I imagine Italian is used in day-to-day life in the Vatican, but what language is used in conclaves such as the one a few weeks ago? When my friend asked me, I said Latin, but he denied that anyone is sufficiently fluent in Latin for such an important event. I insisted and he denied it was possible. He even stated that he believed that there were no more than 1000 people in the world who were really fluent in Latin. Can Dopers set me straight?
I am certain that there are more than 1,000 people in the world who are fluent in Latin. My cite is that I know or have known about 20, and that’s just me. Granted, I spent my life in Catholic schools, and the most important years in Jesuit-run schools, but still, I can’t have met 2% of the people in the world who are fluent in Latin.
That said, I’m guessing the language used in conclaves and synods (the event to which I think you’re referring was a synod, not a conclave) is likely to be Italian. Also some English, and whatever works for the people at the event. Some synods are just the synod of bishops from wherever, so they’ll do business in whatever language they speak.
Official documents from the Vatican will be in Latin, however, and the Latin version of a church document will be the authoritative version. An “official” (whatever that means) document from a national conference of bishops will be in the language of that nation.
According the a footnote on Wikipedia:
What about countries that have more than one official or de-facto national language? Does the Canadian conference of bishops always publish in both English and French? How about the Irish conference of bishops? English only? Irish only? Both?
Well, years ago, I was in Rome, and attended a mass celebrated by John Paul II. It was a mass held during and for the Synod of Bishops of Oceania – lots of little islands in the Pacific. The mass was concelebrated in several languages, one of which was English. The Pope gave a sermon in several languages, one of which was (and I can’t tell you how happy this made me) pidgin English. The document (there may have been more than one, can’t remember) produced by the synod was released in several languages.
The point being, I guess, that if necessary, an entity will publish its documents in more than one language.
Yes, but one of the major points in having an “official” language is that if there is a dispute as to the exact meaning of a word or phrase, they won’t have to deal with the ambiguities of translation. For example, if a hypothetical organization released an official policy document in both Russian and English where the Russian version stated that certain uniforms must be “goluboy” in color, and the English version, which was hastily translated toward the end, translated that as “blue”, then someone could come up with a midnight blue uniform and claim that it is allowed pursuant to the English version. There isn’t a single Russian word for “blue” - in Russian there are two colors that map to parts of what English speakers typically call “blue”. A midnight blue uniform would be “siniy”. The gaffe would be equivalent to an English speaker saying that a stop sign was “pink” or that Pinkie Pie on My Little Pony is a “red” horse.
Or perhaps an English policy document that speaks of “links” on a webpage ends up mistranslated into Western Ruritanian using a word that has a primary meaning of “link” in a chain sense, but that was similarly metaphorically extended to Internet terminology. But the translator forgot that there was a little semantic drift and that the W.R. equivalent of “link” actually means an email address and the correct word for a hyperlink uses the native W.R. word for “chapter” of a book. English speaking IT guys think that they are required to maintain hyperlinks to the central office on each web page, while the Ruritanophone IT guys think that providing an email address is the right thing to put on webpages.
The advantage, then, to having an official language is that if there is any dispute as to what this phrase means or that word means, they can pull out the version in the official language and just deal with that. No arguing that the policy “No employee may take leave without obtaining management’s permission at least two weeks in advance” is not valid for a trip from Warsaw to Krakow because the Polish version uses a term that literally means “international vacation” in place of “leave” and therefore permission is only needed if going to Germany or something.
Well, in that sense the official language of the Vatican City State is Italian, but the official language of the Holy See is Latin. But in both organisations the primary working language is Italian, followed by English and French.
The official language of the Holy See is Latin. The authoritative text of papal encyclicals, and of documents produced by a council of the Church (like Vatican II) is in Latin.
Documents produced by a group of bishops (for example, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) will likely be intended for the faithful in the dioceses presided over by those bishops, and thus will be in the appropriate language. Those documents (they might be pastoral letters or something like that) aren’t issued by the Vatican, or even from the Vatican.
I admit that, now that I’m thinking about it, I have no idea what language the official documents of the recent Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the Family were in. The Vatican website has documents up in various languages. Was there even a final document? I know there was a lot of wrangling, and a fair number of bishops were not on board with Francis’ more or less open-door policy on some stuff.
