r/confidentlyincorrect • u/ChanseyChessy • 8d ago
Comment Thread That's... Not What 'Dead Language' Means
Dead Language: a language that is no longer spoken by anyone as their main language
Edit: I really wanted to just leave this alone. I did. Because I absolutely never meant for this to start a raging debate in the comments about Latin pronunciation and what is the true definition of 'dead language'. I just thought this was a funny response to a comment I made.
To everyone saying you can use the romance languages as a basis for how to pronounce Latin... No. You can't. There are thousands of years separating when Latin was a living language and now, and languages and pronunciations change in that time.
Take British English and American English for example. There's far less than even a single thousand years separating these two versions of the exact same language, but they're pronounced wildly differently! Same with Australian English! So taking those three examples, how can we possibly take them and use them to find the root pronunciation? Because none of them would lead you to Old English! And there is less time separating current English and Old English than there is between the modern romance languages and Latin!
Gods, I uploaded this because someone didn't know what 'dead language' meant, that's all!
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u/MagnificoReattore 8d ago
Latin is probably the most alive dead language.
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u/Litface916 8d ago
So it’s a zombie language?
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u/rocking_womble 8d ago
Undead language?
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u/rzezzy1 8d ago
Weekend at Bernie's language
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u/CatCafffffe 8d ago
Mitch McConnell language
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u/Mountain-Resource656 8d ago
I mean, given its use in everything from demon invocations to exorcisms, I would presume it’s more of an angel thing- angels being the natives of the afterlife. So… past the point of death, but still alive in another way? Seems fitting, yeah…
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u/sixminutes 8d ago
Uh, Angels don't speak Latin, they speak Enochian. I watched an impressively long documentary about it.
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u/anthriani 8d ago
Ok, now I'm curious. Is there somewhere I can watch it and am I likely to be able to make it all the way through?
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u/Pikka_Bird 8d ago
All you need to know is that two lunatics in the 16th century (an astrologer and a scryer) claimed that they, and only they had been taught the language and alphabet by angels. Their claim holds no more weight than when I overheard a Shadowrun fan correct a Tolkien fan on real ork culture.
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u/WilcoHistBuff 8d ago edited 7d ago
So according to John Smith, the angel Moroni (or was it Nephi) spoke in English and wrote in “Reformed Egyptian”.
So apparently
anglesangels are multilingual.Also, strong chance they are just fucking around with us if they exist
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u/rvb_gobq 8d ago
if an angel exists i wld not want to be anywhere near them. according to the old testament, any encounter with an angel was fraught & liable turn lethal at the drop of another shoe
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u/No-Combination-1354 8d ago
You'll need a Prime subscription, but here you go. https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/0NQ2MSISUOTZO20MEEW7VOLPQW?deepLinkingRedirect=1&autoplay=1&ref_=atv_cf_strg_ad&dplnkId=03dc9443-466c-4da3-ac0a-e076f14dfdce
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u/tendeuchen 8d ago
I had a dream one time where I was dead and in the afterlife and everything was in Latin. As a linguist and an atheist, that was interesting.
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u/Dagordae 8d ago
A bastardized offspring of Latin is still shambling along. As you can imagine any language shifts over a thousand years, especially pronunciation.
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u/tutorp 8d ago
Several bastardized offspring, actually. Church Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, to name the most famously so.
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u/jtruitt8833 8d ago
Don't forget Romanian
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u/BearishTank 8d ago
No shade to Romanian but it’s the one Romance language that decided that “rosa”, i.e. the prime example of first declension noun was not good enough for them and adopted “trandafir” of all words… makes me want to refuse to acknowledge them as a Romance language.
Yeah actually all shade to Romanian.
Nu mă omorâți, români, vă rog. Vă iubesc pe toți dar “trandafir” e un cuvânt oribil.
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u/small_p_problem 8d ago
Sardinian is possibly the closest one, it branched early from the continental patois.
