Seems like Eastern Orthodox churches are declining and losing members

@bwallac2335: I'll walk this back a bit. I could co-exist with the Novus Ordo - I didn't and don't go to it - before Jorge "Pope Francis" Bergoglio re-banned the medieval Mass, using the Novus Ordo against it.

 

They should’ve stuck with Latin.

 

@Invictus Keeping in mind my hosts' belief about church services in a tongue not understanded of the people, why I love Church Latin:

Latin is:

• International, not a barrier, an information highway with which scholars all over Europe communicated with each other. A reason Oxford and Cambridge kept it after the Reformation.
• More understanded of the people than it and they are usually given credit for. Noted historian Eamon Duffy is changing that. Medieval English people had a good working knowledge of the language.
• Precise. Why Christian Modernists hate it.
• Unchanging in meaning. People laugh at the notion of using a dead language but this aspect of it is a feature, not a bug. Living languages change meanings.
• A gateway to the classical Graeco-Roman world. The other reason English universities kept it after the Reformation.
• Beautiful, Italian's and Spanish's (among others) mother.

 

I doubt you’ll find much hostility to Latin here.

 

I fully acknowledge that I am coming out of relative obscurity to nitpick, but *takes deep breath*

I like Latin for many reasons, and am not bashing it, but I will argue that this little point isn't true. It annoys me when Classicists in particular do this kind of thing. There's this snide sort of little praise note of advertisement on the back of a Greek grammar in my possession that says "[This book] treats the student as if he were readily capable of understanding a language more complex than English," and I'm sitting here like, these people know nothing of how complicated Germanic syntax is, how many laws govern word order and which prepositions get used, or even just the balance between 'of' and the possessive ''s'. Saying that Latin or Greek is 'complex' or 'precise' doesn't really mean anything. From an academic and linguistic perspective (not that those are exclusive lenses), those terms aren't quantifiable. Big charts of verb paradigms mean... big charts of verb paradigms and nothing else. It's not as though we can't translate them into English with our manifold auxiliary verbs. And Christian modernists, whatever that means in the context you mean it, are also in a bad situation when it comes to Modern English because this language's vocabulary is positively gargantuan and nuanced in ways that betray thousands of years of European literature. More on that in a bit.

Again, Latin's accidence doesn't make it more precise than other languages as a whole; Latin can be accurately translated into modern languages without sweeping syntactic loss. The relations expressed by Latin's cases are covered just as well in modern European languages with their prepositions. There are Baltic (IIRC, maybe they're Finn0-Ugric) languages with something like 14 cases to Latin's five or six, and nobody is sitting there lauding them on their precision, or redrafting the creeds into them because of a perceived need for that precision.

There is something to be said about nuances from the relatively free word order in classical languages, but that's internal to their literatures and writings. That's why texts should be preserved in their original languages, but that doesn't mean that those languages are relatively 'precise'. There are things that happen in Asian languages that have no direct equivalents in European languages (so-called honorific vocabulary, counter words and topic-comment structures that are powerful and flexible, at least more so than the European ones), but in less enlightened times, Westerners were prone to calling Japanese vague because of its lack, essentially, of Latin and Greek style personal conjugations with the moods and aspects and such. Meanwhile, Classical Japanese has just whole wordlists of auxiliaries and pronouns (that aren't analogous to the 'modernist' proliferation) that express all manners of the speaker's relationship to the listener, polite circumlocutions, the speaker's thoughts on the accuracy of reported information and various kinds of result clauses and things that are just as complicated as anything that the Classical Mediterranean languages ever aspired to do - they just happen to be in an utterly different direction.

My point is that there is nothing inherently superior about Latin's grammar. There really isn't. Latin has long lists of inflections, and we have long lists of prepositions that do the same thing. Indeed, except English, all the modern European languages have gender and a healthy amount of concord and the like, useful for underscoring grammatical relations; English is actually the least conservative of all of them.

No. You will meet with difficulty when it comes to Medieval Latin - it's not Classical Latin. Semantic shift is a huge issue. There's actually a separate Oxford dictionary for Classical and Medieval Latin because of that. Then you get to 'what is Latin itself?' That's a pretty big linguistic question. Does it start with Old Latin? Because Old Latin's declensions and such are markedly different, and then you get, again, to the prickly fact on the other end of the chronological spectrum that Latin never died. Nobody got up in the morning in early medieval Florence and said, 'you know what, I think it's time that we radically change our language and cease using proper Latinitas. Starting with you, I'm not going to call you Iohannes - Imma call you Giovanni." When do a few lousy mistakes become dog Latin? And when does dog Latin become seriously the vernacular?

Anyway, I'm not denying that there was a scholarly conception of what Latin should be, but I am saying that in the post-Roman world, you're moving things around, coining new words (consubstantialem comes to mind) and modifying old ones. It was precisely because Latin was absolutely changing in meaning (and borrowing) that we have the modern romance languages.

