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Contemporary Latin

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Recent Latin is the form of Latin used from the early twentieth century down to the present. Unlike all previous varieties of Latin, it is neither used as a living language nor as a textual vehicle for literature, philosophy, and science; instead, it is primarily used as a form of entertainment, practiced among a very small group of Latin devotees.

A Recent Latin inscription at Salamanca University commemorating the visit of the then-Prince "Akihitus" and Princess "Michika" of Japan

Decadence of New Latin

The New Latin of the 17th-19th centuries had become otiose by 1900, confined to a few very technical areas (e.g., botany) where it functioned as a code, capable of only very limited types of expression, and not as a fully functional language. In other fields (e.g. anatomy or law) where Latin had been widely used, it survived only in technical phrases and terminology. The last survivals of New Latin to convey non-technical information appear in the use of Latin to cloak passages and expressions deemed too indecent to be read by children, the lower classes, or (most) women. Such passages appear in translations of foreign texts and in works on folklore, anthropology, and psychology, e.g. Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), which, in describing sexual practices, uses Latin as a cryptography designed to shrink his readership, rather than expand it.

Emergence of Recent Latin

Recent Latin emerges in the twentieth century, and thus lacks continuity with older forms of Latinity. It is characterized by the universal adoption of the reformed pronunciation of Latin (introduced towards the end of the 19th century, but not dominant until the second quarter of the 20th). Its immediate context tends to be the schoolroom and schoolbook exercises, rather than a wide array of Latin texts on current subjects.

Books in Recent Latin

Various texts—usually children's books—have been translated into Latin in the twentieth century, for various purposes, including use as a teaching tool or simply to demonstrate the author's command of Latin in a popular context.

Recent Latin texts include:

Other examples of Recent Latin

  • In the vein of finding ways to update Latin to meet the needs of recent times, Henry Beard has written a series of books on Latin for All Occasions that attempt to find Latin equivalents for contemporary catchphrases.

Church Latin

A body of mostly theological work has continued to be written in Latin by Roman Catholic writers. Up until the 1960s, Roman Catholic priests studied theology from Latin textbooks, even if the language of instruction in most seminaries was the local vernacular. Although Latin plays a less prominent role (liturgically and instructionally) in current Roman Catholicism, Latin is still spoken in international gatherings of Roman Catholic leaders, such as the Second Vatican Council or a papal conclave to elect a new Pope. Church Latin remains distinct in pronunciation from the Latin used by aficionados of Recent Latin.

See also

  1. ^ Asterix in Latin.
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