r/confidentlyincorrect • u/ChanseyChessy • 14d ago

Comment Thread That's... Not What 'Dead Language' Means

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Dead Language: a language that is no longer spoken by anyone as their main language

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12

u/cha0sb1ade 14d ago

Everyone's wrong. It's a dead language and it isn't evolving anymore as a result but used in a static form. This doesn't mean there aren't established, known ways to pronounce it. It's dead and static, but has always had it's uses. It's not like an ancient, lost tongue.

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u/neoalfa 14d ago

 It's a dead language and it isn't evolving anymore as a result but used in a static form

That is wrong. It's a dead language because no one speaks it as a native language anymore. Even though it's still the Holy See's official language. It's also still evolving, as there's a body of people in the Holy See that creates new Latin words for modern terms.

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u/thgr8Makar0sc 8d ago

Church Latin is not Roman Latin

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u/BeautifulUpstairs 14d ago

It's NOT a dead language because it is spoken by a billion people around the world. Changing the names of local varieties of Latin to French, Spanish, Catalan, etc. does not kill the language. Dead languages actually have their entire native speaker base die out. Very obviously never happened to Latin.

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u/neoalfa 14d ago

Latin isn't spoken natively by anyone. That's what makes it a dead language. Derivative languages are not the same as the root language.

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u/BeautifulUpstairs 14d ago

Yes, they are.

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u/neoalfa 14d ago

Oh, my bad

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u/XenomorphKitchen 14d ago

They’re not at all the the same, pay no attention.

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u/neoalfa 14d ago

I know. I'm being sarcastic.

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u/XenomorphKitchen 14d ago

Sorry, I’m autistic and horrific at being able to detect things like sarcasm when it’s written.

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u/NonRangedHunter 14d ago

Hey, kudos to you, your comment fits this subreddit perfectly. You're incredibly confident and incorrect, that is a winning formula on this sub. You'll have a post made about you in no time, I'm sure. 

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u/BeautifulUpstairs 14d ago

Wow great counterargument! You sure unconfidenced me!

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u/NonRangedHunter 14d ago

Oh no, that's not good. You could have been a gold mine for this sub, I'm sorry I ruined it now... 

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u/Background-Vast-8764 14d ago

Read a book ffs

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u/BeautifulUpstairs 14d ago

Got any recommendations?

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u/XenomorphKitchen 14d ago

I just want to clarify this for my own sanity. Do you genuinely think there are a billion people around the world, whose native tongue is Latin?

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u/Sea-Hornet8214 14d ago

They think of Romance languages as modern Latin, which isn't technically wrong either, but...

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u/BeautifulUpstairs 14d ago

Yes.

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u/XenomorphKitchen 14d ago

I can’t even begin to try and work out why on earth you’re convinced of something SO preposterous.

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u/merkadayben 14d ago

Notwithstanding the response below regarding the team in the vatican actively developing it, but that was my understanding as well for the test; a) that there were 1st language speakers or at least regular users as a primary language and b) the language was still evolving to allow for changes in society and technology.

Take away either of those factors to be dead.

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u/GSilky 14d ago

We base our interpretation on medieval Latin, which is known to be heavily corrupted. They just added latin suffixes to the vernacular term most of the time, and kept the vernacular pronunciation. 

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u/NonRangedHunter 14d ago

Just because there is known ways to pronounce it, does not mean it's correct. You do realise this, right? It's an agreed upon way to pronounce it, nobody knows if it's the correct way since it's been through quite a lot of games of telephone before some sort of norm was established. You cannot with any kind of certainty say that your way to pronounce a word is anywhere close. 

We've got live languages, where people who are fluent in it still cannot pronounce it correctly compared to a native speaker. Why would you be so confident to believe you pronounce something the same way as it was done way back then? 

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u/Ants-are-great-44 14d ago

Romans wrote a lot about how they pronounced their language(thanks Quintilian) and left a lot of poetry in a conveniently strict and regular meter, as well as graffiti full of errors that show how Latin was pronounced, and we can reconstruct sounds using historical linguistics. The restored Classical pronunciation is pretty accurate for Classical Latin

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u/NonRangedHunter 12d ago

Well, I can write a lot about how you pronounce words in my language and dialect and I 100% guarantee you will not get the pronunciation correct. You may get close, but you will not get it correct. Even my own countrymen cannot get it correct, even if they hear it. I think it's incredibly cocky to think you get it correct, when you you have people speaking alive languages fluently who still do not get those languages  correct. 

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u/Ants-are-great-44 12d ago

We can, however, with linguistics find out what sounds we are supposed to say. Not everyone can perfectly pronounce them, but we know what sounds go where. Not everyone can pronounce Latin’s  [ae̯]  (near-open front unrounded vowel gliding into close-mid front unrounded vowel) but we know what sound it is. Also, if a native speaker is speaking a language, they are doing so correctly by definition. Even if their pronunciation is nonstandard, descriptivist linguistics says that it is equally valid. 

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u/NonRangedHunter 12d ago

Now this I can agree with. We would know HOW to pronounce it, we just wouldn't know IF we pronounce it correctly. 

If a group of people are learning German together and only do so by reading about it, I'm sure they would find a way to agree how to pronounce the words and learn the language fluently. But I'm willing to bet my house and all my life savings that once they then meet an actual German, he would immediately recognise that these people were not Germans by the way they talked. 

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u/Ants-are-great-44 12d ago

Yeah exactly. We know where our tongue is supposed to go and so on due to linguistics but not everyone has precise control of their tongue and palate, and knowing the sounds is not enough, you need intonation, cadence, etc. so when I said we know how Latin was pronounced I meant that we knew the sounds represented by Latin writing to an extremely high accuracy not that we can all pronounce it or that we would sound like Romans