Something that never quite sat right with me was the Vatican’s official name for the United States: Ciuitatibus Foederatis Americae Septentrionalis, litterally the “Federated States of North America,” which for some reason is partly in ablative. I never liked that name. I’ve used it in my profile for a while since it’s “official,” but damned if it’s pretty. unire I realize is a less common Latin verb, but it fits much better with the name of the United States, if only though sonority. I have at present in my profile Unitae Ciuitates Americae, as you see to the left, which certainly sounds nicer.
The real problem lies with “state” since this word, Latin-origined as it is, has changed very much in meaning over the centuries, even very recently. Respublica is another good word which finds itself in the definition of the country’s government.
Anyone have any suggestions on resolving the problem of Latin’s distance from modern society and language in this case?
I might be inclined to side with the Vatican — if it weren’t that the Vatican doesn’t even put Latin on its Euro! which I find appalling:
It uses Italian! Now, granted, I love Italian, implicitly and explicitly, but the Vatican is the last bastion in the entire world where Latin is embraced as the official national language. How dare they descend to the nearby lingua locuta!
Even we in the United States put Latin on our coins! The Vatican cannot? That’s absurd.
I’ve seen that translation for the “United States of America” in the ablative because it’s usually after a preposition (“in” or “ex”). Members in the Latin Wikipedia and the Nuntii Latini forum use “Civitates Americae Unitae” (or “Unitae Civitates Americae” as you have it), and in the Latin Wikipedia there’s also “Status Uniti Americae”.
Hehe… I’m totally with you on the euro issue. It sucks! Sure, you see il Papa, but where’s the Latin???
Let’s just hope the people who made the euros messed up big time.
The only cool thing I’ve seen in Latin from the Vatican is this, which I’m sure you’ve seen (but I’ve never actually been there, so I don’t know how accurate it is):
Heh, last I checked, the Yankees won the Civil War.
Salve, Luce!
I’ve seen that translation for the “United States of America” in the ablative because it’s usually after a preposition (“in” or “ex”). Members in the Latin Wikipedia and the Nuntii Latini forum use “Civitates Americae Unitae” (or “Unitae Civitates Americae” as you have it), and in the Latin Wikipedia there’s also “Status Uniti Americae”.
Hehe… I’m totally with you on the euro issue. It sucks! Sure, you see il Papa, but where’s the Latin???
Let’s just hope the people who made the euros messed up big time.
The only cool thing I’ve seen in Latin from the Vatican is this, which I’m sure you’ve seen (but I’ve never actually been there, so I don’t know how accurate it is):
seems unnecessarily vague to me, it could mean “the united states of america” or “the states of united america”. word order could clear that up a bit I think.
Not only is “unio” a VERY uncommon verb, but it seems to be used only in the literal sense of bringing things together, while “foederare” is used in the sense of political union. Unitae Civitates Americae certainly sounds better from an English point of view, but I’m not sure if it would from a Latin point of view. Of course, it’s a somewhat silly exercise either way, since there can never be any “right” translation into a dead language of a concept that didn’t exist when it was spoken.
Latin is a dead language perhaps if we limit ourselves to the classical idiom, but I hardly see how it is possible to argue that a language that has been continually spoken and written, even in somewhat limited circles, is dead. Isn’t this very exercise evidence for the continuing growth and development of modern Latin, which, of course, must be distinguished from the prose of Cicero and Caesar that most of us study?
Latin is dead because it is the fossilization of a particular period of time of a language that has continued evolving into Italian, Spanish, French, etc. We learn Latin so that we can read ancient literature, but attempts to write “modern” Latin are inherently artificial. It is nobody’s native language; it cannot have continuing “growth and development” in any real way because it is not used the way a real language is used. Latin’s “growth and development” involved the loss of the case system, standardization of word order, phonetic changes, etc. that led to the modern Romance languages, and those changes made Latin cease to be Latin, much as changes in the Old English of Beowulf that eventually led to our modern English have made the fossilized historical form that we call “Old English” a dead language. There will never be a “correct” Latin word for “United States of America” or “television” or “e-mail” because there is no real community that relies on Latin as its primary means of communication, and because we have to create these words as exercises rather than let them come naturally into the speech of the native speakers, as happens in living languages.
The loss of Latin’s case system and the standardization of word order is a product of illiteracy and the fall of an empire, not evolution. The vulgate was uneducated, and didn’t have access to any authors or literature of any kind for a thousand years; and since the majority of educated people from ancient Rome were lost in the fall of the Empire, the common people remained relatively ignorant. If every Roman citizen and family had been taught the highest Latin, then even after the fall of the Empire and the descent into chaos, as long as they would have continued to pass their knowledge down to successive generations, there would have been practically no change in the language.
