Caveat Emptor: Lovers of Latin Try to Sell a Dead Tongue
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Caveat Emptor: Lovers of Latin Try to Sell a Dead Tongue
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Re: Caveat Emptor: Lovers of Latin Try to Sell a Dead Tongue
#2""We have a single money, the euro," Mr. Feye says. "We should have a single language, Latin.""
We do. Its called English.
Re: Caveat Emptor: Lovers of Latin Try to Sell a Dead Tongue
#3It's a quixotic dream, but one I think is quite beautiful. In terms of 'revived' languages used today in everyday life, the most successful one that comes to mind is Hebrew (and there was a strong desire for national cohesion for a newly created state that in part drove its revival). I don't think anything remotely similar exists in Europe today to drive the widespread adoption of Latin, especially as the drive for further European integration in general has been battered in recent years.
Re: Caveat Emptor: Lovers of Latin Try to Sell a Dead Tongue
#4Certainly won't happen anytime soon.
English is certainly the lingua-franca of the modern world and will probably stay that way for a while. While mastering English is hard, you can get quite far with a modicum of English.
Latin is an extremely important language and we should keep teaching it as a large portion of the grammar and vocabulary of Europe's languages derives from it, but it's fraught with complexities that make it really hard to master unless you really want to spend the time and energy to specialise in it; certainly a worthy goal in itself, but not what most people would aspire to.
Re: Caveat Emptor: Lovers of Latin Try to Sell a Dead Tongue
#5The EU is not going to add Latin as an official language, and it has nothing to do with financial difficulties; every official language of the EU has that status because it is the national language of a member state. In general, the Union is a (con)federation of national states, and adding Latin as a Union-wide language wouldn't really be compatible with that.
Re: Caveat Emptor: Lovers of Latin Try to Sell a Dead Tongue
#6Semper ubi sub ubi.
Re: Caveat Emptor: Lovers of Latin Try to Sell a Dead Tongue
#7Languages are living things. They morph and change, evolve and grow, and die. Latin lives on in English, French, Italian, Spanish and other languages. So in a sense it is not dead. Reading Beowulf (Old English) would not be much less intelligible to a modern audience than reading the Aeneid in Latin. Time changes all languages... and fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus, singula dum capti circumvectamur amore.
Edit: that is, "meanwhile it flees: time flees irretrievably, while we wander around, prisoners of our love of detail."
Re: Caveat Emptor: Lovers of Latin Try to Sell a Dead Tongue
#8Semper ubi sub ubi.
NO! You can't make a real sentence with nothing but adverbs and prepositions!!!
:b
Re: Caveat Emptor: Lovers of Latin Try to Sell a Dead Tongue
#9Just a little remark:
>"Where is the liberty of the people?" Mr. Licoppe asked. "Because there are many who want to preserve the study of Latin."
Is it really necessary that I've got to explain that there are also people who don't want to preserve it? Do I have to explain how the idea marketplace, competence, academic freedom and other systems actually works?
The whole idea of embracing Latin for everything is dumb. If Latin were actually a lingua franca, then, like that school completely ignores, linguas francas (francae?) aren't there to replace the mother language (which includes all of the region's folklore), just to complement it when talking to an outsider (that school isn't, it is teaching reticulum interretiale only instead of internet first and then reticulum interretiale).
Also, from a pragmatist point of view, learning Latin today, and either using it as a lingua franca or not is pretty useless (there are exceptions, of course, like Philosophy, law, medicine, etc; but they aren't that important in a day-to-day context).
Re: Caveat Emptor: Lovers of Latin Try to Sell a Dead Tongue
#10I am in favor of using Latin in some circumstances. People miss the fact that the great thing about a dead language is that it doesn't change. However, if you write about science in English, for example, you can guarantee that 50 years from now your text will feel dated -- just try to read papers from the beginning of the 20th century. On the other hand, we still can read the great works of antiquity (from 20 centuries ago) in Latin. Also, a lot of scientific works were written in Latin during the renascence, and they are still available to us. Sadly, what is written in English will hardly last for more than a few hundred years. The only saving grace is that future generations will have automatic translation systems that will solve a lot of these problems.
Another issue with English is that it is a very imprecise language. You have to be extremely careful to write precise sentences in it. Latin, because of its grammatical nature, is much easier to handle in this respect. This is the same reason why it is much easier to understand philosophical concepts in German than in English. Just because English is widely understood (due to the cultural dominance of English-speaking countries), it doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to use a better language to express ourselves. Latin seems like a natural option due to its large impact on the western world.