The definitive version of the synod’s conclusions will be the Latin text although, as yet, that may not have been prepared.
Note that the meeting which has just concluded was an “Extraordinary General Assembly” of the Synod, whose purpose is to “define the current situation” and collect experiences and proposals in relation to “pastoral challenges of the family in the context of evangelisation”. You ask about the “final document”, but this meeting is merely preparatory to the “Ordinary General Assembly”, a much larger event which will take place next year on “the vocation and mission of the family in the Church and in the contemporary world”. So, while it will have a final document, which will be translated into Latin, that document isn’t the last word; it will be a resource to be considered at the meeting of the Ordinary General Assembly next year. And obviously the bishops who are considering that document will have access both to the official Latin text and to the text in other languages, and will also have access to all the preparatory material in a variety of languages.
First time I hear that, and I know some bilingual-region people who really, really, really would dispute it (bad translations from people who had the diploma but who didn’t really have the language have caused important problems). It may be a nice thing about having one official language and rejecting anything said or writtten in any other language as “what’s this shit, speak properly”, but at least for those of us who have several languages and like it that way, it’s not a reason that makes any sense.
Spanish bishops, when working at the national level, release documents in… I’m not sure if it’s four languages (the official Constitutional count) or five (Valenciano is trying to set itself up as separate from Catalan); by royal request, Spanish Sign languages are to be treated as official for purposes of communicating with the Government but, since they don’t have written forms, there won’t be versions for them. Whether there are four or five versions will depend on what the bishops of el País Valenciano want for their own local version.
But then you have places like Canada, with two official languages. In case of ambiguity, the French and English versions have to be reconciled, normally by the principle of “common meaning” (whatever is common between the English and French versions is the official meaning).
The reporter who broke the news of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation got the scoop because she understood his announcement in Latin.
Self-correction: I checked, and the Constitución says that “other languages (than Spanish) will be official in any Regions as set in the Estatutos (=regional Constitutions) of each of them”, it doesn’t mention any by name.
And, the Estatuto Valenciano states that Valenciano will be its co-official language. So, officially Spain has 5 official languages and Valenciano should legally be treated separate from Catalan.
Isn’t linguistic politics fun?
For what it’s worth, the article hellasketchy linked to includes an interview with the priest whose job was to compose Latin documents for the Vatican. In his estimate, there’s less than a hundred people in the world who he considers genuinely fluent in Latin.
It probably depends on how you define “fluent”.
Can you say “email” in Latin? How about “space elevator”, or “internet”?
And even if we ignore high-tech, there are many subjects that the Church fathers need to discuss, but Latin probably doesn’t have the vocabulary.
Examples, from the top of my head:
child abuse and psychoanalysis
Trans-gendered people
DNA and gene therapy
The Mormon church of Latter-Day-Saints.
mutil-national corporations.
artificial insemination
surrogate mothers.
My wild assed guess is that there are tens of thousands of fluent Latin speakers around the world. It is not strictly a living language compared to say, Basque, but Latin is very much alive. My son studied Latin in secondary school (high school) for three years and his class had rudimentary skills. Their teacher was fluent.
This I may add is in Invercargill, New Zealand which is about as remote as you’d want for a test case.
Official documents of the Catholic Church deal with all sorts of modern-day issues. There is for instance a document about the validity of baptism(s) conferred by «The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints», called «Mormons». I assume there is a Latin version.
Also note that most of your examples actually contain Greek and Latin expressions.
First time in my life I’ve seen Ecclesia Iesu Christi Hodie Sanctorum Novissimis called that.
Well, maybe. But, as I said above, I’ve known plenty of people who could have a conversation in Latin. “Fluent” is a pretty vague term, but I absolutely have known people who could (and did, just for fun sometimes) carry on a conversation in Latin. Not to mention read Latin (and ancient Greek) as easily as they read English.
Nuntii Latini is weekly news in Latin (broadcast from Finland and not from Vatican, though) and I remember reading about how they have to make all sorts of new words for it to be able to deliver the modern news in Latin.