Perhaps a more powerful Venetian republic that accepts a sort of Italian federation could force this. Essentially nullifying any preference to any of these local languages. The issue would be; how does one keep the Venetians strong enough to not be the vassal of some other power yet weak enough to accept any pretense of submission to other Italian powers aside from the Papacy? Frankly though, could we not say this was completed in otl though? The kingdom of Italy had existed for many centuries and used Latin under the Empire and the Papacy. Why not attempt to simply maintain a status quo similar to this?
AHC - Make "Modern Latin" the official language of Italy (and possibly Romania)
- Thread starter baltur2
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Was taught recentlyish (within the last two years, I can't be more precise on that since it was oral and might be eeeh) that if you wanted a good guess at what a Roman's Latin sounded like when they speaking just listen to well, a (Modern) Roman's Italian. Apparently this was wrong, good to know.
Yes, but what counted as "proper pronunciation" varied from country to country. Kind of like how the proper pronunciation of a word in the US isn't necessarily the same as the proper pronunciation of the same word in England.
As for Anglican Chant, it developed from the ecclesiastical chant used in medieval England. So it's not the same as Gregorian Chant, but a development of it.
Also, Ecclesiastical pronunciation just plain sounds nicer, at least IMHO.
To put them in contact with their glorious heritage?
I believe that two points need to be addressed here. First, identity. in order to have *Italy adopt Latin (even a simplified one) you need the Italian Risorgimento to be a "Roman/Latin Risorgimento", stressing a lot more the Roman heritage, in a fashion similar to Greece, which was reborn as Hellas and not Rhomania (the Italian/Greek movement are pretty specular, if you look at things this way). My Greek and Latin teacher in high school used to say that Dante's Divina Commedia was our (I am Italian) tribal encyclopedia, meaning that a lot of what is "italian" is defined from this work and the subsequent literature. Second, but maybe more crucial: Latin was and is the language of the Church, one of the forces which posed the biggest obstacles to the italian unification. Cavour and all the fathers of the Risorgimento were excommunicated, and the Kingdom of Italy was, in all matters, a secular state (until the "Patti Lateranensi" at the very least). So, in whenever scenario in which the papal states have to be outright conquered to get a united *Italy, and the common identity is based on Medieval Italy I believe there is no way to have any form of Modern Latin (apart of course from Italian) becoming the official language. But, with a Federal Italy with a) the Pope as ceremonial Head of State b) roughly equally powerful components c) more divergent vernacular varieties with more evenly prestigious literary traditions (note that all of these somehow make more likely the appeal to Roman heritage) you may have a chance.
The closest I can think of that is if something like Peano's Latino sine flexione (Wiki article here) was developed earlier and gained as much acceptance, if not more so, than Tuscan. For that to happen, though, one idea that could make it work is if Latino sine flexione was based off of Sardinian pronunciation (Sardinian is reportedly the language closest to Latin in terms of pronunciation, particularly the very conservative Nuorese dialect, though not without its own peculiarities) if one wanted to get close to the Classical pronunciation; otherwise, even here the same pronunciation as per Modern Italian could work.
Very simply put, yes, or at least that is a significant part of it. The point is that Latin used to be important to educated people, especially in Catholic countries, as one of the scientific languages of international communication, a role it retained in some fields into the first half of the twentieth century, albeit it was largely residual by then. So it had practical sense to teach it in some school curricula, and then it was retained with a significant though gradually reducing part of the Italian by inertia and a vocal legion of advocates. It is also true that Latin literature exerted a huge influence over Vulgar literary traditions, and particularly the Italian one (and others, also, party through it).
It is useful to know some Literary Classical Latin, or at least be familiar with its authors in translation, in order to understand Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca, but also, say, more modern very important Italian authors like Leopardi (who was well-versed in Classics) just to name a few. While knowing Latin is not particularly needed to sort out Italian ortography, Boccaccio's style, for instance, is heavily modeled on Cicero's in terms of syntax (with constructions that are not current in spoken Italian) and also knowing Latin helps to get a better grasp of Italian (and Spanish, Portuguese, etc.) grammar at large.
