Is Latin 'Dead'?

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 11, 13 March 1902, Page 17

Is Latin 'Dead'?

A West Coast correspondent sends us the following paragraph from a local paper : —' The Scientific American thinks all scientists should speak a common tongue, and suggests that they make Latin the universal language for the arts and sciences.' Our correspondent asks : ' la there any hope of reviving a language so long dead and making it the language of arts and sciences 1'

Whereunto we make reply and say : The Latin language can only be called a dead language in the sense that, like dead lan. guages, its forms are fixed and more or less cast-iron. But in parts of Austria it is still the spoken language of the law-courts. Even hotel- waiters in many places understand and speak it. It will be news to many of our readers to learn that not alone did the Reformers all write in Latin, but the records of English courts of justice were kept in that language till the reign of George 11. Latin is still the recognised language of the medical profession. Hence your prescription for every ailment from dyspepsia to cholera morbus is to this hour, and in every civilised country penned in Latin. And the old language is still known and recognised as a medium of

international communication by scientific and learned men all over the world. It is, in fact, the language of science almost as much as French is the language of diplomacy. Bax, in his German Society at the Close of the Middle Ages (p. 94), says : ' One of the advantages of the custom of writing in Latin, which was universal during the middle ages, was that books of an important character were immediately current among scholars, without having, as now, to wait upon the caprice and ability of translators.' In his entertaining Letter* from High Latitudes Lord Dufferin tells us how in Reykjavik (Iceland) horse-owners, Protestant clergymen, and many others spoke Latin fluently, how the Luther preacher, at the close of the service, ' chanted some Latin sentences in good round Eoman style,' and how at a public dinner in the author's honor Latin was bandied about along and across the table by Icelandic doctor, parson, governor, and the rest. Any one who witnesses a ' dispute,' or even the ordinary daily routine of class-work in, say, a Roman ecclesiastical college, will find reason to greatly doubt the statement that Latin is really a dead language.