Latin as a living language

by Claudio Guardigli

Of course no language is perfect, and up to the present day the world has been dominated by two forms of writing: the alphabetical form in Europe, Africa, America and Australian and the ideographic in Asia (many people are still unaware that the most widely spoken language is Chinese). If it were up to me, I would propose Latin as the international language, for several reasons. Above all because it has a vast literature which is still growing today because Latin is still the official language of the Roman Catholic Church. Secondly it avoids giving preference to national languages and I wouldn't favour English for reasons I'll briefly outline below. Many propose Esperanto (with which I'm unfortunately not too familiar) as the International Language, but in my view it wouldn't be appropriate to the role because it is too Eurocentric and, unlike Latin, it has no history or literature. In order to prevent mankind's enormous cultural heritage being  dispersed, as has happened in the past, I support the initiatives for the setting up of an immense library network; one such is the "Gutenberg Project", and I'm hoping that in the immediate future a greater consideration will be shown for languages other than English. Naturally this can only come about after deciding upon a for of writing which unites all of those used by man. I recall that ever today there exist undecyphered or unreadable languages of great importance, such as Etruscan, the writings on Easter Island, and ever Greek present serious difficulties on close study. The problem of mass comunication is... a problem! For my own part I encourage linguistic diversity, but I would also hope for an international languages soon as possible. As I said above I don't believe that role can be taken by English, which is a relatively recent and irregular language and one which, especially, has no rules of pronunciation. On top of the 'relative' poetry of English vocabulary and verbal forms, the language lends itself poorly to, for example, the translation of ancient text (the example are obvious, but if you wish I can give you some...). Even Latin had problems of pronunciation, when the Roman Empire spread beyond the shores of Italy, but today the two trends in Latin pronunciation, the Classic (and scientific) and the Academic (or religious) are fixed and invariable. For any comments about this article, whatever your views, if you want to add to the debate you can contact me at my e-mail address.