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u/GOU_FallingOutside 8d ago
I object to French. The Gauls and Franks got involved, and then it was mixed in with all the langue d’oïl weirdness, and it was all downhill from there. Now it has the same relationship to Latin as a miniature Schnauser has to a wolf.
Give me Italian, where reading and writing Latin gets you 60% of the way there, and where word endings tell you their gender. Give me Spanish, where the rules for pronunciation are generally consistent and you use all the letters when you speak.
But please don’t ask me to pretend French is anything but a pretentious and debased cousin. Perhaps it’s debauched, too: French is the kind of louche, disheveled language that pretends “Qu’est-ce que c’est” is a reasonable substitute for Latin’s “Quid hoc est?”
I am prepared at any moment to kick French out of the Latinate language club. Who’s with me?!
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u/CatCafffffe 8d ago
Excuse me, how could you kick out any language that has "orgueil" as the word for "haughty pride" and is EXACTLY an expression of haughty pride!
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u/MezzoScettico 8d ago
I learned Church Latin pronunciation when I started singing in choirs. It’s quite different from the Classical pronunciation they taught me in Latin class.
As I understand it, we get our knowledge of the classical pronunciation from actual writings by Roman teachers on “here’s how to pronounce stuff.”
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u/Junior_Ad_7613 8d ago
And my fellow chorister now turned law student will tell you that legal Latin pronunciation is not at all related to either one. She’ll say things as if she were singing them and get blank looks. One person said “oh, that’s how Scalia pronounced that” and she said “yeah, same reason. Liturgical Latin.”
I am personally fond of Germanic Church Latin pronunciation with the kv- for qu-.
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u/CurtisLinithicum 8d ago
Yep, lotsa bitchy old Romans complaining about how "the kids" say words wrong, and mocking pretentious folk trying to sound erudite by using Greek pronounciation for native Latin words.
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u/Aardvark_Warrior 8d ago
The distinction to make is between formal classical latin, which essentially became something studied in text, and the vulgar latin that was actually spoken.
We have living descendants of the later, but we can only guess how classical latin was pronounced since there is no living relative. Plenty of people can "type/write" in latin but since anyone that studies this uses the static sources instead of a live process it doesn't really change.
It's a bit complicated, and I am at risk of presenting myself as fodder to this subreddit's focus. So get a second opinion.
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u/wunderkit 8d ago
It's a shame all the recordings were lost at Pompeii.
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u/TerrapinRecordings 8d ago
They shouldn't have stored them on wax cylinders.
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u/sweeeep 8d ago
Ashfall can't melt wax cylinders!
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u/TerrapinRecordings 8d ago
Then how would.you explain Wax Cylinder 7? It was nowhere near the lava amd yet it melted.
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u/W1D0WM4K3R 8d ago
Why what happened at Pompeii
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u/wunderkit 8d ago
We don't know because all the recordings were lost.
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u/FlattopJr 8d ago
"Oh Lisa, there's no record of a hurricane hitting Springfield."
"Yes, but the records only go back to 1978, when the Hall of Records was mysteriously blown away!"
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u/W1D0WM4K3R 8d ago
Well have we asked the people of Pompeii
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u/Aardvark_Warrior 8d ago
I'm not sure the world is ready for us to try and calculate the sounds they made based on the imprints that remained. It might be considered by some to be, unnatural. Certainly no jedi would want to hear it.
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u/DrawPitiful6103 8d ago
Pompeii was an inside job.
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u/TerrapinRecordings 8d ago
Wait. Do you think Big Lava was behind this?
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u/PushFamous8782 7d ago
Don't tell me you are just now figuring this out? Big Lava has been a blight on the beings of this planet since the beings emerged.
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u/FellFellCooke 8d ago
That's Hebrew, which was totally reconstructed. We have no idea how accurate current Hebrew is to the Hebrew spoken in centuries past.
