Why is Latin considered a dead language?

[QuestionAll...]

dead in a way of not conforming to new words/inventions/ideas?
stagnant tho so influential in many other languages?
who still uses the dead words? the vatican? doctors and lawyers?

[eallen]

1. There is no community where it is the first tongue.

A living language is one acquired naturally by children from parents who speak it as their primary tongue.

[EFerrari]

2. Probably because there are no ancient Romans walking around

to correct your pronounciation.

[msedano]

3. because people don't read?

http://www.leadingthecharge.com/ViewArticle.aspx?id=21318&source=2

[hughee99]

4. Probably because no one speaks it as a first language. n/t

[Gormy Cuss]

5. Latin is a dead language

As dead as dead could be
First it killed the Romans
Now it's killing me.



It's a dead language because no culture speaks it as a primary language.

[Davis_X_Machina]

7. Death Certificate....

...may be found here.

[QuestionAll...]

8. how sudden could that transition be?

seems really strange to me.

fall of rome = new languages. seems so odd.
but I know almost nothing about this, a friend I was talking to tonight pointed this out.

[Nikki Stone1]

6. Actually, you might consider the seven Romance languages as evolved Latin

:)

[Art_from_Ark]

10. Just like Modern English is evolved Old English

but Old English is still dead as a doornail.

[TacticalPeek]

12. Preteritus est non mortuus.

Is est non vel preteritus.

:)

[hsher]

38. LOL

I took Latin in high school

[evilgenius602]

54. semper ubi sub ubi

[nealmhughes]

16. Why limit it to seven? If we count the various langues d'oc, the various Jewish-Romance hybrids,

etc. then who knows how many living Romance languages there are?!

Who even knows how many things pass as "English" these days?!

O linguae volantae! Non constans, semper fugit.

(That is probably horrid Latin. I hated declining nouns)

[Nikki Stone1]

31. Ah the influence of Latin is epic!

See what this OP started? :D

[aquart]

30. Latin meets conquered tribes and tries to communicate.

For the same reason Latin and Norman French are components of modern English: The Roman legions and William the Conqueror.

The Romans didn't march into empty lands...and those lands contained people who spoke languages of their own. But both sides had to communicate somehow. So they patched together something they could both understand.

Then Rome collapsed and the legions withdrew......and the people left behind had only themselves to speak to. The scholars, the lawyers, the clerics all still spoke and wrote Latin because they were still in international communication. It was important for a scientist in one nation to be able to read the discoveries of a scientist in another. But everyday people had nothing to do with that.

Eventually, in each nation once conquered by Rome, there came a day when a poet saw something beautiful in the speech of the people in the street and he began to write in that language instead of Latin. Once the poets have abandoned you, you truly are dead, no matter how many lawyers and musty clerics intone your hallowed phrases.

[QuestionAll...]

42. thanks aquart. important piece of understanding it all.nt

[NoodleBoy]

9. how do you say "Airport" in Latin?

answer: you don't.

Would you consider Sanskrit a dead language?

[QuestionAll...]

15. but da french calls it le/la airport..

not sure if airports are fem or masc.

I guess I'll have to google this one. the transition and the slow death of a language. intrigues me.

[Art_from_Ark]

17. It's "aéroport", and it's a boy!

[NoodleBoy]

21. that's the point-- there are enough native French speakers around to adopt a word

[trackfan]

20. aeroportus is used

http://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroportus_Helsinkium-Vantania

[Phredicles]

22. Now, in graduate school I was told that some 4,000 people

(in India, presumably) identify Sanskrit as their native language. A friend of mine whose family is from India says that claim should be taken with a faily large grain of salt. But if it's true for even a small portion of that number, Sanskrit is at least in a sense not a dead language.

Of course, it's a tricky question, determining what makes a "living" language. I was also taught that Latin became a dead language when it was rigidly codified in the age of Charlemagne, so that it did not evolve or change at all. By that definition, Sanskrit would be dead as well, even with native speakers.

[TahitiNut]

28. Bingo.

I've always understood that a "living language" was one that evolved and adapted to new inventions and concepts BECAUSE a critical mass of people spoke it as their first language. English is a "living language." A language that stops doing this is a "dead language."

[NuttyFluffers]

40. astronaut? cosmonaut? damn, somehow inadequate...

;)

(yes, yes, using greek, i know...)

it's dead because it's not a lingua franca anymore and is not used as the vernacular among living speakers. it merely a font for classification and jargon among literati. many cultures exhibit this same trend between archaic/dead and living languages.

[evilgenius602]

55. aeolo porto

[Selatius]

11. Latin is not used as a common, everyday language anymore (it's dead, Jim)

If you go shopping in Paris or Madrid for food or clothes or something else entirely, you don't speak Latin, but you would speak one of its derivatives (French in Paris and Spanish in Madrid). The simple fact is that when the Roman Empire finally disintegrated, the separate regions of the former empire became isolated from each other. This allowed regional dialects of Latin to form in the several regions. Eventually, these dialects became so distinct that they became their own languages, and by that point, a person who lived in Spain could no longer communicate with a person living in France or a person living in Italy anymore because the language they spoke no longer resembled each other.

It would be more convenient to live in Europe if all the former regions of the Empire still spoke Latin. This way you would only have to learn one language to speak in Rome, Paris, Madrid, or any other city of the former empire. Of course, this isn't the case, and we're going to have to accept the reality of it. It's either that, or the EU launches a program to reintroduce Latin all over Europe.

[Ignacio Upton]

13. They also mixed with pre-Roman languages in the area

n/t.

[QuestionAll...]

19. thank you.

but I'm still perplexed a bit.
why change the language when you change your geography?

