Translating a line of dialogue as though spoken a thousand years ago into Latin for a book

Question

I am writing a book set in the present day with a very old character (thousands of years old). A modern day human asks him:

"Do you speak Latin, like really speak Latin?"

His response would be in old fashioned Latin from when he spoke it natively and would be something like "I used it for many years" or whatever similar phrase would seem appropriate and sound best. If it makes a difference he likes/respects the person he's talking to but might be tempted to show off a bit.

I tried using Google translate but that is notoriously bad for Latin, and my own grasp of the language isn't good enough to verify the results. It suggests that "I used it for many years" translates as "Ego autem per multos annos". Or alternatively "Of course, I spoke it for many years", translates as "Scilicet ego locutus est per multos annos".

So the first part of the question is, what would be the best phrase in Latin for him to use in response? It doesn't need to be this exact phrase but something with a similar meaning.

And the second part is — if he's speaking thousand-year-old Latin, not modern day Latin but probably not old Latin either, would there be anything that an archaeology post-grad with a keen interest in history would notice as unusual about what he says or the accent he uses?

Answer 1

Literally, I would say multōs annōs Latīnē locūtus sum, "I used to speak Latin for many years", or saeculīs praeteritīs Latīnē locūtus sum, "I used to speak Latin in ages past".

If he wants to be a bit more ostentatious, though, he could say something like verba linguā Rōmānā multa saeculīs praeteritīs effātus sum, "I used to speak many words in the Roman tongue, in ages past". This uses some poetic constructions (chiasmus, the obscure verb effor) that would be incredibly pretentious in everyday conversation and would take any Latin-speaker a few moments to decipher.

You can also precede either of these with the word immo, which means either "yes indeed" or "on the contrary" depending on context. (Its exact meaning is something like "the answer I'm about to give is emphatic".)

(In a published book, you probably wouldn't include the marks above the vowels; they represent a pronunciation difference that disappeared in later Latin. But if you want to emphasize that this person spoke the Latin of Cicero and Vergil, as opposed to the Latin of the Catholic Church, including the marks might be an amusing inside joke: the pronunciation difference the marks indicate disappeared in the first few centuries CE and was never used in Mediaeval or Church Latin.)

EDIT: I chose to use the perfect tense here based on TKR's corpus search, but after sleeping on it, I do think it was the right choice for semantic reasons too. The perfect can indicate that something is over and done, finished for good, as in Aeneid 2.325-6:

Fuimus Troēs, fuit Īlium et ingens / glōria Teucrōrum…
We used to be Trojans, this used to be Ilium, and the great glory of the Teucri…

And in this case, your Latin-speaker probably isn't actively using his skills any more.

Answer 2

If you want a simple classical translation of "I used the language for many years" one would say "Lingva Latina per multos annos utebar." There may be more elegant or poetic ways to put in in literature somewhere, so keep your mind open.