WI: 1700s-style ad hoc Latin survived

SeaCambrian

What if the non-ecclesiastial, late Latin of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment survived to the modern day?

Regularized, and simplified to an extent that you can turn any word from any language into a new Latin word as the text requires and inflect it with the existing rules.

Additionally with French, Spanish, Italian, English, and German influences drifting in due to the actual users of the language.
 

Fabius Maximus

SeaCambrian said:
What if the non-ecclesiastial, late Latin of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment survived to the modern day?

Regularized, and simplified to an extent that you can turn any word from any language into a new Latin word as the text requires and inflect it with the existing rules.

Additionally with French, Spanish, Italian, English, and German influences drifting in due to the actual users of the language.
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Well, I expect Latin would be the language of higher education, rather than English.

Assuming the overall course of world history goes similarly to OTL, you might get a situation where Latin is the language of international scholarship and English the language of trade and commerce.

Many more people would be taught Latin, which would probably entail studying Classical authors like Cicero, Caesar, etc. This would in turn have effects on people's culture and outlook, although I'd have to go away and think a bit about what exactly those effects might be.
 

Arcavia

Fabius Maximus said:
Well, I expect Latin would be the language of higher education, rather than English.

Assuming the overall course of world history goes similarly to OTL, you might get a situation where Latin is the language of international scholarship and English the language of trade and commerce.

Many more people would be taught Latin, which would probably entail studying Classical authors like Cicero, Caesar, etc. This would in turn have effects on people's culture and outlook, although I'd have to go away and think a bit about what exactly those effects might be.
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An even greater emphasis on great man history, particularly in the elite?
 
Dan1988

Dan1988

MorningDew said:
Latino sine flexione is so close to italian that I don't know what was the point in making it in the first place.
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Well, with some differences - like Sardinian, for example, Latino sine flexione's <c> /k/ and <g> /g/ consistently represent that phoneme (which Italian orthography would require a change to <ch, gh> before a front vowel) and do not palatalize. Likewise, Latino sine flexione actually uses a vowel system typical of Sardinian, and <z> only represents (as in Classical Latin) a non-native phoneme borrowed from Greek, /(d)z/, which was lost (as were other non-native phonemes) and then regained and reinforced with palatalization elsewhere in Italian. As for the point - supposedly to revive Latin as the international lingua franca but simplified for ordinary people (or so it goes).
 

MorningDew

Dan1988 said:
Well, with some differences - like Sardinian, for example, Latino sine flexione's <c> /k/ and <g> /g/ consistently represent that phoneme (which Italian orthography would require a change to <ch, gh> before a front vowel) and do not palatalize. Likewise, Latino sine flexione actually uses a vowel system typical of Sardinian, and <z> only represents (as in Classical Latin) a non-native phoneme borrowed from Greek, /(d)z/, which was lost (as were other non-native phonemes) and then regained and reinforced with palatalization elsewhere in Italian. As for the point - supposedly to revive Latin as the international lingua franca but simplified for ordinary people (or so it goes).
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All these differences are quite minor, and only have to do with the aspect of phonology. It's grammar is so close to bastardized Italian that I don't see the point of learning or using it when you could just do it with Italian.
 

Fabius Maximus

TBH I don't think Latin Sine Flexione counts as Latin at all -- its grammar is completely different, so what you basically have is another Romance language whose vocabulary and orthography happen to be like those of Latin.
 

Fabius Maximus

One possible result of having Latin as a scholarly lingua franca would be a lower tendency for academia to split into national schools. IOTL after about 1700 we talk of French philosophy, English philosophy, German philosophy, and so on, in a way that we don't really with the middle ages. Perhaps if everybody was still writing and reading in Latin, we wouldn't have these sorts of national differences arise, or at least not as strongly.

I wonder as well whether there would be an effect on the development of nationalism -- if Latin were the prestige language of scholarship, would intellectuals (who were usually the driving force behind nationalistic movements IOTL) be as interest in freeing their people from rulers who spoke a different language?
 

mrmandias

Fabius Maximus said:
Well, I expect Latin would be the language of higher education, rather than English.