As for “fossilization” and “immitation,” English has grown ever more fossilized and unchanging since Shakespeare. This standardization of our language has largely come from immitation of the Bard, to the point where we write and speak now for major part as we wrote and spoke over a hundred years ago. This is the product of education. Creative and new elements are sometimes added to our language, but by and large we write and speak the same language that people have been learning for a hundred years, longer even.
Equally, the reason that Old English did not survive is the lack of education: the Norman conquerers were not properly educated in the native tongue, nor the native Saxons adequately in their own tongue. Thus the languages mixed together, their respective gender systems were incompatible and subsequently dropped, and the new language ultimately found standardization in Shakespeare.
There will never be a “correct” Latin word for “United States of America” or “television” or “e-mail” because there is no real community that relies on Latin as its primary means of communication, and because we have to create these words as exercises rather than let them come naturally into the speech of the native speakers, as happens in living languages.
You are forgetting the Vatican. The Vatican is its own country, whose national language is Latin, uses the ancient tongue as its primary means of communication, and has by necessity come up with words for all those things, and many more. And there are other communities besides the Vatican which use Latin as the lingua franca: in our very own Agora we communicate primarily, indeed, entirely by Latin and Ancient Greek.
As for learning a language natively, there are surely numerous people around the world who have been taught Latin from earliest age; their number may be terribly few, but their existence is likely. Therefore I believe “dead” to be too harsh a word. Latin is far from its glorious past, but that does not preclude the possibility that it may rise again.
I completely disagree with this. It was the elitist attitude that Latin is more educated and civilized, and that the Romance languages are somehow inferior that caused the church to persecute people who would translate the bible from Latin into the common languages, and look down on people like Dante who would actually have the gall to write in the “uneducated” vernacular instead of Latin.
The nature of all language is that it evolves over time as it is spoken by people. Our idea that there is such a thing as the “English language” with a defined set of rules and words is a convenient precept for us to use, but what we call “English” is just a snapshot of a branch of an evolutionary process that began with Proto-Indo-European (or before) and has been in a stage of continual change since then. Likewise, the Italic branch of that language has been in a state of continual change from PIE to now, and we can look at a snapshot of that language as Cicero and Caesar used it and call that “Latin” and a snapshot of it as Dante used it and call it “Italian”. But it’s not as if “Latin” as a language reached a stage of completion and perfection that only fell apart because of the decline of civilization. It’s only because of - 1. The political importance of Rome for a time; 2. The widespread use of the technology of writing; and 3. The high literary quality of many of the writers of this time - that we are inclined to call the snapshot of this language from this particular time and place “The Latin Language.” There is no reason that it should have stayed the way it was forever.
There is nothing less sophisticated about the modern languages; in fact, I have read studies suggesting that the brain is able to process faster languages with meaning based on word order than with meaning based on case endings. It seems to be a natural evolutionary process of language to move away from inflection; note that even our snapshot of Latin was in the process of doing away with some of the noun cases (e.g. instrumental, locative) from PIE, and that as Latin continued evolving, it would continue losing them.
As for “fossilization” and “immitation,” English has grown ever more fossilized and unchanging since Shakespeare. This standardization of our language has largely come from immitation of the Bard, to the point where we write and speak now for major part as we wrote and spoke over a hundred years ago. This is the product of education. Creative and new elements are sometimes added to our language, but by and large we write and speak the same language that people have been learning for a hundred years, longer even.
English is a living language; like all living languages, it has continued to evolve and will continue to evolve. The invention of the printing press and the conscious interference of prescriptive grammarians may have slowed this process somewhat, but it is very much still a changing animal.
Changes since Shakespeare include the collapsing of the second person pronoun singular and plural into one form (you), the collapsing of the subject and object relative/interrogative into one form (who), the introduction of the progressive forms alongside the simple forms (e.g. walks/is walking), the standardization of the creation of the negative with “do” (e.g. “He doesn’t know” vs. Shake. “He knows (or knoweth) not”), the loss of distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs, the standardization of -s as the third person singular verbal ending (e.g. ‘has’ instead of ‘hath’), just to name a few off the top of my head. And these are only the grammatical changes in formal English; there have been significant vocabulary changes: many Shakespeaean words are now obsolete, or have significantly changed in their sense; many of the words we use commonly today would have been unknown to Shakespeare. And if we look at the way English is actually spoken, as opposed to the “Formal” English that we see in print, the drift has been even further.
