Does anyone still speak latin

At the same time, there's a danger in trying to say that if you know Latin grammar, therefore you will somehow have a better grasp on English grammar. In fact, throughout history, people have tried to put the model of Latin grammar onto English and sometimes it doesn't really fit very well. For the most part, there's certainly not as much of an emphasis on learning Latin as there might have been in the past when that kind of Classical education was more central to everybody's learning.

Our early presidents, for instance, would have known Latin and Greek quite well. We don't live in those days any more. Certainly Latin is important for high schools. You can look at something like the Boston Latin School, which is the oldest high school in country, which keeps Latin at the core of its curriculum. There are a lot of schools around the country that try to follow that model.

It's modest in terms of how it's placed in our current educational system, and certainly has importance in the Church Even the Cardinals themselves are not necessarily great Latin speakers. It was reported that the assembled cardinals were left scratching their heads after the Pope's resignation because they didn't know Latin.

Is that true? That's real! That was reported There were cardinals that did not know what he was saying when he made his announcement. It really all goes back to that Second Vatican Council, when Latin was removed from many areas of Catholic life. Not just the liturgy, but also seminary education.

And so, the kind of education the cardinals would have gotten for the most part, would not have had much of an emphasis on Latin. Latin is now considered a dead language , meaning it's still used in specific contexts, but does not have any native speakers. Sanskrit is another dead language. In historical terms, Latin didn't die so much as it changed -- into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian. These are known as the Romance languages -- "Rome" is the root term -- and while other tongues developed from Latin, these are the most common.

All five of these languages incorporate grammar, tenses and specific intricacies from Latin. Not coincidentally, each language developed in former territories of the Western Roman Empire.

When that empire failed, Latin died, and the new languages were born. Yes, people do speak Latin, and they most certainly write it. Latin speakers can talk about all sorts of modern things : spaceships astronaves , astronauts astronautae or cosmonautae , rifles sclopeta , the internet interrete , and on and on.

There are, of course, more sophisticated ways of believing that Latin is dead. Still, no children are born and raised speaking Latin there. And nowhere in Italy will you find a community where people speak Latin as their primary language and use it in everyday life.

However, if we follow this line of thinking, we run into problems. But how could this be? Can we really say that Latin was dead when it was the international tongue of literature, philosophy, theology, and law? Even well into the Early Modern period, some of the greatest Latin authors of all time were composing Latin-language masterpieces, authors like Erasmus, Melanchthon, Thomas More, and Rafael Landivar.

Far from being dead, Latin was the most important language in the world — not unlike English today in terms of status and reach. According to the Linguistic Society of America :. Many other languages are no longer being learned by new generations of children or by new adult speakers; these languages will become extinct when their last speaker dies. This is a real phenomenon.