Latin, of course, used to be the international language of scholars. If you wrote a work of science or history or philosophy or law, you wrote it in Latin so scholars in other countries could read it. Nowadays, Latin may still be used for religious purposes (I believe the Vatican still uses it for official documents) and books may be translated into Latin but I don’t think any scholars write in Latin to communicate with other scholars.
So what was the last scholarly work written in Latin? The last work I could identify was Philosophia Zoologica by Jan van der Hoeven in 1864.
Aren’t the Catholic Church’s official document’s still written in Latin? Certainly, papal scholarly works all seem to have latin titles. Pope Benedict resigned with a speech in Latin.
Oops, missed your comment about the Vatican. Carry on!
It would be an improvement. As recently as fifty years ago civilians used to get all butthurt about untranslated German, French, Italian in scholarly texts. Obviously, anyone educated can read those languages, so it wasn’t a big deal. Ditto Latin, but Greek was never in that group of languages where it was assumed you’d be able to figure it out – since, obviously, all Latin words are English words and people who are scared of it are just lazy or stupid.
And then came google. I don’t think people learn any other languages except pidgin “me want coca cola” like a bunch of retardeds. Well, good luck, assholes – I’m old and probably going to die soon, so good luck with that, fuckos.
Uh… yeah.
Dunno about the last Latin scholarly work, but chewsick, my own view is that any work largely written in one language should include translations (in footnotes is fine) of any portions not in that language, unless it’s a foreign phrase or a term which is very widely understood. It’s just a courtesy.
Try the works of Sir Richard F. Burton someday - he hardly wrote a laundry list that didn’t include words, phrases or whole paragraphs of four different languages with a footnote or two in Sanskrit and Aramaic. His work is still fascinating on many levels, but unreadable by any but the best-educated or most dogged reader.
There are still some journals published in church Latin-- mostly religious-historical stuff, but not official Vatican publications. I’ve needed to use a few articles like these in research before, and, woof. At least the grammar and spelling are more consistent than in the 15th/16th c.
Wasn’t most if not a great deal of Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) in Latin to downplay its prurient aspect?
I believe it was mostly written in German with the passages directly about sex written in Latin.
Believe it or not, international botany organizations required descriptions of new species to be submitted in Latin until 2012!. Not sure that really counts as a “work” though, since it was only one or two paragraph descriptions in otherwise english papers.
I was just coming in to mention this ( shakes fist at Simplicio ), however I was completely unaware that the practice had been halted ( retracts fist-shaking )! Shows how far out of touch with academia I have become. Man, this younger generation just has no respect for tradition* ;).
- Actually as someone with a greater interest in zoology, I remember gently ridiculing the botanists at my university for the Botanical Code of Nomenclature’s hidebound adherence to Latin abstracts, something the Zoological Code of Nomenclature had long since dispensed with. It was very, very slightly humorous back then ( 1980’s and 90’s ) if you were a huge bio nerd.
The interesting thing is that the Latin requirement was only enacted in 1935 - a time when the use of scholarly Latin was deeply in decline. It makes me suspect this requirement might have been a rearguard defense of the language.
Writing the sexy stuff in latin so the lay public doesn’t get excited (as mentioned above) continued for a surprising time. My paperback copy of Alexander Heidel’s The Epic of Glgamesh and Old Testament Parallels has all the “sexy” passages in latin. The original edition was published in 1946, revised in 1949. It’s apparently still available, and not just as a used book.
(One of the aliases Lee Harvey Oswald used was “Alek Hidell”. I’ve long wondered if the broadly-read Oswald ever read this particular translation.)