So, knowledge of Latin was regarded, correctly, as helpful in mastering Italian (though of course, it is a requirement for it). Also recall that Italy, unlike Latin America for example, is literally teeming with Latin inscriptions, documents in Latin dating all the way to the Renaissance and beyond, and the like. So Latin is just physically and visibly present all over the place.
Finally, advocates of keeping a place for Latin in the school curricula here often argue that is serves to hone the students' logical ability, due to some supposedly inherent logical nature of the language (by which they vaguely mean the need to train to recognize case endings and analize the phrase structures accordingly, which you would not need to do in Italian). This is a highly silly argument if taken out of context, which assumes some inherently superior nature of Latin (often associated with Greek in this) as language of thought and clarity. Obviously, all language are equally logical within their own system, and Latin has not special feature of this sort whatsoever. It is true that studying Latin serves the purposes of developing some specific anyalitical skills, but studying any other language with a rich literary tradition and a highly codified grammar would do equally well, and perhaps better. Classical Arabic is more "logical" in this distorted sense than Latin ever was, for example. And obviously, if the point was really to develop logic, we'd teach actual formal logic instead, which is not done because of cultural reasons: bear in mind "logic" is this discourse does not truly indicate the "cold" formalism of mathematical logic or even Aristotelian syllogistics, but something more akin to a "literary" logic - that is, indeed, what would be rhetoric and dialectics in terms of the Aristotelian tradition. Italian school curricula were designed with a huge bias toward humanities, and specifically literature, as their original creators had had largely that sort of education, were convinced it "human" formative value (and its relevance to nation-building) and were strongly under the influence of philosophical Idealism and subsequent German schools which de-emphasised sciences and mathematics while looking for some form of "spirit". This has changed considerably in later decades, but the place of Latin in the system ha been strenuously defended (and some arguments in favor actually make a lot of sense).
French dominated diplomacy and was the most widespread international language of elite communication since roughly the times of Louis XIV, but in scholarship there was no single most important language, it varied by field (as it does to an extent even today) and scholars were usually supposed to master French, German, English and often also Italian (Russian would also become important later, and less prominent languages such as Spanish or Dutch also were significant in some cases). Latin remained significant but clearly declining and seen as no longer viable (partly because its association with Catholicism, albeit many educated Protestants still mastered it; it would be rare in Russia however) which partly explains why this is when discussions of artificial International Auxiliary Languages (and earlier, pasigraphic systems meant to be readable in any langauge) boomed.
I suppose that German had indeed a special place at least in terms of overall quantity of output, but it is probably too much to say it was the most important scholarly language of Europe without qualification. French was probably seen as equally or more important by most people involved, but there is a lot of variation I think.
Even that may not be enough. Sicilian has the oldest literary tradition of any modern Italian language, with a historically important school of poetry (they invented the sonnet), yet its impact on standard Italian is fairly superficial.
I'm also interested in how it could've been possible in Romania. In OTL 19th century Romania, intellectuals were looking back to the ancient history of Dacia under the reign of Trajan, perhaps with even more fervor than how much the contemporary French idealized the Gauls. However during the OTL Romanian language reform, Modern French was a much more important influence for replacing earlier Church Slavonic-derived terms in technical vocabulary than Classical Latin.
Also as far as I'm aware this 19th century Romanian resurgence had no religious component. No one seriously considered that Romanians should convert to Roman Catholicism and they were content with Eastern Orthodoxy. However the writing system was changed from Cyrillic to Latin, inspired by Italian orthography.
I wonder wether we could see a "pan-latin" movement arising by the end of the 19th century, with the aim of uniting the Romance-speaking country, or at least, to strengthen the ties between Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and Romania. Then latin could emerge as language of the relations between said countries and get a co-official status and official language of this "Latin Union". Although I am not sure about how this could happen, as France and Italy had conflicting interests. Maybe it is easier if one takes France out of the equation. Or maybe, with a post- 1900 POD, where Mussolini, Franco and Salazar stay out of the war and ally in a (neutral) Latin Block.
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Let me assume - the prestige of the French language and French culture, as well as the continued importance at that time of French as a lingua franca? Among other factors?
That seems to be the case, although French pronunciation wasn't really followed through, instead words imported from French had entered Romanian with a more Italian-like pronunciation.
Latin has speakers both natural born and learned, it is used in dozens of fields and is referred to when western languages invent new words academically. It is not dead.