Comment by shiroiuma

>Formal latin should have remained the language of academics and international trade. We really screwed up.

I think if formal Latin was really that great a language, it would have endured much longer. Latin is a horribly complicated language, and this is probably a big reason why "vulgar Latin" came about, and why Latin-influenced languages evolved from it (Spanish, French, Portuguese, etc.), yet were neither actual Latin themselves, nor as complicated.

There's a good reason English is so popular these days, and it's not just US dominance. English is a really easy language to learn poorly. It's hard to get all the little details right (like this apostrophe stuff), especially for formal writing, and it's hard to really master it, but it's really easy to learn it at a basic level and become decently conversational with it. You'll make lots of mistakes at this level, but it doesn't matter because with the way the language works, listeners will still understand you just fine. It's not like highly inflected languages where conjugating something incorrectly suddenly changes the meaning completely.

A complicated language like formal Latin makes sense if you want your language to be more like a rigid technical specification: it leaves much less room for ambiguity. But this is not at all easy for speakers of other languages to learn well enough as a 2nd language for international trade.