4 ms·

I believe Latin was still being used for theological discourse in Europe well into the 1700s for that same reason, precision. Something nice about a dead langua

I believe Latin was still being used for theological discourse in Europe well into the 1700s for that same reason, precision. Something nice about a dead language is the meanings of the words don't have a way to change from under you.

jquinby 7y ago
Indeed, Ecclesial Latin is still the official language of the Catholic Church, inasmuch as documents like papal encyclicals are published in Latin first before translation to other languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_Latin#Current_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_Latin#Current_u...
- schoen 7y ago
  However, I don't think the people using Latin for these purposes really think that logical precision is an important reason to do so. The Vatican Latinist I briefly studied with, Reginald Foster, doesn't seem to think that way -- he regularly made fun of people who acted as if "Latin came down from heaven in a gold box". You might say that the use of Latin has a benefit of precision for the Catholic Church because there are some familiar theological and ecclesiological terms available whose meaning should be clear and which can be matched up with similar vocabulary in older Christian texts. Still, these texts are not using some kind of formal logic, and they don't do a more careful job of avoiding ambiguities than lawyers drafting legislation or contracts in modern languages do.
  - posterboy 7y ago
    then these texts must be really horrible to read and no less bug ridden than any reasonably sized code-base, except that any bug is swiftly explained away as a feature by the commanding authority. Whether bear arms or it fell like scales from his eyes, this stuff doesn't age well, which is pretty much the point. To be fair, though: The later bit is from Greek; but why not tomatoes, huh?
schoen 7y ago
Latin is still perfectly capable of every kind of ambiguity that other natural languages are. For example, I once wrote the sentence Quisque aliquid habet quod occultet for a t-shirt. While the intended meaning is 'everybody has something to hide', in a different context one could imagine that the subject of "occultet" is someone else previously referred to. For example, if we had just been talking about Moxie Marlinspike, we could conceivably read this sentence as 'everybody has something for him [Moxie] to hide'. (Like, all of us users out here have got different things that Moxie can help each of us to protect.) There's also a famous joke "malo malo malo malo malo" ('I prefer (being) a bad man in a bad situation to (being) an apple in an apple tree'). I'm sure we can proliferate examples of ambiguous Latin to match every other natural language. A cool disambiguation feature in Latin is the distinction between the possessive pronouns "eius" and "suus", where "suus" is used when referring to possessions of the grammatical subject of the sentence and "eius" when referring to someone else's possessions. While English can specify the former ("his/her/its own"), it doesn't have a straightforward way to show that the possessor is not the subject of the sentence. You can see the contrast between eius and suus in the text of the Magnificat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnificat#Text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnificat#Text where "ancillae suae" ('his handmaiden') occurs in a sentence whose grammatical subject is God, but "nomen eius" ('his name') in a sentence whose grammatical subject is the name. And sure enough, there is an actual disambiguation between the subject of a sentence and someone else later on: Suscepit Israel, puerum suum, recordatus misericordiae suae, sicut locutus est ad patres nostros, Abraham et semini eius in saecula. He [God] has taken up Israel, his [God's] servant, remembering his [God's] mercy, as he [God] said to our ancestors, Abraham and his [Abraham's] seed forever. In this case "his mercy" and "his seed" refer to God's mercy but Abraham's seed, but there is no referential ambiguity about that in the Latin because one is "misericordiae suae" and the other is "semini eius".
- linguistbreaker 7y ago
  When it comes to ambiguity in languages, linguistics has a distinction/designation of low-context vs. high-context languages which can also be related to the concept of entropy. Latin is often used as an example of a low-context language because so much is explicit in the surface representation. Japanese is often used as an example of a high-context language - meaning that a good deal of context is needed to properly interpret a sentence. This is loosely analagous to Java (low-context) vs. a Groovy DSL (high-context). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...

jquinby 7y ago

Indeed, Ecclesial Latin is still the official language of the Catholic Church, inasmuch as documents like papal encyclicals are published in Latin first before translation to other languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_Latin#Current_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_Latin#Current_u...

schoen 7y ago
However, I don't think the people using Latin for these purposes really think that logical precision is an important reason to do so. The Vatican Latinist I briefly studied with, Reginald Foster, doesn't seem to think that way -- he regularly made fun of people who acted as if "Latin came down from heaven in a gold box". You might say that the use of Latin has a benefit of precision for the Catholic Church because there are some familiar theological and ecclesiological terms available whose meaning should be clear and which can be matched up with similar vocabulary in older Christian texts. Still, these texts are not using some kind of formal logic, and they don't do a more careful job of avoiding ambiguities than lawyers drafting legislation or contracts in modern languages do.
- posterboy 7y ago
  then these texts must be really horrible to read and no less bug ridden than any reasonably sized code-base, except that any bug is swiftly explained away as a feature by the commanding authority. Whether bear arms or it fell like scales from his eyes, this stuff doesn't age well, which is pretty much the point. To be fair, though: The later bit is from Greek; but why not tomatoes, huh?

schoen 7y ago

Latin is still perfectly capable of every kind of ambiguity that other natural languages are. For example, I once wrote the sentence Quisque aliquid habet quod occultet for a t-shirt. While the intended meaning is 'everybody has something to hide', in a different context one could imagine that the subject of "occultet" is someone else previously referred to. For example, if we had just been talking about Moxie Marlinspike, we could conceivably read this sentence as 'everybody has something for him [Moxie] to hide'. (Like, all of us users out here have got different things that Moxie can help each of us to protect.) There's also a famous joke "malo malo malo malo malo" ('I prefer (being) a bad man in a bad situation to (being) an apple in an apple tree'). I'm sure we can proliferate examples of ambiguous Latin to match every other natural language. A cool disambiguation feature in Latin is the distinction between the possessive pronouns "eius" and "suus", where "suus" is used when referring to possessions of the grammatical subject of the sentence and "eius" when referring to someone else's possessions. While English can specify the former ("his/her/its own"), it doesn't have a straightforward way to show that the possessor is not the subject of the sentence. You can see the contrast between eius and suus in the text of the Magnificat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnificat#Text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnificat#Text where "ancillae suae" ('his handmaiden') occurs in a sentence whose grammatical subject is God, but "nomen eius" ('his name') in a sentence whose grammatical subject is the name. And sure enough, there is an actual disambiguation between the subject of a sentence and someone else later on: Suscepit Israel, puerum suum, recordatus misericordiae suae, sicut locutus est ad patres nostros, Abraham et semini eius in saecula. He [God] has taken up Israel, his [God's] servant, remembering his [God's] mercy, as he [God] said to our ancestors, Abraham and his [Abraham's] seed forever. In this case "his mercy" and "his seed" refer to God's mercy but Abraham's seed, but there is no referential ambiguity about that in the Latin because one is "misericordiae suae" and the other is "semini eius".

linguistbreaker 7y ago
When it comes to ambiguity in languages, linguistics has a distinction/designation of low-context vs. high-context languages which can also be related to the concept of entropy. Latin is often used as an example of a low-context language because so much is explicit in the surface representation. Japanese is often used as an example of a high-context language - meaning that a good deal of context is needed to properly interpret a sentence. This is loosely analagous to Java (low-context) vs. a Groovy DSL (high-context). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...