And now we need to turn to the theoretical reasons why that cannot be right. Don't get me wrong, I love dead languages, but suggesting that the modernists cannot reinterpret what they mean because they are somehow fossilized is delusion. People argue about what Greek words in the Bible mean all the time, not because St. Paul didn't mean something specific, but because he is not here to tell us the minutiae of what he meant in his now unspoken Koine. Just look at all of the available English translations. The advantage of a living language means that you can ask a native speaker what words mean in a given context, and normally it is self-evident. With a dead language, you cannot do that. "St. Augustine, when you wrote..., did you mean...?" Moreover, your definitions for the dead language's vocabulary are wholly dependent on modern scholarship. People who have to be taught the definitions in living languages. As long as the reception on this end of the line is faulty, the ostensibly preserved definitions emanating from the other side are still compromised. So the value of Latin's Lack of Living Locutors is questionable. Dead languages are actually more vulnerable to reinterpretation than modern languages, because none of the ancients are here to contradict us when we get it wrong, and if the modernists can reinterpret what we say in English's very specific and targeted vocabulary, then they can do it just as well in the dead languages. There is literally no reason why they cannot.

 

@Distraught Cat You've schooled or pantsed me as the kids say but you win some, you lose some. Cases and conjugations are a pain but please allow me to think they're an elegant way to set up a language. Old Spanish is already recognizably Spanish, like how Norman francicised (frenchified) Middle English is recognizably English, but you can argue that Italian is a dialect of Latin, Latin that's had a few drinks, or as you bring up, where do Vulgar Latin end and Tuscan Italian, Neapolitan, Sicilian, and Calabrese begin? Although someone uploaded videos to YouTube of speaking Latin in Italy and got "I don't understand you," which probably wouldn't happen using Spanish.

You also bring up the point that Latin didn't die. Not only the Romance languages; it still had locutors as recently as 1960 from Roman Catholic seminary teachers to Oxford dons. Like the medieval English people I mentioned – locutors, just not first-language speakers anymore; Europe's auxiliary language.

Somebody else once mentioned to me how inflected Finnish is but "just because someone speaks a complicated language doesn't mean they can explain what's going on in it." I understand the reserved Nordics won't talk to you much if they can help it – my few experiences in person with Swedes – but they know they speak difficult languages so they learn Europe's and the world's new imperial auxiliary language, English. Swedes learn it all through school; before World War II they communicated with the world in German. Of course Finnish or Estonian didn't become Europe's standard of verbal precision not just because speakers are few but because those tongues are not Indo-European.

Not just anglospheric pride (anglophile Loyalist who's spent time in the mother country) and Latin's beauty (thanks for letting me have that and Latin's internationalism) but I wouldn't want the Holy See to switch to American English, implying that the U.S. government gives the orders there, though maybe since the end of World War II they do. And anyway I think the Vatican's official language is now Italian.

 

Well done my good fellow. Your rather lengthy refutation of a glibly delivered 'statement of supposed fact' is a lesson in how error, for the masses, is more powerful than truth, when it comes to propagation of knowledge or ignorance.

It took you 1052 carefully chosen words to explain exactly why, "Precise. Why Christian Modernists hate it." (as a sentence), was total bollocks. Until you explained it I would have believed the confidently delivered FACT that Latin is "Precise".

In my avid desire to obtain the truth of the matter I patiently read your article and my attention span could cope with the length of it. Unfortunately most people couldn't be bothered, so would just swallow the proposition "Latin is precise", hook line and sinker. Thus the cause of the political situations in the USA and the UK, (indeed worldwide), are easily explained. Public ignorance that they are being glibly lied to.
.

 

@Tiffy, there are honest mistakes. I believed what I wrote. Don't bear false witness against me by accusing me of acting in bad faith, viz., lying.

 

I honestly never intended what I wrote to be understood that way. We all of us inadvertantly propagate information we honestly believe to be true, which may turn out not to be when examined in depth. I offer you a public appology for causing you to think I was accusing you of mendacity. My point was rather to alert us all to the ease at which we all 'believe' what we are told, at face value, without sufficiently checking it's veractity. The internet has vastly enhanced our propensity to be wrong in what we believe to be true.
.

 

This is one of the most insightful things I’ve read in a while. Well said.

 

'^_^ No pantsing intended, really. It's just a pet peeve of mine.

They are! There's something satisfying about knowing when you've got them all lined up on your homework.

@Tiffy , here's a glibly stated supposed fact that I have not followed up on: my friend told me that there was a French Dauphin, or maybe it was some other noble, who actually was a native speaker of scholarly Latin, because he was always among his tutors, and they only ever bothered to converse in Latin.

@Invictus, thanks.