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Do we need every language in use to survive in an everyday setting? Latin is dead, and yet it still permeates much of the world in some form or another. It's

Do we need every language in use to survive in an everyday setting? Latin is dead, and yet it still permeates much of the world in some form or another. It's important that we document and keep a good record of the language, the culture it accompanies and any other relevant context; I think this is obvious to most people. But to force people who don't naturally want to learn the language to do so for sentimental reasons doesn't sound like the way to preserve it as a source of joy.

kmm 6y ago
> Latin is dead I know what you mean, but I've always found that such a curious expression. There's an unbroken line of native speakers being taught by other speakers from every person native in French, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, Walloon, ... to a person speaking some variant of Latin. By that definition, every single language from more than a thousand years ago is dead. It seems to me Latin is more alive than ever, with about a billion speakers, it's just that they don't all quite understand each other.
Dumblydorr 6y ago
The majority of people learning languages are not doing it because they naturally want to. The vast majority of language learning is by humans orally teaching children, who have no say in the matter. If we left it up to desire alone, Latin study would die off very quickly as the majority of those who learn latin are required to, I would've taken more STEM instead of latin if I had the option. The root reason Latin didn't die is because it's a very historically influential language, whereas Scottish Gaelic is a small, regional dialect of a small, regional language that didnt have an influential empire associated with it. Gaelic is a nice cultural relic but it is not functionally useful to most young Scots.
- bpodgursky 6y ago
  An interesting quirk of the US education system is that Latin is the only place most children ever learn formal grammar -- I never learned anything about subjunctives, the accusative case, intransitive verbs or the like in an English class. To be honest, I probably would have been fine without it (like the vast majority of US students who don't learn Latin). But it was certainly an interesting insight into English grammar structure in a way I would have missed otherwise.
  - irrational 6y ago
    I never had the chance to take Latin in school, but I became interested in historical languages later in life (I’ve self-studied middle egyptian, neo-Babylonian, and Greek) and found the following book to be very helpful. Understanding Language: A Guide for Beginning Students of Greek and Latin https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0813218667/ https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0813218667/
chrisseaton 6y ago
> Latin is dead Latin isn't dead. School children all around the world still learn it. It's still taught at universities. It's still used as the living language of the Catholic Church. I wouldn't be surprised if Latin is fairly high up the list of second-languages people learn.
- FeteCommuniste 6y ago
  Latin has no native speakers, which is what defines a dead language.
- prerok 6y ago
  Latin is a dead language by definition: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language It is not extinct though, which I guess is the point of your post ;)
- corty 6y ago
  School children learning latin is very high on the list of pointless drudgery our school system imposes on our children. We do waste lots of money, teachers and childrens' lifetime and attention.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Learning a language is a skill; it’s been shown that you learn your second foreign language much easier than your first. Teaching students a years worth of Latin and then transitioning to another living language is actually a fairly effective teaching strategy.
    - corty 6y ago
      You might as well teach multiple living languages. Using a dead to teach language learning is a waste of a good opportunity.
      - ashtonkem 6y ago
simias 6y ago
Latin is not a good comparison in this case. Latin is a dead language, but it never died. It slowly evolved into Late Latin, then Proto-Romance, then free of the unifying influence of the Roman Empire the languages started becoming mutually unintelligible across long distances and evolved into their own things, eventually becoming Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan etc... I over-simplify of course, but that's the idea. At no point was Latin replaced by anything else. If you had a time machine and went to Rome, then started to slowly rewind back in time you'd slowly see the language morphing back into Latin. If you did that in Paris, you'd hear the same thing[1]. On top of that Latin was the lingua franca for science and arts for over a thousand years. Through that route many words were loaned back into other languages, sometimes forming doublets of words having a different meaning but coming from the same Latin word through different routes. Take English "chair", coming from Latin "cathedra" (seat) through Old French and "cathedral" coming from... the same word, also through Old French but this time taking a detour through the ecclesiastic language. Gaelic's situation is utterly different. It hasn't evolved organically into a different language that eventually became different enough as to be mutually unintelligible, instead it's being replaced. It also has very little chance to survive as a lingua franca like Latin because the language that replaces it already does that better too. It's not a high prestige language that's used by many 2nd language speakers like Latin was and English is. [1] As a side note, that's why I can't stand ultra-prescriptivists. When a fellow French speaker starts harping on about how the "kids can't speak right" and the usual reactionary crap I usually ask them why they feel that way when they speak such a broken mess of a low dialect of Latin themselves. I mean if it doesn't have ablatives and deponent verbs it's not a real language as far as I'm concerned.

kmm 6y ago

> Latin is dead I know what you mean, but I've always found that such a curious expression. There's an unbroken line of native speakers being taught by other speakers from every person native in French, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, Walloon, ... to a person speaking some variant of Latin. By that definition, every single language from more than a thousand years ago is dead. It seems to me Latin is more alive than ever, with about a billion speakers, it's just that they don't all quite understand each other.

