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Essentially, this was the ongoing debate between Latin and the national languages between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century, and it is now to some extent being played out in reverse. Prior to 1800, the question was, How much should we entrust to national languages? Now the question is, How much of a role should they still be accorded?
The situation in premodern Europe, in which each region had its own language, while important areas such as religion, science, and supraregional communication were bound together by a single language (Latin), seems to have been more of a historical norm than an exception. And it appears that in terms of communication, Europe is now returning to its premodern self.
If one examines the matter closely, thousand-year-old empires are hard to find. A generous view cedes to the Roman Empire only seven hundred years of hegemony. But as a world language, Latin has a history spanning more than twenty-three hundred years. Is English now a world language simply because the United States, Great Britain, and some other countries play a dominant global role in business and politics? Or does English now to some extent already exist in a space that is independent of nations? These questions provide a very interesting focus from which to make comparisons with Latin.
Historical experience, however, shows that an actual world language comes into existence only when it really belongs to the world at large and is not just an expansion of one linguistic community at the expense of other linguistic communities. One of the core arguments of this book is that Latin, like all other world languages of premodern times, attained this status only after it had detached its standards from those of a concrete linguistic community and had to some extent become a “dead” language.
The Latin taught today in Latin classes throughout the world, which appears to be a completely standardized language, is merely the result of a rather strange perspective that does not take into account the active use of the language and views the translation
of individual sentences or short texts as an exercise in scholarly construction. Wherever Latin is used as a means of communication, either oral or written, it immediately becomes clear that grammar alone is not enough. There is no such thing as completely standardized speech in any language.
