WI: 1700s-style ad hoc Latin survived

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.

I'm not sure that the pronunciation would be that important, TBH -- 99% of the communication would be done by writing, anyway, so it wouldn't matter too much if you could understand the other guy's accent. Or if it did matter, then I'd expect the various pronunciations would draw closer together again to facilitate communication.
 
I'm not sure that the pronunciation would be that important, TBH -- 99% of the communication would be done by writing, anyway, so it wouldn't matter too much if you could understand the other guy's accent. Or if it did matter, then I'd expect the various pronunciations would draw closer together again to facilitate communication.

I would think the pronunciation would matter, because one would have to teach Latin and this would involve speaking it. In this respect, I would compare it with the situation in Hebrew up until people like Eliezer Ben-Yehuda came onto the scene - while a good portion of communication in Hebrew would be via writing, one would need to teach Hebrew (with each community having its own reading tradition) so that one could recite the weekly Torah passage to the congregation (not to mention the entirety of the Shabbat service). So there is a spoken component for Hebrew that is inseparable from the written language, and that should also be part and parcel of Latin, and to me it's in this case where the vowels in particular would have to be addressed early on if you want to make the leap to a spoken lingua franca.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
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.

Yes, but its use was declining quite rapidly. Keep in mind that Newton and Bacon, for instance, wrote a lot of stuff in Latin, for an audience that read in Latin. They already wrote stuff in English as well, though, whereas a century before, practically every intellectual work was in Latin. And conversely, when we get to Locke, he's already writing almost exclusively in English-- like most of his contemporaries. That's a move from "virtually everything intellectual is written in Latin" around 1500 to "the vast majority is written in English" when we approach 1700.

Latin remained a part of education, but its active use was in steep decline. If you reverse the 17th century trend in that direction, you'll see a rather different intellectual environment in Europe (/ "the West"), no doubt.
 
I would think the pronunciation would matter, because one would have to teach Latin and this would involve speaking it. In this respect, I would compare it with the situation in Hebrew up until people like Eliezer Ben-Yehuda came onto the scene - while a good portion of communication in Hebrew would be via writing, one would need to teach Hebrew (with each community having its own reading tradition) so that one could recite the weekly Torah passage to the congregation (not to mention the entirety of the Shabbat service). So there is a spoken component for Hebrew that is inseparable from the written language, and that should also be part and parcel of Latin, and to me it's in this case where the vowels in particular would have to be addressed early on if you want to make the leap to a spoken lingua franca.

Yes, but that wouldn't be an issue unless your teacher is from a different country or whatever. Otherwise it doesn't really matter how people pronounce the language, as long as they all write it the same.

I guess if academic conferences become a thing ITTL, it could prove quite problematic. Though in that case, I'd expect the result to be much the same as happened IOTL, namely, people adopting one or two pronunciation standards (most likely Classical and/or Ecclesiastical) to facilitate communication.
 
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