Okay, so it’s not quite dead…
This is from the May 15 Wired News e-mail, under the section called “Furthermore”:
Recentis Latinitas
The Vatican’s Latin lovers — that is, those who love the ancient language of Rome — are issuing a new dictionary on how to say contemporary words like FBI and videophone. The book may never become a liber maxime divenditus — a best seller — if only because of its steep cost of 100 euros, but its release is causing a major buzz in literary circles. The Italian-Latin dictionary, Lexicon Recentis Latinitas, which joins two earlier volumes, A-L and M-Z, offers students of Latin, still the Roman Catholic Church’s official language, a way to refer to things that didn’t exist in Julius Caesar’s time. FBI, for instance, is known as officium foederatum vestigatorium. TV correspondents embedded with U.S. military units in Iraq might be amused to know that they filed stories via a telephonium albo televisifico coniunctum.
Cool.
