Comment by snowpid
4 hours ago
As a side note I do think Latin language should be become the official language of the EU. It's dead so - its a compromise for all member staes - you can change as you like - it was used millennials as a law language so it fits
I think that is a reason the catholic Church still uses it for things like papal encyclicals. It puts different groups on a more equal footing.
Far more people understand it than things like Esperanto. Quite a lot of people know it a bit. I did it at school. My kids learned some (their choice to do it up to GCSE level).
That said, in practice, English is the international language. It is what is most likely to be used at an international conference in most fields, or when people with two different native languages speak.
English is the international language now. About a century ago, the lingua franca of the technological world was German. Half of my father's university text books were in German, pretty much all of mine were in English. Things can (and do) change.
> that is a reason the catholic Church still uses it for things like papal encyclicals.
Nah, it's just because that particular institution tries very hard to be internally consistent, for historical reasons. They immediately publish translations of such documents into "common" languages as well, and that's what non-clerics will actually read.
I said a reason, not the reason. Both can be true.
English is a living language so it's a bad choice (at least from my criteria ;) )
Yes, agreed. That was intended to be a BTW and Latin is probably the best choice on your criteria.
Or Esperanto. But Spanish or Italian would also be great as they sound so nice.
Among the constructed languages that I have seen, I believe that Interlingua was the closest to how a language that could replace English as the international language should be.
I disagree with some grammatical choices made for Interlingua, but in any case it had a simple grammar and the vocabulary was well chosen among the words that are common to the greatest number of European languages. Thus I could read and understand Interlingua without knowing anything about it before that.
Interlingua has a vocabulary bias towards Romance languages, but that is due to the fact that Romance words, mostly coming from Latin or French, are also widespread in English, and also in other language groups like Germanic or Slavic, while much less Germanic or Slavic words are found in languages from other groups. Therefore when selecting the words that are found in most European languages, there are more Romance words than from the other groups.
Esperanto being created by L.L. Zamenhof ... a Polish Ashkenazi Jew. Full circle!