Dumblydorr 6y ago

The majority of people learning languages are not doing it because they naturally want to. The vast majority of language learning is by humans orally teaching children, who have no say in the matter. If we left it up to desire alone, Latin study would die off very quickly as the majority of those who learn latin are required to, I would've taken more STEM instead of latin if I had the option. The root reason Latin didn't die is because it's a very historically influential language, whereas Scottish Gaelic is a small, regional dialect of a small, regional language that didnt have an influential empire associated with it. Gaelic is a nice cultural relic but it is not functionally useful to most young Scots.

bpodgursky 6y ago
An interesting quirk of the US education system is that Latin is the only place most children ever learn formal grammar -- I never learned anything about subjunctives, the accusative case, intransitive verbs or the like in an English class. To be honest, I probably would have been fine without it (like the vast majority of US students who don't learn Latin). But it was certainly an interesting insight into English grammar structure in a way I would have missed otherwise.
- irrational 6y ago
  I never had the chance to take Latin in school, but I became interested in historical languages later in life (I’ve self-studied middle egyptian, neo-Babylonian, and Greek) and found the following book to be very helpful. Understanding Language: A Guide for Beginning Students of Greek and Latin https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0813218667/ https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0813218667/

chrisseaton 6y ago

> Latin is dead Latin isn't dead. School children all around the world still learn it. It's still taught at universities. It's still used as the living language of the Catholic Church. I wouldn't be surprised if Latin is fairly high up the list of second-languages people learn.

FeteCommuniste 6y ago
Latin has no native speakers, which is what defines a dead language.
prerok 6y ago
Latin is a dead language by definition: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language It is not extinct though, which I guess is the point of your post ;)
corty 6y ago
School children learning latin is very high on the list of pointless drudgery our school system imposes on our children. We do waste lots of money, teachers and childrens' lifetime and attention.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Learning a language is a skill; it’s been shown that you learn your second foreign language much easier than your first. Teaching students a years worth of Latin and then transitioning to another living language is actually a fairly effective teaching strategy.
  - corty 6y ago
    You might as well teach multiple living languages. Using a dead to teach language learning is a waste of a good opportunity.
    - ashtonkem 6y ago

simias 6y ago

Latin is not a good comparison in this case. Latin is a dead language, but it never died. It slowly evolved into Late Latin, then Proto-Romance, then free of the unifying influence of the Roman Empire the languages started becoming mutually unintelligible across long distances and evolved into their own things, eventually becoming Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan etc... I over-simplify of course, but that's the idea. At no point was Latin replaced by anything else. If you had a time machine and went to Rome, then started to slowly rewind back in time you'd slowly see the language morphing back into Latin. If you did that in Paris, you'd hear the same thing[1]. On top of that Latin was the lingua franca for science and arts for over a thousand years. Through that route many words were loaned back into other languages, sometimes forming doublets of words having a different meaning but coming from the same Latin word through different routes. Take English "chair", coming from Latin "cathedra" (seat) through Old French and "cathedral" coming from... the same word, also through Old French but this time taking a detour through the ecclesiastic language. Gaelic's situation is utterly different. It hasn't evolved organically into a different language that eventually became different enough as to be mutually unintelligible, instead it's being replaced. It also has very little chance to survive as a lingua franca like Latin because the language that replaces it already does that better too. It's not a high prestige language that's used by many 2nd language speakers like Latin was and English is. [1] As a side note, that's why I can't stand ultra-prescriptivists. When a fellow French speaker starts harping on about how the "kids can't speak right" and the usual reactionary crap I usually ask them why they feel that way when they speak such a broken mess of a low dialect of Latin themselves. I mean if it doesn't have ablatives and deponent verbs it's not a real language as far as I'm concerned.