LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.04.08 (04) [E]

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From: Mike <botas at club-internet.fr>
Subject: LL-L "Language politics" 2005.04.07 (06) [E]


Mark wrote:

...Latin from dying out...or was it already dead as
a language spoken by the common people?

Question to all:
When has a language to be considered as died out?
When it ceases to be used in its original form?
Which form? Latin has changed over the centuries
and never died out, only changed its name into...
Italian, Friûl...
Is that a fair statement?
Who will enlighten us?
Mike Wintzer


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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language varieties

Hi, Mike!

Point taken, but ...  Would you really, in the real world, expect or advise
those speakers to say or write "Latin" as an answer to questions about their
native languages, or even "Italian Latin," "Friuli Latin," etc.?  Would
speakers of English, Danish, Frisian, German or Afrikaans say "Germanic,"
"Norse," "Low Franconian," etc.?  Technically speaking you may be right, but
... come on now, Mike!

Old English is extinct, or "passé" or whatever you want to call it, but
English is still very much alive.

However, having said this, whether or not Latin (_lingua latina_ in the
actual, narrow sense) is alive or extinct is indeed a valid question, in my
opinion.  While it is no one's native language, it continues to be used, not
only in writing but in some communities (such as among Roman Catholic clergy
and in Latinophile circles) also as a spoken language.  The same applies to
Sanskrit, which is even still spoken as a lingua franca in Hinduism and, to
a far lesser degree, in Buddhism (in some institutes as a mandatory
language), is even used in radio broadcasting (also by Deutsche Welle),
though not as a native language.  (Today's Indo-Aryan languages are, broadly
speaking, descendants of Sanskrit, but speakers of Hindi, Marathi, Nepali,
Bengali or Gujarati would never dream of listing their languages as
"Sanskrit," not even as "Prakrit," which they technically are.  Classical
Chinese is still written and read, but it is neither native nor spoken (and
its sounds are only reconstructed theoretically), being pronounced in the
various modern "dialects" if need be.   Given all this then, are these
languages extinct (and artificially maintained) or are they still alive?
Can a liturgical-only language (such as Church Slavonic or Coptic Egyptians)
be called alive?  The fact that a liturgical and scholarly language can be
revived as a native language can be seen in the case of Hebrew (which
meanwhile causes native speakers to have very distinctive "accents" while
speaking other languages).

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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