ancient languages are meant to be used for better understanding of a world that no longer exists and through the past for better understanding of our present world, maybe, where latin is not spoken anymore by many centuries.
No matter how much we love it, the fact is there: it IS a dead language... And the major use that is to be made of it is reading. Or write or even speak it if you like, but it will never have the same applications as a modern tongue.
That it's a ancient language used to understand a past world? That Latin is a dead language? Latin is
NOT a dead language used to understand a past world. You can speak in Latin about
autocineta and
aeroplana with no problem a at all and a not-so-small community does that on the
Interrete. In fact, there're more Latinists who do use Latin for communication on the Internet on a daily basis than native speakers of many living languages. Latin is alive and we do use it to talk about our modern world. Stating the contrary is as retarded as saying that you cannot speak about the Khmer Empire in Russian because there were no native Russian speakers in the Khmer Empire or that you cannot write in English fiction about a distant future in which English is no longer a vernacular language because English can only be used to talk about the world of the English speakers.
Do you know what's the real problem of Latin? That it's no longer a vernacular language and centuries of diglossic usage has given us the impression deeply engraved within our culture that Latin can only be used as a written language to talk about certain topics, and not precisely mundane topics, hence the
gravitas associated with the language that our dear tattooists love because it gives a special aura to a simple (and in many occasions even stupid) sentence.
Well, do you wanna know something? Diglossia is the way to failure for the language perceived as the higher one. History proves it. Latin has been for centuries the hegemonic language of culture but it failed miserably when it had to compete with vernacular languages for the same space. Both Katharevousa and Classical Chinese had better chances to succeed one century ago and they have also failed. Diglossia is what is helping to this seemingly unstoppable decline of the total amount of people who can understand spoken Latin, read and write Latin with no problems and even speak it fluently. And there's only one solution to this: treating Latin like a normal language.
When people learn a language they can apply to their reality then people begin to learn it the proper way because languages are nothing but tools meant to be
USED. The human mind and the human brain are not prepared to learn diglossical languages, they're prepared to learn and use languages and when it comes to teach to said mind a new language you have to teach it the right way or the brain will just erase such useless information. Sure Latin is no longer a vernacular language so getting fluent in it is harder than, for example, getting fluent in German, but people has been doing so for centuries with no problem at all and with far worse teaching methods than ours, so in the end there're no excuses other than preferring the current diglossia that is killing Latin over a Latin devoid of all its
gravitas and other cultural connotations which is used to sing rap full of sexual innuendo or talk about mundane things.
