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
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kestrels_nest

kestrels_nest

November 19 2012, 01:29:58 UTC 8 years ago

if you were Jewish, from the most revered rabbi to the most brutish thug of a boxer and stonemason, you already at least kinda knew some Hebrew.

And if you were Jewish, you were literate. No distinction between male and female on that, either, as women were expected to teach the young children.

But it was not the language that they spoke every day; like Latin, it was reserved for religious observance and scholarship. The lingua franca was either Yiddish (eastern European) or Ladino (Jews of Iberian descent.) That made the revival of Hebrew a fairly big deal - when all you know are the phonemes from reciting the prayers, learning to use the language in daily life is a non-trivial undertaking.
paka

paka

November 19 2012, 08:33:24 UTC 8 years ago

Okay, so the revival of Hebrew as an everyday language is something big, I'm sorry to have been a little too quick to dismiss that; but I still feel it was an exceptionally democratic sort of thing, rather than Latin, which was used to shut off big chunks of the population from their intellectual heritage.
kestrels_nest

kestrels_nest

November 19 2012, 13:55:24 UTC 8 years ago

And you're correct about that. One lf the reasons Hebrew was chosen was that it was common to all Jews. Latin, on the other hand, became the language of mysteries accessible only to the educated and/or religious.