Latin’s a dead language, as dead as dead can be
It killed off all the Romans – and now it’s killing me
Writing against Enlightenment critics of Latin, one Giuseppe Antonio Aldini begged to differ. A respectable scholar in 18th-century northern Italy (he spent his whole life in Cesena, in Emilia-Romagna), Aldini (1729-1798) is now mostly forgotten. What remains of him, other than the punchy Latin he wrote, is this striking portrait with quill pen in hand:
The good people at the Emilia-Romagna cultural heritage bureau tell us that he was a man of many talents – poeta, filosofo, grecista, e numismatica valente (how many numismatists, let alone valiant ones, can be numbered today?) – who taught literature at both the local university and high school. Elsewhere in the work excerpted below, he even complains about the local authorities objecting to his trying to teach high school Greek alongside Latin – nothing much, it seems, changes.
In a work defending the use of Latin as a living language, Aldini responds to contemporary detractors of living Latin, including one Paolo Zambaldio (1701-1774) and the polymath (mathematician, music theorist, addressee of a famous letter of Rousseau’s) Jean D’Alembert (1717-1783). He argues that Roman precedent itself (philosophers such as Lucretius and Cicero famously had to grapple with rendering Greek concepts in Latin) and the need to accommodate an ancient language to modern realities both justify using Latin not as the Romans did, but as they would if they were alive in the present.
Novis autem inventis rebus, novis inductis moribus et ritibus quid vetat quominus nova imponamus nomina? Sic certe fecerunt olim Latini cum primum lingua sua philosophari coeperunt; quod nobis hodie non liceat nova proferentibus, nulla ratio adferri potest. Quapropter si nostro Latini reviviscerent aevo, non aliis, credo, ad novas quas in orbe invenirent res exprimendas, uterentur verbis quam iis ipsis quae ab recentiorum usu veluti consecrata reperirent; nec fortasse Deum Optimum Maximum adpellarent Jovem, neque uterentur formulis litare diis manibus ad significandum sacrificium pro defunctorum animabus oblatum Deo; aut igni et aqua interdicere pro eo quod dicimus devovere, execrari aut aliquem a fidelium communione separare, graece ἀναθεματίζειν.
What, then, is stopping us from giving new names to new things that have been discovered (and) to new customs and rituals that have been introduced? “Surely that is just what classical Latin speakers (Latini) did when they first began philosophizing in their own language; no reason can be adduced as to why we can’t nowadays invent new ones.”1 This is why (quapropter) if classical Latin speakers (Latini) were to come back to life in our age, they would – it seems to me (credo) – not use, to describe the new things (res) which they would encounter in the world, (any) words other than those same ones which they would stumble upon, words – as it were – hallowed by the usage of modern speakers (ab recentiorum usu). Maybe they wouldn’t call God (Deus Optimus Maximus) “Jupiter”2, and they wouldn’t use formulas such as “propitiating the Manes [spirits of the dead]” (litare diis manibus) to refer to the sacrifice offered to God on behalf of the souls of the deceased,3 or “forbidding from (using) fire and water”4 for what we call “cursing,” “execrating,” or “excommunicating” someone (lit. “separating someone from the communion of the faithful”), in Greek “anathematizing” (anathematizein).
Source: G.A. Aldini, De varia linguae latinae fortuna dissertatio (Cesena, 1775)
- Aldini here quotes Jean Le Clerc (Ars Critica). ↩︎
- Aldini’s point is especially plausible because Romans often called Jupiter “Jupiter the Best and Greatest” (Iuppiter Optimus Maximus), a formula that survived into Christian times, with “God” taking the place of “Jupiter.” ↩︎
- I.e. the Requiem Mass. ↩︎
- I.e. banishment, proscription, declaring an outlaw, an idiom attested in Cicero and Caesar. Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636), patron saint of the Internet and font of ancient lore, comments that such proscription denied the condemned even the necessities normally, and naturally, available to everyone: Romani aquam et ignem interdicebant quibusdam damnatis, quia aer et aqua cunctis patent et omnibus data sunt, ut illi non fruerentur quod omnibus per naturam concessum est (Etymologies V. 27) . ↩︎
Gemmae Latinae 