Our US company sent me to France to help out with an implementation. The guy I worked with spoke very little English and my French is terrible. Both of us had done Latin, however - so the comments were hilarious as we used that as our common link. One of those projects I'd expect to show on the daily WTF at some point.
I did try my hand at a translation tool, as it was all i18n up proper. Watched one guy blow coffee through his nose when I demo'ed - and the 'BACK' navigation was the French word for a persons back or something like that.
Isn't it true that schoolboys in many countries would learn Latin 100+ years ago? I suppose it would've been used sometimes in international communication?
If you're from Europe knowing Latin definitely gives you a deeper appreciation of a bunch of stuff.
It's a useful way of formalising verb conjugation and tenses which is common across the major European languages. Something they all take for granted but I watch my poor mother's mind melt when she tried learning German as a Chinese speaker. Especially as a lot of these forms are looser and more forgiving in English.
A lot of vocabulary has its origins in Latin and biology and medicine still like to borrow from it.
It's niche but only today I was playing some Mozart on the piano and saw "M. S." where I was meant to cross the hands and I considered for a sec and guessed it must be mano sinistra (forgive the declension) even though I've never learned Italian thanks to Latin.
100+ years is still pretty recent. The immediate predecessor to English as a world language was French. Matter of fact, my country has only dropped French translations from its passport with the most recent design update a decade ago or so.
Latin would have been used pre-Renaissance. Our grandparents might have still had to learn it as a part of an educated person's toolkit, but it was long not intended for communication anymore back then.
> The immediate predecessor to English as a world language was French
From what I remember, there was a divide between Catholicism and Protestantism, where some of the smaller countries that followed Protestantism used German as a common language due to its origins. I think knowledge of German in Norway was something that was expected of students attending the universities until the mid 1900s (due to geopolitical changes)
It's still mandatory (1-2 years) in non-vocational high schools in Croatia, for the stupidest of reasons ("culture" and "you might need it in law or medical higher education").
It was mandatory at the schools I attended from 7 to 14, which was in the 90s, although this was at what British people call "prep/public schools", a group of a few hundred fancy fee-paying schools. Most people dropped it at 14 (GCSEs), and almost everyone dropped it by 16 (A Levels)
Lol, I learned it in the 80s - 90s. If you chose to learn Latin & Greek in high school here in Belgium then you're seen as being a top student. It's still a big thing.
I did try my hand at a translation tool, as it was all i18n up proper. Watched one guy blow coffee through his nose when I demo'ed - and the 'BACK' navigation was the French word for a persons back or something like that.