Latin Isn't Dead! To Those

[Seatbelt Blue]

Latin LACKS AN ACTIVE LITERARY LIFE - there is not a school of authors who write novels in latin. Plays are not generally written in latin. Movies are not generally written in Latin. Even The Passion was written in English and then _translated_.

Church documents don't count as a literary life. The language is not being _engaged_ or _expanded_.

Latin lacks a linguistic community - there are not whole communities that depend on latin for commerce or business; there are not regions that use latin as the vernacular. The popular usage of Latin is restricted to its existence as an ecclesial and scholarly language.

Compare latin to, say, English.

English 400 years ago is quite different from English today. Latin 400 years ago is IDENTICAL to Latin today. English 800 years ago is VASTLY different from English today. Latin from 800 years ago is, again, identical.

Language changes so much so quickly that, within forty years of Hebrew being reintroduced in Israel, it was considered a seperate language from the original tongue. My college offers both Hebrew and Modern Hebrew. There is no course in Modern Latin.

Romanian is not particularly close to Latin. For example, take the latin "father" - [i]pater[/i].

In Spanish and Italian, the least transformed, it is "padre."
In French, it is "pere."
In Portuguese, it is "pai."
In Romanian, it is "tata."

Romanian was heavily Slavicized until it was Latinized from the top-down in the mid-19th century, using a large number of _french_ loan words, making Romanian slightly intelligible to a native Latin speaker, but the intelligibility between Romanian and Latin would be even less than that between French and Latin, which is already quite low. Consider:

The French for Bishop - evêque - is quite different from the Latin episcopus. The "p" transformed into a "b" in Middle French which became a "v." Middle French, written, used "ê" for "es," but this was eventually lost, and now, the "s" is gone. The final syllable was simply dropped entirely. Hence, episcopus becomes evêque.

Romanian, borrowing from French, is thus a bizarre mixture of Romance and Slavonic, and hardly qualifies as some form of modern "Latin."