Latin remains the lingua franca to the present day

[Vivisfugue]

“It’s the language of scholars and educated people,” said Jason Griffiths, headmaster of Brooklyn Latin. “It’s the language of people who are successful. I think it’s a draw, and that’s certainly what we sell.”

NYTimes, Oct 7th, 2008

 

[Dutchie]

No reformation - Catholicism remains supreme thorughout Europe, maintaining its trans-national, trans-cultural position. With ecumenical Latin as a common linguistic basis, the natural philosophers and scientific philosopers naturally use it to correspond with their foreign counterparts. Merchants use the common understanding of Latin for business. etc. etc.

 

[Vivisfugue]

Is there a POD that, while retaining the Protestant Reformation, could preserve Latin as the medium of commercial, religious, and diplomatic discourse in Europe, the West, and eventually America and the wider world (Basically, have Latin replace English as the global 2nd language).

 

[Legolas]

It would be very difficult because Latin is much, much more difficult to learn and to adapt to various new situation (or make pidgins) than English. Of course, a dumbed-down version might well be possible, but then can we really call that Latin?

 

[Condottiero]

No reformation - Catholicism remains supreme thorughout Europe, maintaining its trans-national, trans-cultural position. With ecumenical Latin as a common linguistic basis, the natural philosophers and scientific philosopers naturally use it to correspond with their foreign counterparts. Merchants use the common understanding of Latin for business. etc. etc.

Latin was still used as lingua franca among scholars and clerics even after the reformation.

 

[Promethean]

Latin was still used as lingua franca among scholars and clerics even after the reformation.

But not by the Reformed

 

[Surena]

Just so we're clear, are we talking about Latin as the lingua franca among every day folk...or, as the quote suggests, a sort of common language among academics and/or elites?

Because I'm not sure if Latin was ever a lingua franca among the general population. And wasn't Greek at least as influential among the elite? As somebody above pointed out, it's an extremely complicated, formal language, and doesn't lend itself well to export. In most cases, when it was, it broke down into the less complex (EASIER, God knows) descendant languages that we know today.

That said, I think to do it somehow you're gonna have to avoid the whole paradigm and power shift from Southern to Northern Europe.

 

[MrP]

It would be very difficult because Latin is much, much more difficult to learn and to adapt to various new situation (or make pidgins) than English. Of course, a dumbed-down version might well be possible, but then can we really call that Latin?

Yeah, one just turns up one's nose at the speaker.

IIRC, one of the differences/evolutions in Latin between about 300 AD and the time of Bede is that rather than using ut + subjunctive to signify purpose, they just use the infinitive. It's still comprehensible, but Ovid doubtless rotated his remains. One'd see similar oddities occurring in Latin that had survived this long as a living language. I wonder if one might have to kill nationalism to get this to work, though.

 

[Leo Caesius]

Just so we're clear, are we talking about Latin as the lingua franca among every day folk...or, as the quote suggests, a sort of common language among academics and/or elites?

I think the best we can hope for is a diglossic situation such as what you find in the Arab world, where the difference between the Arabic used in the media and education is as great from that used in the streets as the difference between Vulgar Latin and the various Neo-Latin languages.

The problem is not so much the Reformation, but the growth of of a sophisticated literature in the vernaculars, which began before the Reformation but was contemporary to it, to a certain extent. That's why you need to butterfly away people like Dante Alighieri, Antonio de Nebrija, Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, and Miguel Cervantes. I think it's too much to expect that the people in the non-Romance speaking parts of Europe use Latin as a lingua franca, but perhaps Latin could continue to occupy the same role there as Arabic did in the Ottoman Empire and in Iran to the present date - as a language of culture and religion. That's not too far from the OTL - as far as I can tell, the last stronghold for Learned Latin (the academic dialect) was Germany, where treatises in Latin were still being published into the last century. In the rest of Europe, it strikes me that Latin publications were largely the province of the Church, but I could be wrong.

 

[Dutchie]

The magic of English is that it is so fluid and plastic, taking on words from any and all languages it meets, stealing words and transposing meanings and endlessly evolving. Meaning it is very easy to learn enough to get by (though very difficult to get right, becuase every rule has three opposing exceptions...).

That's where Latin has a harder time, since it is so fixed and structured - perfect for ecumenism which is not meant to change, and for early scientific discoveries because it provides structure and exactitdue.

Unfortunately once you start inventing things, or discovering all new things and concepts you run into the limitations for the static language. This is even more so in more human interactions of trade and commerce, the arts, etc. Here you need the flexibility that modern languages provided, and that English excells at.

 

[Surena]

I think the best we can hope for is a diglossic situation such as what you find in the Arab world, where the difference between the Arabic used in the media and education is as great from that used in the streets as the difference between Vulgar Latin and the various Neo-Latin languages.

The problem is not so much the Reformation, but the growth of of a sophisticated literature in the vernaculars, which began before the Reformation but was contemporary to it, to a certain extent. That's why you need to butterfly away people like Dante Alighieri, Antonio de Nebrija, Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, and Miguel Cervantes. I think it's too much to expect that the people in the non-Romance speaking parts of Europe use Latin as a lingua franca, but perhaps Latin could continue to occupy the same role there as Arabic did in the Ottoman Empire and in Iran to the present date - as a language of culture and religion. That's not too far from the OTL - as far as I can tell, the last stronghold for Learned Latin (the academic dialect) was Germany, where treatises in Latin were still being published into the last century. In the rest of Europe, it strikes me that Latin publications were largely the province of the Church, but I could be wrong.

I think you're right, but we're going to need a pretty big POD to butterly them away, no? Seems like getting rid of all or a majority of them would need to happen, as the removal of one or two wouldn't be enough.

IMO, given Latin's (relatively, of course) limited role even at its height, its role in OTL is one of the best case scenarios. It directly spawns 3 languages that have hundreds of millions of speakers, plus Italian and Romanian, and has a big influence on the most successful language of all time (English) directly and via Anglo-Norman. That's not bad.