Latin Is a Dead Tongue

DESCRIPTION: "Latin is a dead tongue/language, Dead as it can be, First it killed the Romans And now it's killing me."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1983 (Kane-SongsAndSayingsOfAnUlsterChildhood)
KEYWORDS: humorous nonballad death | Latin Romans
FOUND IN: Ireland
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Kane-SongsAndSayingsOfAnUlsterChildhood, p. 65, "Latin is a dead language" (1 text)
ADDITIONAL: Peter and Iona Opie, _I Saw Esau: Traditional Rhymes of Youth_, #138, "(Latin is a dead tongue)" (1 text)
Roud #20758
NOTES [278 words]: You may sometimes encounter a second verse to this, but it's not clear to me that it circulates outside print.
All are dead who spoke it.
All are dead who wrote it.
All are dead who learned it,
Lucky dead, they've earned it.
The irony of this, to me at least, is that -- as dead languages go -- Latin is about as lively as it gets. Etruscan, Sumerian, Ancient Mayan -- *those* are dead. But there are still Catholic scholars writing in Latin, and the official Catholic Bible remains the Latin Vulgate, and many living languages -- Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, French, Romanian, Rhaeto-Romansch -- are descendants of Latin and often retain substantial similarities to it. And while the Western Roman Empire was destroyed in 476, the Eastern Roman Empire lasted until 1453; it's just that we tend to call it the Byzantine Empire. And while the Byzantine Empire is gone, its church -- the Orthodox Church -- is still around (although its root language is Greek), just as the Catholic Church of the Western Empire still exists.
And although modern English Bibles are translated from the Hebrew and Greek, the earliest ones (Wycliffe's Middle English translation, and the Old English renderings from before the Norman Conquest) were derived from the Latin, and even the translators of the King James Bible consulted the Latin at times.
The point of this diatribe (a word transmitted via Latin although its origin is Greek) is that, although no one actually learns Latin as a native tongue any more, it is neither useless nor, in fact, entirely frozen (the way Sumerian is); Church Latin is not classical Latin, and Church Latin continues to evolve, if slowly. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.5
File: KSUC065A

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