Calling alanguage“dead ” seems more like aninsultthan a simple categoric designation — as though it ’s less authoritative than its living counterparts .
And if we ’re babble about a language specifically as a way to have a conversation , a stagnant one is less important . AsBabbel explains , a dead language is any language that ’s “ no longer the aboriginal linguistic process of a community of people . ” That definition may vary slimly depending on your source : harmonize to theCambridge Dictionary , a language is also sometimes considered numb if it ’s no longer anyone’smainlanguage or just not “ used for ordinary communicating . ”
Latinchecks all these boxes . It used to be speak inAncient Rome , and eventuallyevolvedinto the Romance language after the fall of theRoman Empire . It ’s not necessarily that nobodycanspeak Latin today , or even that they don’t — it ’s more that nobody require to use Latin to say something like “ Where ’s the lav ? ” for lack of another pick .
But just because Latin is technically numb does n’t mean it ’s gone . For one matter , plenty of people study it , from high schoolers with an involvement inetymologyto classics scholar who prefer to translate Virgil’sAeneidin its purest form . Because Latin is still studied and spoken in some contexts , it ’s not regard anextinct language , or one that has no remain speakers at all .
Even people who do n’t read or utter Latin still use parts of the language . scientist , for example , give Latin names to freshly discovered specie — though some Latinized terms , like the Taylor Swift - inspiredswiftaeinNannaria swiftae , definitely were n’t around inJulius Caesar’sday . Vatican City in reality stillcountsLatin as one of its two official languages ( along with Italian ) . And that ’s not to cite all theLatin termsthat on a regular basis dress up in English : legal jargon likehabeas corpus , journalistic usage likesic , and worldwide expressions likemea culpaandquid pro quo .
[ h / tBabbel ]
