Latin

[son_of_angels]

Classical Latin is an artificial language, as any book covering mediaeval latin or book on the history of the lingua latina will tell you. It simply never, or rarely, existed as a spoken or commonly used language. A cursory study of even some classical texts, like the Satiricon, will show quickly how some of the vulgarisms were already common in the early Empire. Read Catullus occasionally, he has a very different diction than, say, Cicero. On the other hand, Christian latin (as its better called) comes from an originally Greek-worshipping culture which freely borrowed from that tradition to form a language for its own purposes, and also took some vocab from the common archaic phrases of the day.

In any case, it was because of people's inflexibility in the development of Latin that caused it to die once as a regularly used language, if, by learning Classical Latin, one completely ignores the TWO THOUSAND years of vocabulary which has developed since then, one is choosing a language which is intrinsically unwieldly and destined for only a small range of growth. This, in my opinion, is probably what will start to happen to languages like French which only reluctantly admit the use of vulgarisms into standard language.

A reflection on this also leads me to some conclusions concerning modern translations of the Bible and the Mass. We should follow the example of the Fathers, and of the original compilers of the Latin Bible, and not be afraid to make our language do hoola hoops to adopt the style and flow of the original from which it is taken. Even if this means expanding the meanings of words, adopting foreign words into the vocabulary, using expressions that don't quite work in English, etc. For if we do not, we will constantly be forced into revising what translations we are using, and all the while losing contact with the expressions of past writers. This already happens even with writers of the nineteenth century. As someone who grew up with the King James Bible, I know the benefit of a "worship language" which yields easily to memorization and expression.

Deus vos conservet!