Re: Natural Language Praised

leuwarden@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
> do you mean I ought to find a better term?
>
> Latin is no longer alive. is it being kept alive in the Church? I read
> that Ratzinger was going to try and bring it back. Maybe he ought to,
> but what are the chances? I do not know, and I have not seen any debate
> about this.

(a) Latin never died; it survives in all the Romance languages.

(b) A classical written form never fell out of use. Doctoral
dissertations were being written in Latin until the end of the 19th
century, and some scholarly works published in Rome to this day are in
Latin.

(c) Latin can still be used as a spoken lingua franca at international
congresses of Roman Catholics.

> I have been told that Hebrew has been revived 100%, but I am alsmost
> sure that is a different story. Also, it was not a recent development,
> not some kind of political program, but something that started way back
> in the 19th century.

You must be very young indeed ...

(d) The situations of Hebrew and Latin were almost identical until late
in the 19th century. Virtually every Jewish male studied Hebrew to at
least some extent, although their native languages were always something
else. Hebrew was spoken whenever Jews from different parts of the world
got together. Communications throughout Jewish civilization were written
in Hebrew (though local communities wrote local languages with Hebrew
script: Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and many others). Hebrew was
"reborn" as a native language when a small group of enthusiasts who had
moved to Palestine chose to use no other language around their
infant(s), but since they were speaking it as a second language
themselves, the children's new language has a rather European syntax and
phonology.

Oh, and among the motivations, political ones certainly did figure.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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