Latin is the new Klingon

I think it’s a little odd that Finland is publishing news bulletins in Latin on its EU presidency website. Finnish isn’t even an Indo-European language, like Latin is — it’s Uralic (or Finno-Ugrian, if you’d prefer).

Whose idea was this?

Classicists can catch up with the news in Latin every Wednesday thanks to two energetic Finnish Latin academics.

Tuomo Pekkanen and Reijo Pitkaranta already have a cult following among Finnish classicists who tune in every Sunday night to Nuntii Latini, a five-minute Latin news bulletin broadcast on YLE, Finland’s public broadcaster.

Pitkaranta said: “Latin is not dead: it is still very much in use in different forms across the world today. Italians, French and Spaniards all speak a new form of Latin. I hope that EU documents are soon translated into Latin which is such a clear language.”

He’s right — you wouldn’t really say that Latin is ‘dead’. Modern English is just as much English as Old English was in its day. Latin just gradually morphed into unrecognisability.

But why translate EU documents into Latin? Perfectly good languages that people currently speak already exist. Clarity? I don’t speak Latin, so it’s not clear to me. Or does Pitkaranta mean that using Latin will help avoid ambiguity? You’d have a tough time making that case. No language can really claim not to be ambiguous, since all people have essentially the same cognitive wiring, and they’ll put up with roughly the same amount of ambiguity in their language before ‘evolving’ it.

No, this is a nerd factor thing. Some people just like Latin, as some people just like Elvish. And that’s okay.