Feathers of Hope

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 Numenius at December 27, 2003 09:27 PM | TrackBack