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Latin never died or stopped changing or stopped being spoken; it is still spoken by about a billion people today — they just stopped calling it “Latin” at some

Latin never died or stopped changing or stopped being spoken; it is still spoken by about a billion people today — they just stopped calling it “Latin” at some point.

winrid 7y ago
I'm ignorant. Who speaks Latin today under a different name?
- umanwizard 7y ago
  Speakers of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, and various other lesser-known languages and dialects. All of these are directly descended from Latin in exactly the same way that today's English is descended from 1900s English, just over a longer period.
  - favorited 7y ago
    I think that's pretty disingenuous. The fact that my cousins and myself are around doesn't mean that my grandparents aren't dead. Latin is certainly a dead language, even though it has living descendants.
    - umanwizard 7y ago
      Is 1900-AD English "a dead language" because nobody who spoke it natively is still alive? What about 1800, 1700, or 1000? What year did English die and if it did indeed die, what are we speaking now? The reasons for considering English circa 1000 and English circa 2020 to be "different stages of the same language" but Latin and French to be "different languages" are an arbitrary cultural distinction not rooted in science. The English of Beowulf is just as different from the modern variety as French is from Latin. And at every point from the introduction of Latin into France thousands of years ago until the present day, everybody could communicate perfectly easily with their own grandparents, and thought they were speaking the same language.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - djannzjkzxn 7y ago
        The natural conclusion to this argument is that everyone on earth is speaking the same language, because they all descended from the Mitochondrial Eve’s utterances 150000 years ago.
        umanwizard 7y ago
        No, the natural conclusion is that whether two varieties are "the same language" or "different forms of the same language" is a cultural question, not a scientific one that can be answered objectively. (Tangent -- certainly not all languages are descended from a hypothetical Proto-World, since we have examples of brand new languages forming: any creole languages, or Nicaraguan Sign Language. Whether most of the major language families are descended from a Proto-World is very much an open question, and probably one that will never be answered, since even if say, English and Navajo are genetically related, they diverged so long before we had written records that no trace remains.) In any case, there's a meaningful difference between a language gradually changing over hundreds of years such that the newer varieties are quite different from the old ones, and a language truly dying, because it has exactly one remaining native speaker, and that person dies.
        baddox 7y ago
        > No, the natural conclusion is that whether two varieties are "the same language" or "different forms of the same language" is a cultural question, not a scientific one that can be answered objectively. It's a question that linguists (who are scientists) strive to answer in ways that are useful to studying, reasoning about, and explaining language. It's not much different than the species problem in biology. Everyone knows that speciation happens gradually, but scientists still propose ways of defining and explaining speciation to aid in scientific inquiry. The labels and dividing lines themselves are not empirically observed, of course, but that doesn't mean they're unscientific or outside the purview of scientific inquiry.
    - petre 7y ago
      It's very much used in science for naming things, for studying old literature and also in the Catholic Church. We also had Latin courses in highschool. Also many words in many European languages, including Englush, have Latin or Greek roots.
  - woodruffw 7y ago
    I studied (classical, not ecclesiastical) Latin for about 8 years, and I don't think it's accurate to claim that the Romance languages are in any meaningful sense "Latin". The weaker (and more reasonable) claim is that learning Latin improves your ability to recognize words and (very basic) structures in its descendants.
    - umanwizard 7y ago
      Latin and the Romance languages are indeed very different, but their similarities are much stronger than just vocabulary. The Romance languages have lost noun cases and gained prepositions, fixed word order, and definite articles, but they retain noun genders (though without neuter), remnants of the case system in pronouns ("je", "me", "moi"), many of the same verb tenses, and the subjunctive/indicative moods, to give a few examples. Anyway, my point is that it's an error to say that Latin "stopped changing". Other languages have changed similar amounts: modern Americans can't understand Beowulf, modern Greeks can't understand Homer, and modern Chinese people can't understand Confucious, but nobody would claim that English or Greek or Chinese died and stopped changing. The fact that people call Latin, but not English, a "dead language" is purely due to the fact that the different stages of English all happen to be called "English". In an alternate world where Latin was exactly the same as it was in the past, and Italian is exactly the same as it is now, but Latin had never spread outside of Italy, I suspect that we would today call Latin "Old Italian" (or perhaps we would call Italian "Modern Latin"), and nobody would be having this discussion, despite the scientific/linguistic facts being identical to what they are in our reality.
      - woodruffw 7y ago
        > The fact that people call Latin, but not English, a "dead language" is purely due to the fact that the different stages of English all happen to be called "English". I don't think this is the case: the language that Beowulf is written in is normally referred to as Old English. Chaucer is Middle English. Shakespeare is Early Modern English. William Makepeace Thackeray is Victorian English. IMO, it's reasonable to assert that each of these are "dead" in some meaningful way: even Early Modern and Victorian English, despite their intelligibility, are simply not spoken by any group of current-day English speakers.
  - trynewideas 7y ago
    ugh you still speak Latin 77? the new Latin 2018 spec is way more readable

