Latin

Many of the bishops and periti (experts) at the Second Vatican Council delivered addresses in Latin. Some even spoke to one another in Latin.


It's important to remember that the participants in any language exhibit varying levels of literacy, eloquence, and interest. Also, some will speak with a higher register and others with a lower register, even if these registers are mutually intelligible. There could never be a direct line of Classical Latin predominance from the golden Latin literary age because even Cicero broke grammatical rules!

I wish that some would stop idealizing the classical dialect. A thorough reading of the early and classical Roman authors reveals a very complex, and often convoluted, morphology. Expect a massive multiplication in morphological complexity over 1500 or more years of a sporadically enforced use of classical-dialect Latin.

Ironically, the Roman Mass has preserved more archaic Latin than former golden age authors. Indeed, the liturgical Latin we have today is often a better preservative of Latin than attempts to create a neo-Latin.
 
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I have to disagree. I can't think of a single place in 17th Century Europe where the locals would be able to converse in Latin. Latin was a language of government at most and even then in many countries it was only used by those who recorded the laws, not actually for debate. I find it highly dubious that a Latin speaker could travel around Europe and actually use that language to speak to the people he (or she) met to ask directions and such. The only way that could work is if they found that the locals spoke a romance language and could piece together mutually intelligible words.

What we're somewhat misunderstanding here is the nature of travel in the 16th and 17th Centuries. If you could afford to travel, you were wealthy enough to have learnt Latin, and you definately wouldn't be speaking to peasants even to ask directions. If you needed to know where the nearest inn was, you would stop at the Church or the local monastary and converse with the Priest/Monks (said conversation being in Latin), who would often also act as translators for the locals. Essentially, anyone who the traveller would actually want to talk to would be someone who could speak Latin.
 
What we're somewhat misunderstanding here is the nature of travel in the 16th and 17th Centuries. If you could afford to travel, you were wealthy enough to have learnt Latin, and you definately wouldn't be speaking to peasants even to ask directions. If you needed to know where the nearest inn was, you would stop at the Church or the local monastary and converse with the Priest/Monks (said conversation being in Latin), who would often also act as translators for the locals. Essentially, anyone who the traveller would actually want to talk to would be someone who could speak Latin.

In part I agree, though I've read that a surprisingly high amount of those going on pilgrimage were in fact of a lower class than you might think would be able to travel, so travelling was hardly a noble's game only. Also, I'm sure I read somewhere that in the list of abuses and delinquencies of the Church drawn up in England for the purposes of justifying the dissolution of the monasteries it was said that increasingly the monks of the lesser houses were using English for all conversation, and that many not only couldn't actually speak Latin, but even worse didn't actually know what some of the Latin they recited meant. Either way, this doesn't change the actual point, which is that those who did speak Latin were still far too small a percentage and far too aloof (or rather, cloistered) a group of people to make Latin a lingua franca. There's no way that the language of the monks can become the language of the people. Linguistics spreads in other ways than that, and I remain committed to my standpoint that Latin cannot be a lingua franca unless it starts off with a country where Latin IS the language of the common folk and that country becomes the dominant power.
 
What we're somewhat misunderstanding here is the nature of travel in the 16th and 17th Centuries. If you could afford to travel, you were wealthy enough to have learnt Latin, and you definately wouldn't be speaking to peasants even to ask directions. If you needed to know where the nearest inn was, you would stop at the Church or the local monastary and converse with the Priest/Monks (said conversation being in Latin), who would often also act as translators for the locals. Essentially, anyone who the traveller would actually want to talk to would be someone who could speak Latin.

Which may be true or may not be true in the 17th century, but is missing the point. For Latin to be as common as the challenge requires, you have to be able to use it to hitchhike around Europe (or the era's equivalent), thus the comment about using it to ask peasants for directions. Its not good enough for it to be at the level where you can communicate with priests, monks, lay scholars, and the well educated nobility for it to be anything much more useful than a secret code.

Falastur said this better, but I'd like to clarify because of being the one mentioning traveling.
 
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