Latin

First we need a definition of extinct language, here's the one I found: "An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers, or that is no longer in current use" Influence is not a measure of existence, for instance the most influential language's are the ones that almost no one knows about. Proto-Indo European is the base from which most European, west Asian and north African languages come from [1] and yet Proto-Indo European has no speakers (linguists have made theoretical reconstructions [2]) and can most certainly be considered dead. Now Latin does have speakers, or does it? As I mentioned last time no one knows how to pronounce Latin and hasn't for some time, this went completely unchallenged and so I assume you accept that also. The only basis we have for pronouncing Latin is the letters the words are made up with to show how problematic this is I will use the example of Scots Gaelic. In Scots Gaelic the word for welcome (or at least the word that roughly translates as welcome) is spelt "failte" try to think how that is pronounced for a minute and then click on this video [3]. Now was that how you thought "failte" was pronounced? Unless you already speak some Gaelic I assume you got the pronunciation totally wrong and that is because there are different rules of how to pronounce letters and the words the make up in Gaelic as opposed to English there are also different rules in French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. We can see that the rules of pronunciation vary both over geographical distance (like Gaelic and English) and over time, we can see this in the changing rules of pronunciation in English over the last few hundred years. Of course the rules for Latin were vastly different unfortunately we don't know the rules for Latin and hence forth cannot speak it. If you disagree try and pronounce this sentence "A' chaisg sona", remember it has rules you don't know. This is the same as what we do with Latin. We can still read Latin, I can't argue with that, but is only being able to read and write a language enough to say you speak it? A person who speaks Mandarin Chinese can write and read Cantonese Chinese but can't (necessarily) speak Cantonese Chinese. In a hypothetical situation if everyone who spoke Cantonese Chinese suddenly keeled over and died and every bit of information about Cantonese Chinese was eradicated would Cantonese Chinese be extant because there were still people who could read and write it? According to me no in this hypothetical Cantonese Chinese would be extinct because in order to know a language you need to be able to do four things: 1. Be able to read it to a reasonable standard. 2. Be able to read it to a reasonable standard. 3. Be able to speak it to a reasonable standard. 4. Be able to listen and understand it to a reasonable standard. With Latin we can do the first two (although there is a lot of symbolism we can't understand because we don't understand all the implications of some Latin words) but we can do neither of the second two, at least to the standard required meaning no one actually speaks Latin any more. As for Latin's continued use which is now really resigned to fundamentalist Catholics and a few professional archaeologists none speak it (I think I have already shown this) and Latin is no longer used as a language but instead as a tool for either uncovering the past or bamboozling "flocks". Because of this Latin no longer fits the second part of the definition because Latin is no longer used as a language. [1] http://brasileiracrowley.files.wordpress.com... [2] [3]