Assuming the overall course of world history goes similarly to OTL, you might get a situation where Latin is the language of international scholarship and English the language of trade and commerce.

Many more people would be taught Latin, which would probably entail studying Classical authors like Cicero, Caesar, etc. This would in turn have effects on people's culture and outlook, although I'd have to go away and think a bit about what exactly those effects might be.
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Maybe a generally less democratic outlook, since educated people literally have to know a second language?
 

mrmandias

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by their command of Cato."
 
Skallagrim

Skallagrim

Banned
More seriously, going off what @Fabius Maximus suggested: you could see a scenario where the OTL "Republic of Letters" remains more closely tied to the pre-existing intellectual milieu, and indeed keeps it more cohesive. The alt-Enlightenment could incorporate a strong element of trans-nationalism, with the intellectual elite that supports it seeing itself as more united among its own ranks than its members are with their respective nationalities.

If you get some reforming monarchs on board with this early on, you could see some pretty far-reaching results. Age of Revolutions (as we know it) butterflied? Instead of Enlightenment being tied to emerging nationalism and democratic impulses, the alt-Enlightenment could propagate proto-internationalism (like a 'Concert of Europe', but consisting of self-declared 'Enlightened Despots') and meritocratic impulses ("The Sovereignty of the Intellect!") And yes, reform and Enlightened monarchy could become the succesful alternative to OTL's revolution and republicanism.
 

SeaCambrian

Fabius Maximus said:
Well, I expect Latin would be the language of higher education, rather than English.

Assuming the overall course of world history goes similarly to OTL, you might get a situation where Latin is the language of international scholarship and English the language of trade and commerce.

Many more people would be taught Latin, which would probably entail studying Classical authors like Cicero, Caesar, etc. This would in turn have effects on people's culture and outlook, although I'd have to go away and think a bit about what exactly those effects might be.
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As it was, in the early 20th century, didn't universal secondary education already focus a lot more on the Greco-Roman classics than today?

Whereas in the 19th century, knowledge of Greek, Latin, and the art of rhetoric was a requirement for undergraduates at many universities.
 

Fabius Maximus

SeaCambrian said:
As it was, in the early 20th century, didn't universal secondary education already focus a lot more on the Greco-Roman classics than today?

Whereas in the 19th century, knowledge of Greek, Latin, and the art of rhetoric was a requirement for undergraduates at many universities.
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It was, but I don't think much Latin was being produced. People might study Classical works, but scholarship on them was generally being written in national languages rather than in Latin.
 

Fabius Maximus

mrmandias said:
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by their command of Cato."
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"Somnium habeo, quod mei quattuor parvuli olim nationem inhabitabunt in qua non ex colore pellis sed ex peritia Catonis judicabuntur."
 

Quintuplicate

When did the educated European person start writing in his own national language instead of Latin? After which point could educated people from different countries not count on each other to be able to read Latin?
 
Dan1988

Dan1988

What should also be mentioned as a tangent is not just if New Latin becomes a more viable linguistic variety of Latin serving as a lingua franca (hence its survival), but also what happens to the traditional pronunciation of Latin for native Anglophones. This may sound trivial, but it's actually of huge importance - for a long time, Anglo-Latin basically followed the same trajectories as English speech (despite its origins in the Latin spoken in Old French and Old Norman speaking territories), so that as a result thanks to developments in English phonology (above all the Great Vowel Shift) the Latin used in English-speaking countries was difficult to comprehend when spoken for non-Anglophones. The end result is that around the turn of the 20th century (so around the time New Latin goes out of fashion and hence its end as a lingua franca) advocacy grew for a revival of the old classical pronunciation. Now, if the vowels of Middle English were conserved as part of the pronunciation of Latin in England and English-speaking countries (while the consonants continue to go their own merry way), there would be a start in making New Latin comprehensible all across Europe and would be of much benefit in keeping New Latin as the lingua franca.
 
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