Latin

*WARNING*

There is really no point in the following gibberish. You can stop reading right now and not have missed a single thing. I just wanted to warn you.

As the saying goes "Latin is a dead language, as dead as it can be. First it killed the Romans now it's killing me." I read an article a while back about dead, dying and endangered languages. At first thought I would have assumed Latin was in the list but it was not. I had forgotten about all the medical professionals that are required not to speak conversational Latin but know the words related to their profession. Fair enough.

But what about Latin amongst the general population? If any linguists read this post I'd be curious to know how sharp of a decline was there after the Roman Catholic Church ended Latin requirements in services. That was, I think, part of Vatican II in the early or mid 1960's. I could be totally embarrassing myself and probably am as I am talking about something of which I know almost nothing. I might have to check to see if any higher education institutions still require Latin as part of a religious degree in higher education. I wonder about that too.

Why? I don't know, beats me. Just something I was thinking about.

So what are the dying languages that I referenced in the first paragraph? There is a long list, at least globally. Vanuatu seems to be the most endangered, or at least in a tie, with only a single native speaker left alive. That can't bode well for that language. In American Yiddish has practically disappeared as a conversational language despite being a language spoken widely enough to have Yiddish Newspapers in print in major US cities at the turn of the last century.

What gets me on these wild tangents? That's probably the real question here. As far as I can tell with today's tangent I started to think about language and my odd ability to pick them up rather rapidly - at a cost. See I seem to only be able to squeeze English as my native tongue and one other language, spoken only functionally, never mastered, in my head at one time. For instance I picked up Korean well enough to awkwardly convey what I wanted to a native speaker in about eight weeks. Not bad. But in doing so I seemed to have pushed Spanish totally out of my brain. Sure, I can still say, in Spanish, "where is the bathroom?", "how much is this?", "check please.", "another round of drinks, please sir!" and basic things but I can't communicate any longer, not one bit. My Korean is slipping too as I don't have anyone to talk to that speaks the language (at least not until I joined the Korean Language Group on meetup.com, we'll see how well that goes).

Other languages I wanted to learn, but never have, are Dutch, I just like the sound of it, German and French. But it seems my brain could never let me know the them all, just one at a time. And how much fun is it to learn something just to forget it after starting a new language? Sheesh. Sounds like a waste of time to me as I now rarely travel outside the US and besides, I could probably make best use of Spanish anyway.

I'll shut up now.