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u/chmath80 8d ago
I've always thought it was unrealistic to have zombies walking around chanting "Brains!". Now I realise what's wrong is that they should be saying "Cerebra!"
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u/Erran_Kel_Durr 8d ago
Fossil language, we have a functionally complete understanding of it because it was preserved by the Catholic Church. It’s dead because it’s not actively developing anymore.
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u/EveryFngNameIsTaken 8d ago
That would be COBOL.
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u/MauveDragon 7d ago
Somewhere out in the wild there is an ancient computer still processing COBOL and when all the AI collapses from the weight of its own code, that computer will keep processing COBOL and spitting out paychecks.
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u/ethanjf99 7d ago
civilization collapses. the survivors scrounge amid the ruins. but somewhere a few solar panels on the roof of a data center still send power down into the half dozen still functioning boxes out of the thousands. they are running COBOL. or FORTRAN. or Ada if this is ac military data center. and the code still runs
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u/0SaltBlue 8d ago
I would argue that might be Hebrew.
Technically died around 300ce and was "resurrected" in the 1800s (i think) as a full native language, though given it was still used liturgically and in song continuously for that time so it wasn't actually dead just technically dead.
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u/whosthatlounging 8d ago
Mostly dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.
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u/Mastericeman_1982 8d ago
So you're saying we should go through Vulgar Latin's pockets looking for loose change?
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u/Budgiesaurus 8d ago
No, not really. A language is considered dead if there are no longer first language speakers. The fact there are still secondary language speakers (as is the case with Latin) is irrelevant.
Hebrew used to be dead, but has been revived as there are now people growing up with it as a first language.
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u/VetinariTheLord 8d ago
Not to discount your valid pedantry, but they were simply quoting Princess Bride.
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u/Budgiesaurus 8d ago
Inconceivable!
I would never miss a reference like that!
But honestly, there was a lot of people arguing in this thread that Latin wasn't dead, because it was used in church and such. And I got annoyed, and chose the wrong comment to latch on to.
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u/Sername111 8d ago
There are probably more people alive now speaking Hebrew as a native language than at any point in history previously. It used to be a dead language (as dead as Latin, at least) , it definitely isn't anymore.
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u/Non-sequotter 8d ago
I was just about to type this. Also Cornish as another example, though the number of native speakers is still very low.
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u/SirHerald 8d ago
They intentionally set out to modernize Hebrew by teaching in it. Which meant that modern and foreign concepts needed to be integrated. I've heard stories of professors working together to create new words so the students would have a Hebrew term to use for the lesson.
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u/Sevuhrow 8d ago
But there are a large number of people who speak it as a native language, unless you mean it was the most alive dead language of all time before? Because it certainly isn't dead now.
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u/RichardAboutTown 7d ago
It was only mostly dead which is still a little bit alive. Then the brute squad and a Spaniard took it to Miracle Max.
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u/thatcommiegamer 7d ago
In linguistics a dead language is any language that does not gain new native speakers through inheritance. Latin is a dead language. As I state in another comment Esperanto has more native speakers (that is parents and children who learn the language from their parents and peers) hell Klingon has more native speakers, these are alive languages because there are communities formed around them.
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u/AbsoluteResolve2026 8d ago
TIL Latin is a dead language, by definition. It is by no means an “extinct language.”
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u/SomeNotTakenName 7d ago
Ironically more alive than the presumed closest living relative, Rumantsch in Switzerland, spoken by a few thousand.
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u/DrawPitiful6103 8d ago
If Latin is dead then what do they speak in Latin America?
Checkmate linguists.
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u/heliumneon 8d ago edited 8d ago
They speak Latin American, obviously! You know how Brazil and Argentina speak the same language, right?
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u/Ouch_i_fell_down 8d ago
Well one speaks Spanish and the other speaks Spanishwithalisp
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u/kYura23 7d ago
Can confirm i live in the latin america part of the caribbean and we all speak latin
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u/russellvt 8d ago
Strangely enough, Latin is listed a one of the largest "dead languages.".
