by Quintus Marius Primus on Thu May 27, 2004 4:49 pm
Salvete!
Is Latin dead? Well from a Linguistics point of view it is and it isn't! Just like a lot of things with human languages things aren't always as simple as we'd like them to be! Let me (try to) explain.
What determines whether a language is dead or living is simply whether there are any native speakers of the language alive and still able to use it (if there's only one speaker of a language left alive then the language is effectively dead as there are no spheres where the language can be used), so in this sense the language that we know as (Classical) Latin is dead.
Not withstanding the fact that the written language of the Roman empire that we learn was even then a partly artificial written ideal that even the educated top brass didn't speak in their normal daily lives. It should also be rememebered that all living languages change over time, and this includes the spoken Latin of the Republic and the Empire (in fact, one thing that marks a language as living is the fact that it does change - as soon as it becomes static and unchanging marks it as a dead language). It wouldbe quite interesting from a lingusitic point of view to see how much the spoken language of the 4th century AD differed from the written language!
On the other hand, Latin is still alive and kicking, only we do not know it by that name. Latin didn't die out just as the language of the Etruscan language did, or Cornish or Manx did in the 20th century in Britain. It changed. As I alluded to above, all living languages change, and this happened to the Latin spoken in the different provinces. Where it survived, it eventually changed over time into what is today known as French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, plus a variety of other dialects and languages (e.g. Catalan, all the Italian dialects, Romansch, Langue d'Oc).
So on one hand Latin is dead, but it does live on purely for doing what all languages do over time - by changing!
Valete
Marius Primus