Latin is a dead language, and we did not have a will to adopt it as a universal language
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I used to believe that "Latin is a dead language" - until I learnt more about the subject. It was spoken everywhere in the Roman Empire, and the local differences evolved into the Romance languages. They are what Latin is today. And it (the relatively fixed 'classical' version anyway) was a universal language for a long time....until the 19th C in maths and the sciences. Thousands of years is a long time in language-years, and nothing stays still for that long, but changes totally. Latin's dead in the sense every language must be after thousands of years of evolution. English will be dead in that same sense in another 2000 years, and so will every other language of today.
Latin is still spoken today, on the radio of all things. The Finnish national broadcaster broadcasts Nuntii Latini, or the News in Latin.
The interesting part is they do not invent new words but find existing Latin expressions and combine existing words. That alone speaks a lot of how universal the language was and perhaps still is.
An example of the Indonesian tsunami catastrophy: "Plus mille quadringenti homines perierunt, cum fluctus tsunami ex motu terrae ortus in insulam Sulawesi Indonesiae (28.9.) incidisset. Magistratus timent, ne numerus victimarum in multa milia ascendat. Maxime afflicta est urbs Palu et proxima illi Donggala. In regione motui terrae et fluctui exposita circiter sescenta milia hominum habitant."
Thanks for the link - it's a good resource for those who would like to read and hear Latin being used in a modern setting. I only wish the voice were less mechanical-sounding, but the effort in trying to keep a dead language alive can only go so far... Also, the Finnish accent is not too bad - especially compared with the way Latin can be heard from the English or the French (or even the Italians).
How is it 'the same'? I can't see it. If somehow the tree was made from your molecules, sure, there's a sense that it would be true, but how that's 'the same' or anything similar to the continuous evolution of Latin into the Romance languages, I don't know.
It's more like, say, there was jazz in the 1920s, there are many types of jazz today, evolved from that early jazz but all very different from it, and different from each other.
Well, strictly speaking, Romance languages are not the evolution of Latin - each is a mix of (the Vulgar) Latin and a local language. For example, French has been heavily influenced by Frankish, so much so, in fact, that English, not even being a Romance language, seems closer to Latin than French does - simply because it imported so many words directly from Latin. (The closest example of a continuous and mostly unadulterated evolution of a now dead language into a modern one is Greek.)
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I used to believe that "Latin is a dead language" - until I learnt more about the subject. It was spoken everywhere in the Roman Empire, and the local differences evolved into the Romance languages. They are what Latin is today. And it (the relatively fixed 'classical' version anyway) was a universal language for a long time....until the 19th C in maths and the sciences. Thousands of years is a long time in language-years, and nothing stays still for that long, but changes totally. Latin's dead in the sense every language must be after thousands of years of evolution. English will be dead in that same sense in another 2000 years, and so will every other language of today.