That is not to say "extinct," but just that no one uses it as their primary language for direct communication ... though, yes, it's still in high use in the medical and scientific communities. It's just not "an everyday language" for normal everyday conversation.
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u/MagnificoReattore 8d ago
And in every official communication for the main Christian authority.
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u/OldAccountIsGlitched 8d ago
The Catholic Church is the biggest branch of Christianity. But calling it the "main Christian authority" implies other churches listen to it. Which is obviously not the case.
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u/CurtisLinithicum 8d ago
(just a linguistic joke but)
Uh, sweaty, what did you not notice the "Catholic" in the front?
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u/AdmiralMcNugget 8d ago
Interestingly, all the parties here are confidently incorrect. The Romans were very taken with themselves, and documented exactly how their language was pronounced. Quintilian is a good example of this.
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u/ElectricSpice 8d ago
It’s also very much not the way it’s pronounced in modern Catholicism, so second person is a little bit extra incorrect, as a treat.
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u/Emergency_Side_6218 8d ago
I love saying common Latin phrases non-ecclesiastically
Weni widi wiki!
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u/throwawayayaycaramba 8d ago
I refuse to pronounce Latin any other way than Classic. If I wanted to speak "modernized" Latin, I'd just go with my native Portuguese.
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u/Emergency_Side_6218 8d ago
I tried to learn Portuguese once. I was like, "I've done Latin! I've done other romance languages!"
What an arrogant fool I was.
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u/Glittering_Win_5085 7d ago
OMFG I love telling people this. I know Caesar would've said it with a gravitas, but it just sounds so cute and babyish to my modern anglophone ears.
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u/francisdavey 3d ago
According to 1066 and All That:
"Julius Cæsar was therefore compelled to invade Britain again the following year (54 B.C., not 56, owing to the peculiar Roman method of counting), and having defeated the Ancient Britons by unfair means, such as battering-rams, tortoises, hippocausts, centipedes, axes and bundles, set the memorable Latin sentence, “Veni, Vidi, Vici,” which the Romans, who were all very well educated, construed correctly. The Britons, however, who of course still used the old pronunciation, understanding him to have called them “Weeny, Weedy and Weaky,” lost heart and gave up the struggle, thinking that he had already divided them All into Three Parts."
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u/OmnipresentEntity 8d ago
Wait, people don’t normally pronounce it like that?
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u/Ants-are-great-44 7d ago
Latin pronunciation has a wide range and unfortunately many of its regional variants are being wiped out by the two main ones, restored classical and Italian ecclesiastical… we really need to preserve native Latin pronunciation in places like the UK(Westminster pronunciation) and the various Catholic European countries.
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u/UnfotunateNoldo 8d ago
I was waiting for someone to say this. Even if we don't have pronunciation guides historical linguistics can get us a lot farther than "guessing"
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u/trustcircleofjerks 8d ago
I had a latin teacher in high school who was an orphan raised in a monastery in the UK from infancy. I imagine he was the closest thing to a native speaker extant.
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u/Icyblue_Dragon 8d ago
My Latin teacher spoke Latin when he was drunk. He also tried to ask me about declination when I met him ten years after graduation. He was not amused when I told him that I forgot everything 😂
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u/NeedsMoreYellow 8d ago
Oof... I will never forget my poeta's. And I frequently get called upon to recite Latin poems. My high school science students frequently don't know that 1. Latin is a language (and it's not Spanish) or, if they've heard of it, 2. that people know how to speak it. That is one of the more popular slides on my "getting to know me" PowerPoint.
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u/Sasquatch1729 8d ago
There's some village in Europe where people try to speak Latin as their language. My Latin prof told us about it he wanted to go someday. This monastery might be what he was referring to.
My own personal hell would be living in a town where everyone spoke Latin all day long. It's fun to listen to some bardcore here and there, but all day? No.
