we approximate the pronunciation of the Latin phrase in situ, but it is possible that we would not recognize it if a classical figure stood in front of us uttering the phrase. The hosts of Nuntii Latini fashion their Latin to sound a bit like Italian. However, they might be speaking something that people who lived in Italy in the Roman times could not understand. Therefore, their enduring efforts to try to revive the dead, yet eternal language still may not keep Latin in situ. But in years from now they may become a model of a new world Latin. And who knows? In the future, we may use more Latin words when writing papers.