[artemiszx]

From my personal point of view: native speaker of Chinese & self-taught Japanese; not particularly good at Latin—your typical Vergil, Tacitus, Sallust level but did some phonological history research in university setting. I admit I can’t sight read well (beyond Osberg’s textbooks)

I agree with the other commenter that woefully, Latin is a dead language. The author lists examples of modern usage of Latin in the article that, imo, are few and far between. They almost always resort to neologisms and English back ports on the spot, or reuse some Latin vocabulary that hopefully makes sense. In the manned mission to Mars video by Paideia the author linked, the speaker rather handwavily refers to the rovers Opportunity and Curiosity as instrumenta, while his slides uses carri (wagons). I don’t think there is any consensus on what rovers should be called. Articles on the Latin Wikipedia (that the author also links to) painstakingly avoids this issue by de-Anglicizing official NASA monikers (so Curiosity is Laboratorium Scientificum Martianum, or just vehiculum).

I’m not saying the way modern Latin creates new vocabulary is bad--most non-English languages have gone through a similar process. I am lamenting the absolute lack of consistency or consensus, because the corpus is so small and because Latin speakers rarely actually communicate in Latin about such matters for practical ends. The Maritian mission lecture can uncharitably be said to be a mediocre high school presentation on the subject, with the novelty of it being in Latin (and again, I like Latin as a language a lot. I almost went on a Paideia trip before their scandal cropped up). And yes, novelty is the biggest factor here--why are all the numbers in Roman numerals? Cultures around the world have adopted to Arabic numerals despite all having indigenous systems.

I am aware that the Latinitas Foundation publises a Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis, and you can see a small portion of it on the Vatican website: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/institutions_connected/la.... The problem is that it simply has lemma in Italian and Latin explanations to them, which is not exactly helpful (or sometimes correct). “Jet” is explained as aërināvis celérrima (the fastest airship) and “jumbo” as capacíssima aërināvis (the largest airship; wouldn’t it be prudent to think it might refer to things other than a plane?). Also I am under the impression that planes are more often referred to as aeroplanum, because loaning from English gets more traction (like computatrum vs ordinatrum). It’s ironic that in the information age, when dialects in living languages are increasingly homogenized, Latin is so fragmented—-again, probably because people don’t actually communicate in it. Remind me how Latin got replaced by the veraculars?

This is becoming a huge rant, but as someone who has experience teaching myself language to fairly high levels, an excess of engaging learning materials is crucial for achiving proficiency. Imagine learning English and you get to choose from the huge and diverse corpus of Shakespeare, Milton, Samuel Richardson, Shelly and Dickens. Not that any of those is not a great work, but to achieve listening and speaking skills, you obviously need other materials: news, pop culture, entertainment, instruction manuals, random people’s posts online–the equivalents to which Latin cannot provide. If you are trained to read and analyze only the classics, you will be able to do that--maybe you can't listen or speak or sight read, but what did you really expect.

That said, I do not regret not having been part of a “living” kind of Latin language course. Language instruction in the US is atrocious, and I learned nothing from 3 years of French courses despite good grades. Grammar-translation might not be ideal (I didn’t do it for long either), but at least it has rigor.