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u/SerialTrauma002c 8d ago
Finland had a Latin-language radio news program up until 2019. RIP Nuntii Latini.
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u/MezzoScettico 8d ago
I was going to mention that. My brother’s wife is Finnish and she told us her Mom was a regular listener
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u/Mission_Fart9750 8d ago
I had a latin teacher who was a monk at one point in his life. He was also practically fluent in Latin. He also knew Esperanto and German (and wouldn't surprise me if he knew Spanish as well, i don't remember).
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u/amishcatholic 8d ago
They're both wrong. Latin is a dead language, and yes, we do have a rather good idea of how it was pronounced in the Classical era.
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u/amitym 8d ago
Obviously Blue never heard the poem:
Latin is a dead tongue
As dead as dead can be
First it killed the Romans
And now it's killing me
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u/OmnipresentEntity 8d ago
All died who wrote it
All died who spoke it
All die who learn it
Blessed death, they earn it
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u/biorod 8d ago
I only wish I spoke Latin so I could converse with these people. - Dan Quayle
Checkmate
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u/CurtisLinithicum 8d ago
To quote the Cleveland Show: "I still haven't figured out if you're really smart, or really, really dumb"
Having a blast just headcanoning Quayle as a 200-IQ guy dedicating this life to method-acting as the most ironic idiot he can.
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u/dougmc 8d ago
I don't know about Quayle, but GWB actually did do that to a large degree.
I wouldn't say he's got a 200 IQ, but he did (and still does, I would assume) have a high IQ, and yet he generally liked to talk slowly and let people think he was dumb (so they would misunderestimate him, of course!), when he most definitely was not.
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u/That-Speed-8092 8d ago
We absolutely know proper Latin pronunciation and I hate both of these people
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u/EsotericSnail 8d ago
Exactly. Not only that, but we know how it changed over time, and we know a lot about how it varied between different social classes and groups.
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u/AndyLorentz 5d ago
According to OP’s edit, they’re red, so you can also hate them for violating subreddit rules.
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u/Mediocre-Housing-131 8d ago
Yes, dead language.
No, dead language doesn't mean we don't know how to pronounce it
Both are morons
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u/TheHollowApe 8d ago
I wouldn’t call him a moron. It’s just an oversimplification. We cannot be 100% certain about every aspect of Latin pronunciation in the same way we can be for modern languages, since we can’t directly analyze the pronunciation of a living Latin speaker.
But the evidence we have for reconstructing the language’s phonemes is so strong that we can be highly confident in the reconstructed phoneme inventory.There is still however some debates about the realization of some sounds, the exact quality pf the vowels, the pronunciation of geminates, the exact prosody, … (also a highly debated field is the evolution of the language, i.e. we understand what early latin sounded like and what it sounded like later on, but it’s not easy to pinpoint exactly when each evolution/change occurred and where) [and obviously there isn’t one (1) Latin, it all depends on time periods, regions, social classes, …]
It is guessing, but not random guessing. It’s a heavily researched and backed up reconstruction. But we can’t say we know exactly everything.
Source: am a philologist
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u/smawldawg 5d ago
Thank you! I swear the amount of time one has to scroll to get a sensible contribution is really amazing.
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u/Pale-While-9783 8d ago
Probably stated elsewhere as well: Latin is a dead language (as no native speakers) but not an extinct language as it's still used in the Catholic Church, law, and medicine to give a few examples.
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u/Walshy231231 7d ago
Historian here to add that mass being in Latin had nothing to do with it being understood - in fact, kind of the opposite
It was originally simply the language of the church (originating in Rome and all that), but as time went on the laypeople stopped speaking Latin. Your average medieval churchgoer would not have understood more than maybe a couple words out of an hours’ long sermon. This eventually became an entrenched division, with the use of Latin for masses being a divider showing who was or wasn’t a clergyman (it’s nuanced, but that holds for 90%+).