And all of those changes are DESPITE the fact that, as you said, there has been an attempt to make English more like Shakespeare; moreover, the changes are continual. Shakespeare is certainly readable, but is not easy for the average person to read, especially without significant glossing of obscure words. These difficulties are probably greater for us than they would’ve been 200 years ago, and will probably be greater still in another 200 years.
The changes over the past hundred years have been less noticeable, but that is the nature of language; the change is usually not fast enough to make the language significantly different within one human’s lifetime except in extreme circumstances. Still, English today is not the same language that it was 100 years ago, particularly spoken English. My 88 year old grandmother in her normal speech uses words like “yonder”, and (much like in Greek!) follows some verbs of perception with a genitive (e.g. she’ll say “Taste of it.”) I very much doubt that there are very many people in my generation (I’m 24) who have either of those particular characteristics in their speech, and I imagine that when I am 88, they will be gone from the living language; likewise, I imagine there are things that are part of my speech that will by then be on their way out. Such is linguistic change.
Equally, the reason that Old English did not survive is the lack of education: the Norman conquerers were not properly educated in the native tongue, nor the native Saxons adequately in their own tongue. Thus the languages mixed together, their respective gender systems were incompatible and subsequently dropped, and the new language ultimately found standardization in Shakespeare.
Again, this is implying that Old English was somehow a “complete” or “finished” language that one would not have expected to change except under extreme circumstances. That is not the case. English was far from stable even before 1066; the languages of Northern and Southern England, for example, at the time of Beowulf, were each difficult for the other to understand. The Norman invasion certainly steered the direction in which English would change, but even if it had not happened, the language we speak 1000 years later would not be the same. Linguistic change is a constant and inevitable process that is a consequence of a language being “alive” instead of “dead”.
You are forgetting the Vatican. The Vatican is its own country, whose national language is Latin, uses the ancient tongue as its primary means of communication, and has by necessity come up with words for all those things, and many more. And there are other communities besides the Vatican which use Latin as the lingua franca: in our very own Agora we communicate primarily, indeed, entirely by Latin and Ancient Greek.
As for learning a language natively, there are surely numerous people around the world who have been taught Latin from earliest age; their number may be terribly few, but their existence is likely. Therefore I believe “dead” to be too harsh a word. Latin is far from its glorious past, but that does not preclude the possibility that it may rise again.
Around 1300, Dante, in his treatise on language, said “Italian is the language you speak naturally; Latin is the language you must be taught.” This has been true since the spoken versions of the Romance languages had drifted to the point where Latin was not naturally intelligible. The fact that Latin was still preserved for use in school and churches is something of an oddity, but that did not and does not make it a living language. Living languages are in a continual, natural process of change. Living languages are learned by babies as they are immersed in them; I would guess that there is probably not a living person who learned Latin in this way, and I suspect that there has not been for over 1000 years.
Certainly there are communities that continue to communicate in Latin, but I do not consider this “living Latin” because it is not subject to the normal rules of linguistic evolution. Every living language has a set of grammatical rules and a set of words that must be learned, but the speakers of this language, through their use of it, have license to change it, to push the boundaries of how words and grammar can be used. But in Latin, the grammar is completely fixed, and any grammatical construction that does not have classical precedence could never make its way into the language as an accepted part.
Likewise, although there are people like the Vatican who try and imagine how to put modern concepts into Latin, the Latin vocabulary cannot expand in the regular and natural way that language does: e.g. by slang terms being invented, and then becoming popularized to the point where they come to be a regular part of the language. For example, 150 years ago, the word “gay” was not used to mean “homosexual”, but was an extremely common word meaning “happy”. Since then, it began at first to be used as a slang term, and then the meaning “homosexual” came to be the primary sense of the word, to the point where, in regular speech, it is practically never used with any other meaning. However, it would be completely impossible for such a thing to happen in Latin.
Because Latin is a “dead” and “fossilized” language, this normal process of linguistic change cannot happen. When it was still happening, 1800 or so years ago, it led to the rise of the Romance languages: e.g. “bucca”, which means “cheek”, developed the slang meaning of “mouth”, but became such a standard part of the language that “os, oris” fell out of use, and the word “mouth” in the Romance Languages always comes from “bucca”. But “os” could not ever fall out use in what we now call “Latin”, because Latin is not a living language. The people who speak it today, whether at the Vatican or in the agora, must use “os” to mean mouth, and can never develop a new word for “mouth”. This is the sort of restriction that, in my opinion, keeps Latin from being a living language.
