I hesitated to mention this, because I assumed people would all be jumping in to say this. Roman Catholics have been using Latin continuously since it was a Li

I hesitated to mention this, because I assumed people would all be jumping in to say this. Roman Catholics have been using Latin continuously since it was a Lingua Franca. No doubt many of them are pretty fluent. Clerical Latin is a dialect; I don't know much about it, but I know it's different from (for example) legal Latin, or vulgate Latin. But I assume that at least some practitioners of clerical Latin are fluent, and I also assume that there is a pronunciation tradition in the Catholic Church that runs back to Lingua Franca days. It was pointed out to me in some other HN thread that Latin is not a "dead language" - it experiences the same kinds of drifts and changes in grammar, semantics and so on as modern languages. I accept that. The same can't be said of Sanskrit, I think.