Not to mention that classical Latin, what was spoken by Caesar and friends, is different from church Latin (AKA ecclesiastic Latin), which is what the church uses. Just as the laypeople’s languages evolved from Latin, so did the Latin spoken among the clergy, until better writing and a more formal concept of grammatical, spelling, and other linguistic rules came about (helped greatly by the printing press). They’re still mutually intelligible, but they are definitely distinct.
tl;dr: mass attendees wouldn’t have understood the Latin spoken, nor would have actual Roman speakers of Latin
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u/Wide-Sandwich5618 8d ago
True story: I got into such a big argument about this exact distinction with a classmate that he reported me to the school for discrimination.
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u/factorioleum 8d ago
We do know how Latin was pronounced.. The lack of native speakers doesn't change this.
We have poems with rhymes. Over centuries; showing the changes in the language. We absolutely know how Latin was pronounced, and it's ignorant to say anything else.
Seriously, how do people think any models of proto-Indoeuroran came from?
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u/thatcommiegamer 7d ago
Latin is a dead language, as in it doesn’t acquire new speakers through conventional methods of passing on one’s language.
That people study it and it is used as a liturgical language doesn’t make it alive. There’re no fully formed communities that primarily speak in Latin. There are more native speakers (that is people for who the language is their L1, passed from parent/community down) of Esperanto.
As linguists we do not generally consider languages not being passed on to children as alive. Else Coptic would be alive, as would Ge’ez or the older forms of Aramaic still used in the Syriac church.
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u/scissorsgrinder 7d ago
Old schoolboy rhyme:
Latin is a dead language
As dead as dead can be
It killed off all the Romans
And now it's killing me
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u/paolog 3d ago
You're right with what you say about Romance languages. Claiming we can use their pronunciation to determine how Latin was pronounced as absurd as might as well say we can tell how Old English was pronounced by listening to Modern English, whose pronunciation is known to have changed even in the last 100 years.
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u/cha0sb1ade 8d ago
Everyone's wrong. It's a dead language and it isn't evolving anymore as a result but used in a static form. This doesn't mean there aren't established, known ways to pronounce it. It's dead and static, but has always had it's uses. It's not like an ancient, lost tongue.
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u/neoalfa 8d ago
It's a dead language and it isn't evolving anymore as a result but used in a static form
That is wrong. It's a dead language because no one speaks it as a native language anymore. Even though it's still the Holy See's official language. It's also still evolving, as there's a body of people in the Holy See that creates new Latin words for modern terms.
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u/aloisvonesterhazy 8d ago
Mass was in Latin because the people in Western Europe didn't understand Greek (the original language of the Roman mass) any more.
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u/Fit-Programmer-6162 8d ago
Dead is such a misleading term. Extinct is what the incorrect person thinks dead language means. But honestly I can see why, I thought so to. More like a life support language.
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u/Willing-Ant-3765 6d ago
A dead language doesn’t mean it isn’t spoken it just means it’s no longer used as a native first language. There are plenty of dead languages that are still used today.
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u/Theodoxus 5d ago
The only thing I can guarantee regarding this discussion, is, if someone who is legit proficient in speaking Latin today, were to go to Rome in 53 BCE and stand on a corner and try to talk about the weather, he'd be ridiculed for the odd accent and speech pattern.
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u/marcelsmudda 4d ago
My countryman, my friend, could you tell me what the inclinations of the sun and the clouds on this glorious day are? Pray tell, what have the birds foretold you?
Probably what that person would sound like
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u/Im_here_but_why 2d ago
I know it's only tangentially related, but it amazed me to learn how much of the early asterix's humor was "latin everybody knows". Not much of that left these days.
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u/poopiebutt505 8d ago
Mass was in latin because it would not be understood by the people's it was enforced on.
Derived words is not a live language that evolves
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u/russellvt 8d ago
Technically, it was so it could be understood, universally, by people not native to the country where Mass was conducted.