[Selatius]

25. The language didn't change overnight

It takes centuries of drift. Back in those days, you walked or rode a horse, and when Rome fell, you most likely didn't travel beyond the Roman latifundia (a large plantatation/estate owned by a politician, general, or somebody wealthy that you worked for), which then evolved into the feudal manor ruled by your feudal lord. You couldn't leave because your lord said you couldn't; you're now a serf, not an employee. "Interstate trade" simply ceased in the chaos of the early Dark Ages with constant warfare between feudal lords over land and resources. It shouldn't be surprising, in light of that, that languages in different regions drifted apart. Few were willing or able to travel throughout the former empire; it was too dangerous, and you'd likely end up dead.

Language is going to drift regardless in any population. That's a given. This is why I'm typing in English and not Old English or Middle English. The only question that matters is if the population remains together or is separated. If you separate a population into two groups, in several centuries, they will likely be speaking two distinct languages but both with a common ancestral language. Without contact between the two populations, minor changes in language in one group will not be picked up by the other group.

[QuestionAll...]

29. thanks once again. I'll bookmark,

I appreciate your time for me, Selatius.

[Nikki Stone1]

34. Very nice.

:kick:

[catnhatnh]

26. Think "regional accents"...

but with turbochargers....starting with the same base but evolving totally separately latin "evolved" into different languages in the form most utile to the local conditions....

[Ignacio Upton]

14. It would be interesting to revive Latin, at least as a lingua franca

Maybe if the EU gradually turns Europe into one country it could employ Latin (fitting, considering Rome's once-massive grip over the continent) as a beurocratic language in the same way Hebrew is used in Israel (wasn't Hebrew a dead language until Israel was founded in 1948?).

[Igel]

58. Not all the current EU members had

the Roman Empire staged on their territory, and not all used Latin in the Middle Ages as a lingua franca; a Slavic koine was attempted in part of E. Europe, but it's unclear exactly how successful it was.

Hebrew was a dead language until a bunch of kibbutzim adopted the revisions made to the language with a view to resurrecting it. It certainly needed work: the vocabulary was innovated, on par with a lot of language upgrading that took place in the 1800s as languages not widely used for official discourse were struggling to come into their own.

The result isn't the Hebrew from the OT or from the first century CE; the grammar and pronunciation's been altered. There's even a minority claim that Israeli Hebrew is actually relexified Slavic; regardless, there's a lot of Slavic and German in Israeli Hebrew, even if the vocabulary doesn't show it. That's not discounting changes that are purely Israeli, many innovated by speakers (and frowned upon, for a while, by grammarians) in resurrecting Hebrew.

[hsher]

18. Non scio

[FogerRox]

23. metaseqoia glyptostrobides

[SoCalDem]

24. because it's a written language now..not spoken

:shrug:

[Manifestor_of_Light]

27. dead but damned useful

I had two years of Latin in high school.

It was hell when I took it, but when I got to law school, I was sure glad I could say "res ipsa loquitur" without mangling it.

Doctors use mostly Greek and some Latin. And it laid the foundation for my love of singing in French and Italian.

And when I was in high school I figured out that there are tons of English words with Latin roots.
Hell, even German words have been known to have Latin roots.

[QuestionAll...]

33. it's not really a dead language. but yet it is.

mysterious.

Are there any others of this case than can compare?

[msedano]

48. blame it on the catholics!

the catholic church still composes stuff in latin, so in that sense that is not a dead language. heck, english speakers use all sorts of untranslated latin, i.e. stuff in the original tongue, like ibid est or i.e. or e.g. "for example", QED, and the false latin, illegitimi non carborundum, and then there's igpay atinlay.

check out st. jerome. he's a scholar who started the slide away from a standard language to the vulgate, in fact, that's jerome's fame, translating scripture into latin, and upened the floodgates of "accessibility". once god stopped speaking greek, there was no reason not to speak french, or spanish, or esperanto, despite the tragic demise of the last native-esperanto speaker in 1963 at the hands of the CIA.

[Nikki Stone1]

51. The last native Esperanto speaker, killed by the CIA? Do tell.

:imagine smilie with big ears here:

[Nikki Stone1]

32. Hey, we only need IV more votes for greatest page!

:)

[Nikki Stone1]

36. Aha, now we only need III

:)

[BlooInBloo]

35. Because it conforms to the definition of "dead language", which is trivial to look up.

[left is right]

37. It is at times like these that I think of my favorite Latin phrase

'Deus nos pickleus' God preserve us

[QuestionAll...]

43. god pickle us?

:rofl:

[Nikki Stone1]

39. II? Anyone? II more?

:)

[Dead_Parrot]

41. I came, I saw, I vote left.

:silly:

[spillthebeans]

44. Even if you have Latin at school

you are just translating old text in to your language.

It's pretty uncommon to form sentences or even speak the language.


And of course there is only a minority that speaks the language. (vatican for example)

[conscious evolution]

45. Evolution in action

[goodhue]

46. because nobody speaks it

[The Backlash Cometh]

47. So doctors and lawyers can charge us more?

[Dorian Gray]

49. Because

it is not a language used in conversation. People don't speak the language.

[flowomo]

50. Latin is NOT dead -- see for yourself:

http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/user/d/r/dryfoo/www/Funny-pages/handy-latin.html

[Blue_Tires]

52. ttt

i also took it in high school

[trackfan]

53. It's not completely dead to those of us in Grex Latine Loquentium:

http://www.alcuinus.net/GLL/

I've subscribed to the e-mail list to which this page relates for about 7-8 years now.

[El Fuego]

56. In Germany, you have to learn Latin to get into law school.

A German law student told me this. She said that in Germany legal proceedings are only in Latin.

[liontamer]

57. because latin is canonized

it lacks the flexibility that is inherent in a "living" language. i.e. no new slang can develop, the rules can't change, et cetera ;)