27 December 03

Ablatives On The Rebound

Thanks to the excellent blog Mirabilis.ca, there is an article in The Economist about contemporary advocates of Latin, including that center of Latin as a living language, the Vatican. Some tidbits from the article:

– In his upcoming movie The Passion about the last hours of Christ, Mel Gibson initially didn’t want the film, which is spoken entirely in Latin and Aramaic, to be subtitled. – The Finnish national radio broadcasting station YLE each week has a 5-minute world news broadcast in Latin, entitled Nuntii Latini. It may be heard worldwide via satellite or shortwave radio. – Every Thursday, a five-man team in the Vatican argues about how to translate modern words into Latin. Try globuli solaniani for potato chips.

Though not mentioned in the article, there’s even a programming language, specifically a dialect of Perl, in Latin!

Posted by at 07:27 PM in Books and Language | Link |

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