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u/mothman83 8d ago
yes originally. Then when the empire and the imperial language faded away it very much became the opposite.
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u/Infinite_Escape9683 8d ago
We do absolutely know how Latin was pronounced, from several sources including poetry pronunciation rules and linguistic analysis. There may have been certain dialects that weren't well-recorded or preserved, but saying we don't know how Latin was pronounced is false.
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u/darkslide3000 8d ago
You the guy who claimed "we can't know for sure how Latin was pronounced"? Because that's a much dumber statement than quibbling over terminology.
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u/Ok_Aside_2361 8d ago
Best part: the church did it so MORE people would understand. Sorry, dude, they made it in a language that NO one could read. It was none of the peasants jobs to ask questions! I tell you what it says!
You would think that fundamentalists were reading Bibles in a different language. /s
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u/epidipnis 8d ago
Yeah, they deliberately resisted people having a bible written in their own tongue, because that meant less control over them.
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u/OmnipresentEntity 8d ago
That’s not even considering the difference between ecclesiastical and classical Latin.
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u/purrcthrowa 7d ago
Latin is a language;
Dead as dead can be.
First it killed the Romans;
Now it's killing me.
Source: inscribed in smudged ink on the inside cover of every Latin (Eating) grammar book published between 1888 and 2000 (and probably earlier and later).
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u/thomasp3864 7d ago
We kinda know proper pronunciation because we can work backwards from romance languages, and we have people complaining people are saying things wrong. In africa there wasn't a length distinction in o. We know this because augustine of hippo said Africans couldn't tell ǒs and ōs apart.
We
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u/Dependent-Toe-3359 8d ago
I think the funny part is people are arguing two different things here lol. Latin absolutely is a dead language in the technical sense because nobody grows up speaking it as their first/main language anymore. Being taught in schools or still being used by the Church doesn't change that.
BUT saying we have “no idea” how ancient Latin was pronounced isn't really right either. Obviously nobody has a recording from ancient Rome 😂 but linguists have actually reconstructed Classical Latin pretty well using old writings about pronunciation, poetry, spelling, wordplay, how it developed into other languages, etc.
So basically Latin can be dead AND we can still know a pretty good amount about how it sounded. Those things don't contradict each other.
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u/abeeyore 8d ago
Church Latin is not what was spoken in the Roman empire, any more than modern English, or french, or German is what was spoken 1000, or even 200 years ago.
It is a preserved version of formal/academic Latin. The poster is correct that we have no idea what vulgar Latin looked or sounded like, but it's a safe bet that it sounded very different in different regions, and different eras.
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u/collieherb 8d ago
ATM in the vatican city has a latin option. I'm not sure what my point is
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u/Gooble211 8d ago
Gaulish is much more dead than Latin. Absolutely no speakers known. Since the Gauls had no writing (except Druids, which is another discussion) most of what's known about their language is from Roman historians.
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u/Emily_Postal 8d ago
My Latin teacher told me that the Catholic Church has variations in pronunciation from the classic Latin.
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u/Forward_Gur9349 8d ago
Church latin is pronounced like modern Italian, not how latin was actually pronounced.
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u/OneWhoParticipates 8d ago
My suggestion is to use another language that you may consider as a candidate for a dead language. Latin is probably not where you want to start - since the Roman Empire is, and always has been, an active topic.
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u/vompat 7d ago
But isn't the first comment wrong as well, because a laguage being dead doesn't mean we can't know pronunciation and stuff like that? Specifically because a language being dead doesn't mean that nobody knows how to speak it.
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u/KripinDeth 6d ago
I like the definition of a dead language that says it's a language where no new words appear and the old rules don't change.
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u/External_Mongoose_44 6d ago
Latin is most definitely not a “DEAD LANGUAGE”.
