Panslavism is cute sometimes
There are more Germans in "their territory" than Sorbs these days.
Latin as the universal European language
- Thread starter Veles
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There are more Germans in "their territory" than Sorbs these days.
Winner
Diverse in Unity
Panslavism is cute indeed. Pangermanism is still just scary 
gangleri2001
Garbage day!!!
This thread makes me thing that we probably need a Lingua latina CI thread.
Which is probably why one is deader than the other.Panslavism is cute indeed. Pangermanism is still just scary
Godwynn
March to the Sea
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Some people are more mature than others.
holy king
Deity
and castillians.
seriously, i do not get what's so tough about pronouncing th. put your tongue between your teeth, already.
Lillefix
I'm serious. You can.
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Yeah, but if you're talking quickly it's so easy for the th-sound to slip into an f-sound. It takes an effort to do the sound right(it's the voiceless one you're talking about, right? That's the most difficult one.).
Weird to think about that my ancestors a thousand year back used that sound all the time, and I nowadays there's not a trace of it in Norwegian.
Pangur Bán
Deconstructed
The sounds represented by "th" are between an f/v and s/z, so if your language says those it can easily say the "th".
Both dental fricatives were in early medieval German. They disappeared in all the continental Germanic languages, but survive in English and Icelandic. Interestingly, they disappeared in Gaelic too ... though often the voiced one occurs as an allophone of /d/ (i.e. [ð] actually occurs when speaker believes he is saying [d]). There may be a natural tendency to stop using this sound because of stigma associated with the lisp, or because cool Romance speakers speaking these other languages did not adapt to it, who knows.
Both dental fricatives were in early medieval German. They disappeared in all the continental Germanic languages, but survive in English and Icelandic. Interestingly, they disappeared in Gaelic too ... though often the voiced one occurs as an allophone of /d/ (i.e. [ð] actually occurs when speaker believes he is saying [d]). There may be a natural tendency to stop using this sound because of stigma associated with the lisp, or because cool Romance speakers speaking these other languages did not adapt to it, who knows.
wolfigor
Emperor
I agree it would be extremely useful to have an universal language that everybody is bound to learn and that is used officially for every possible publication (e.g. every official document must be written first in this language then, maybe, in the local language).
This would be the real important bit, which language to use is relatively irrelevant.
However it's a pretty insane idea to use latin for that.
It's a dead and very difficoult language (I had to study it at school and I always considered it extremely useless), and even if it's quite elegant it also has a lot of quirks and ambiguity.
It would be much better to take an existing live language and promote it as lingua-franca for the world of science and business...
hmmm... wait, there is already one!
English, even if not widely spoken in some regions, it is the language of business and science today.
Lets build on top of it without prejudice and without useless nationalistic feelings to make it even more widely understood and used.
One could argue that mandarin-Chinese has more speakers, but English is more widely know (geographically) across the planet.
Another strategy, if we want to limit ourself to written language, is to adopt an ideographic script (e.g. Chinese).
With ideographic scripts (in their purest form) each symbol (or glyph) is a word or "meaning".
Everybody regardless of their native language would be able to read a document.
For example the glyph 狗 will be read as "Dog" by an English, "Cane" by an Italian, and "Gǒu" by a Chinese.
All of them will understand the meaning if what it was written.
Two random people from across the globe may not be able to talk to each other but they will be able to write to each other.
I don't think that would work too well because the sentence structure and context of different words would make it too confusing. I mean, Chinese and Japanese largely use the same characters, or used to anyway before the PRC adopted simplified Chinese characters. Something written in Japanese can be understood a little by someone who is literate in Chinese but the understanding is limited.
Just Classical Latin grammar with modern vocabulary. Modern Hebrew is also based in Biblical Hebrew and people speak it as a living language now. One has to make the language a real living language of anno 2012 and it'll be doable. Latin is only difficult due to lack of a vast community that adheres to a Modern appliance of the language. Introducing the 'simplified crap', however, beats the purpose of reviving a language with more than 2000 years of history (the reason why one should make it the European national language). That would be like teaching Negroes in the French-speaking colonies of Africa 'petit nègre', because they deemed French too difficult for their tiny brains.
I bet Living Latin (of which takes time to get the motor starting) isn't harder than your native Czech anyway.
Winner
Diverse in Unity
It's probably easier, but that doesn't count because I didn't have to make any conscious effort to learn Czech. Learning a foreign language is a different matter entirely.
Maybe I just have some bad experience with Latin, so feel free to discard my opinion as uneducated drivel
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
You don't think that the ideological strength of the Israeli national project had some influence on that? I'm not sure that you could reproduce that in a pan-European context- not least because most Europeans have no reason to view Latin as an ancestral language.
Yes, actually I do. It was a recently forged nation after a 19th century ideal in a hostile environment. It's true, it would be nigh impossible to get the European population in such a state, unless you successfully apply methods of Stalinistic proportions (neither evident nor desired).
Still, making Latin the universal European language would have as advantage a link to the intellectual past of Europe. Once your get a young population able to think in Latin, people would be part of a culture with more than 2000 years of history.
Well, intellectually people used Latin as a medium for a very long period. It was the Roman Catholic Church that kind of forged a loose sense of unity in Europe in the past and through it the Latin language. In that regard it can be seen as 'an ancestral language' culturally. Still, neither likes the idea to abolish my Germanic Dutch-speaking roots, as neither I am exempt from nationalism.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Then why not teach them Mandarin, and get 3,000 years of history?
Winner
Diverse in Unity
Unless you can prove Menzies is somehow right (writing "Menzies" and "right" in one sentence feels so wrong), no. Mandarin isn't even a European language.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Latin isn't any more indigenous to most of Europe than Mandarin is, and it has more resident speakers, to boot.
Disagree for said reason above. Latin makes more sense than Mandarin for Europe for it being an intellectual and sometimes cultural medium throughout Western history. Even after the fall of the Roman Empire the language remained in use, as a secondary language, and far beyond reach the Empire's borders.
Most of Europe once spoke Latin in court, in church, and in books. That's a lot more than can be said for Mandarin.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
That doesn't imply that it has any particular cultural relevance for Europeans living today. You might equally observe that the Classical world exerted a huge and lasting influence over the arts, but that does not in itself give us a good reason to practice their styles todays.
I'm aware that the upper crust had some familiarity with it, but that doesn't make it any more indigenous. It was a second language even to them, let alone the other 99% of the population who actually constituted, well, the population.
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