Latin never died or stopped changing or stopped being spoken; it is still spoken by about a billion people today — they just stopped calling it “Latin” at some point.

winrid 7y ago

I'm ignorant. Who speaks Latin today under a different name?

umanwizard 7y ago
Speakers of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, and various other lesser-known languages and dialects. All of these are directly descended from Latin in exactly the same way that today's English is descended from 1900s English, just over a longer period.
- favorited 7y ago
  I think that's pretty disingenuous. The fact that my cousins and myself are around doesn't mean that my grandparents aren't dead. Latin is certainly a dead language, even though it has living descendants.
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    Is 1900-AD English "a dead language" because nobody who spoke it natively is still alive? What about 1800, 1700, or 1000? What year did English die and if it did indeed die, what are we speaking now? The reasons for considering English circa 1000 and English circa 2020 to be "different stages of the same language" but Latin and French to be "different languages" are an arbitrary cultural distinction not rooted in science. The English of Beowulf is just as different from the modern variety as French is from Latin. And at every point from the introduction of Latin into France thousands of years ago until the present day, everybody could communicate perfectly easily with their own grandparents, and thought they were speaking the same language.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - djannzjkzxn 7y ago
      The natural conclusion to this argument is that everyone on earth is speaking the same language, because they all descended from the Mitochondrial Eve’s utterances 150000 years ago.
      - umanwizard 7y ago
        No, the natural conclusion is that whether two varieties are "the same language" or "different forms of the same language" is a cultural question, not a scientific one that can be answered objectively. (Tangent -- certainly not all languages are descended from a hypothetical Proto-World, since we have examples of brand new languages forming: any creole languages, or Nicaraguan Sign Language. Whether most of the major language families are descended from a Proto-World is very much an open question, and probably one that will never be answered, since even if say, English and Navajo are genetically related, they diverged so long before we had written records that no trace remains.) In any case, there's a meaningful difference between a language gradually changing over hundreds of years such that the newer varieties are quite different from the old ones, and a language truly dying, because it has exactly one remaining native speaker, and that person dies.
        baddox 7y ago
        > No, the natural conclusion is that whether two varieties are "the same language" or "different forms of the same language" is a cultural question, not a scientific one that can be answered objectively. It's a question that linguists (who are scientists) strive to answer in ways that are useful to studying, reasoning about, and explaining language. It's not much different than the species problem in biology. Everyone knows that speciation happens gradually, but scientists still propose ways of defining and explaining speciation to aid in scientific inquiry. The labels and dividing lines themselves are not empirically observed, of course, but that doesn't mean they're unscientific or outside the purview of scientific inquiry.
  - petre 7y ago
    It's very much used in science for naming things, for studying old literature and also in the Catholic Church. We also had Latin courses in highschool. Also many words in many European languages, including Englush, have Latin or Greek roots.
- woodruffw 7y ago
  I studied (classical, not ecclesiastical) Latin for about 8 years, and I don't think it's accurate to claim that the Romance languages are in any meaningful sense "Latin". The weaker (and more reasonable) claim is that learning Latin improves your ability to recognize words and (very basic) structures in its descendants.
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    Latin and the Romance languages are indeed very different, but their similarities are much stronger than just vocabulary. The Romance languages have lost noun cases and gained prepositions, fixed word order, and definite articles, but they retain noun genders (though without neuter), remnants of the case system in pronouns ("je", "me", "moi"), many of the same verb tenses, and the subjunctive/indicative moods, to give a few examples. Anyway, my point is that it's an error to say that Latin "stopped changing". Other languages have changed similar amounts: modern Americans can't understand Beowulf, modern Greeks can't understand Homer, and modern Chinese people can't understand Confucious, but nobody would claim that English or Greek or Chinese died and stopped changing. The fact that people call Latin, but not English, a "dead language" is purely due to the fact that the different stages of English all happen to be called "English". In an alternate world where Latin was exactly the same as it was in the past, and Italian is exactly the same as it is now, but Latin had never spread outside of Italy, I suspect that we would today call Latin "Old Italian" (or perhaps we would call Italian "Modern Latin"), and nobody would be having this discussion, despite the scientific/linguistic facts being identical to what they are in our reality.
    - woodruffw 7y ago
      > The fact that people call Latin, but not English, a "dead language" is purely due to the fact that the different stages of English all happen to be called "English". I don't think this is the case: the language that Beowulf is written in is normally referred to as Old English. Chaucer is Middle English. Shakespeare is Early Modern English. William Makepeace Thackeray is Victorian English. IMO, it's reasonable to assert that each of these are "dead" in some meaningful way: even Early Modern and Victorian English, despite their intelligibility, are simply not spoken by any group of current-day English speakers.
- trynewideas 7y ago
  ugh you still speak Latin 77? the new Latin 2018 spec is way more readable