Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

The Latin Revival

I was bemused to discover that the Pope did something I agree with: he advocates the revival of Latin.  (Link courtesy of my partner Doug.)  For centuries, Latin was an auxiliary language of the Church, scholars, and widely traveled people.  That was incredibly useful and I'm disappointed that people ditched it.  It's a great language, with a lot of history and literature to its credit, and any  widespread auxiliary language is really convenient.

In general, I think the guy is a dick, and we disagree on almost everything.  But in this our paths run together, and I'm an oldschool activist capable of swapping out allies on different issues.
Tags: linguistics, news, spirituality
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  • 24 comments
lyonesse

lyonesse

November 14 2012, 22:46:10 UTC 8 years ago

you might be interested in the highly-successful movement to revive hebrew, which was a dead language for a long time and isn't anymore. but they had children learn it natively, which is not what the pope is suggesting.

i was amused to discover that atm's in vatican city will offer you latin as a language for your transaction :)
ysabetwordsmith

Thoughts

ysabetwordsmith

November 14 2012, 22:54:27 UTC 8 years ago

>>you might be interested in the highly-successful movement to revive hebrew, which was a dead language for a long time and isn't anymore. but they had children learn it natively, which is not what the pope is suggesting.<<

I have read that story! I think it's cool.

Yes, language nesting is the most effective approach. However, schooling will work, especially for an auxiliary language. Used to be, Catholic schools taught Latin quite thoroughly and from a fairly young age. It's not ideal but it gets the job done.
kestrels_nest

Re: Thoughts

kestrels_nest

November 19 2012, 01:16:55 UTC 8 years ago

Which was how Hebrew was taught, until the settlement of Palestine/establishment of Israel.