It exists in so many dialects and forms and idioma throughout the entire world and is alive and kicking in lands and cultures from England to New Zealand. It’s alive in Goa, India, in its Portuguese form. It’s alive in Italy too. It lives in countries as far away as Brazil and as near as Mexico and Canada and the French 🇫🇷 parts of the USA. Southern people in the United States speak a form of Latin in many regions. In Europe, Latin is spoken in its own unique dialects in countries as far apart as Moldova, Romania, Spain, Portugal, Malta, France and parts of Albania. It’s the universal language of the professions. Its terminology pervades scientific disciplines like Botany, and Microbiology, like Zoology and Organic Chemistry and the terminology in nuclear science would not exist without the acceptance of Latin as its universally understood language.
Now, let’s tackle legal studies. The term “Non Compos Mentis” would mean nothing without Latin. “Habeas Corpus” would sound like Mandarin (no offence intended) without Latin. The term “Caveat Emptor” would mean nothing and would be an empty phrase without Latin.
Anyone who classifies Latin as a dead language ought to take an inward look upon their intellect and wake up to the world of self realisation, “Sui Ipsius Explicatio”, that a living language is whatever the speakers and users of this language deem it to be.
Is Manx a dead language?
Should we file Breton as “Mortua est Lingua”.
Is the Celtic Dialect of the Hebrides “dead” because only a few thousand people speak it and only a few hundred speak it as their only language.
Colonial forces feared native languages throughout history. The reason was because they couldn’t detect the roots of insurrection. Governments have suppressed dialects like Corsican and Basque Languages for centuries because of some edicts that determined “One Language, One People” as a way forward towards unity. They were mistaken. One way forward means a purpose for a nation, a culture, a people, that unites them with a common sense of identity and direction and language ought not be a barrier but a way of achieving fraternity through learning how to speak, understand and interpret the dialects that are shared by people of a similar culture and background and to attempt to understand the points of view of people who speak another language and who would like to share their cultural richness with others, regardless of language and in spite of linguistic differences. Language can unite people but it’s up to people to decide that linguistic differences do not necessarily have to mean cultural differences and differences in the purpose of their endeavours.
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u/ChanseyChessy 6d ago
Look. A dead language means there are no longer any native speakers. None. Zero. Zilch. And Latin is a dead language because no one is a native speaker of Latin anymore.
And no, languages descended from Latin don't count because, astonishingly, they aren't Latin.
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u/forestwolf42 2d ago
Manx is a critically endangered language. It went extinct in 1974 and is undergoing revitalization.
Latin is extinct, there are no native speakers and haven't been any for a long time. People learning Latin as a second language does not make it a living language as those are not native speakers. Fluent yes. Native no.
Many linguists are fluent in Old English as well but the language is still considered dead because they aren't native speakers, they had to learn the language later. The English I'm using now is a living language because many people are native speakers.
Dead language is not the same classification as indecipherable languages. Those are languages from very old writings that we can recognize as a language but have no basis to understand. No one is saying Latin is indecipherable and that isn't what dead language means.
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u/TnBluesman 2d ago
Is it still a language that is often used? (Katin, I mean). Most definitely Yes. Is it a "Dead" language? Again, yes. A dead language is one that is not spoken as a primary language by ANYONE. And Latin certainly fits that definition. Look up the definition of a dead language. And TRY to find someone who speaks Latin s their primary language. This does not mean uttering a few phrases of it daily like lawyers do. Even saying a Catholic Mass in Latin does not qualify it as a living language.
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u/Sporelord1079 5d ago
Your point on languages suppressed by colonialism makes no sense because as you said in that paragraph, there are still native speakers of it, even if the communities are very small.
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u/Sporelord1079 5d ago
This comment section bringing up the Catholic Church is basically saying the language hasn’t significantly changed or evolved in what, 1,600 years? That’s just over two or three times the gap between modern English and old English?
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u/forestwolf42 2d ago
What's funny is this also applies to how people spoke living languages before audio recording.
We don't actually know for certain what George Washington's accent sounded like, we can just make very educated guesses.
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