THERE ARE THINGS WORSE THAN LATIN (C)1997 Alan M. Schwartz Latin is the Official key to understanding all Romance Languages, among which the engines of modern technological civilization - English, German, and Japanese - are not included. Latin is the language of knowledge, as in Inquisitions, Crusades, Dark Ages, and the One True Church. Latin is so indecently redundant and recursively interwoven that word order is irrelevant to meaning. (Latin scholars happily overlooked supplemental soggy process by not declining the spaces between words or incorporating glottal stops. Pity.) God spoke to Moses in Latin, but since Moses spoke Hebrew He had to go back and spell it out Semitic letter by letter (carefully omitting vernacular linguistic crutches like vowels). Why would the ancient world so ardently embrace the complex and wretched philological trash heap that is Latin? Shallow analysis suggests Roman conquest gave them little choice, carrot and stick both. A better reason is that Latin was a giant step forward compared to travesties of written language that portion of the globe suffered for 3000+ years. The horrors of the Tower of Babel are not apparent in the 21st century wherein a handful of mostly related languages cover all bases - English, German, French, Spanish; slightly Russian and Japanese (and never Mandarin Chinese, even in the dim future and by sheer weight of numbers). Consider Egypt. Egypt is outstanding for its extended history of civilization, political and national consolidation, and freedom from the intellectual asphyxiation and solemnized venom of Christianity at least until decades after the calendar formally flipped to AD. Egypt is historical linguistic mayhem, even so barely hinting at the consummate Balkanized idiomatic chaos of the region. Latin was a blessing. Do you wonder in consternation why everybody in the Middle East is, to put it none too gently, a raving lunatic? Let us talk it out. Hieroglyphs embellished Egyptian religious papyrus texts but mostly inscribed stone for 3000 years to the Fifth century AD. Ancient Egyptian (AE) papyri (documentary and religious texts) were formal Hieratic script derived from hieroglyphs, with later use restricted to religious texts only, vanishing in the third century AD. AE documentary texts were written in less formal Abnormal Hieratic, waning in the sixth century BC. Persian military impressed Aramaic upon Egypt in 525 BC. (The Dead Sea scrolls are Aramaic papyri found in the Judean Desert.) AE papyri were written in Demotic cursive script derived from Hieratic, used for documents for nine centuries until replaced by Coptic in the third century AD. AE Coptic was written with Greek characters plus seven (shay, phay, khay, houry, janja, tsheema, tee) for purely Egyptian sounds. Greek as such infused Egypt after Alexander the Great in 331 BC until AD 750 as the language of administration, business, and schools (i.e., conquest). Latin came to Egypt with the Roman military in 30 BC. It was spoken by veterans who settled in Egyptian villages through the first two centuries AD and for another four hundred years. The sanity ebbed. Pahlavi arrived with another Persian (Sasanid) occupation in 616- 628 AD. Syriac was spoken in late antiquity by immigrants from Syria, mainly Christian monks. Arabic entered Egypt by Arab conquest in 640 AD aided by the Copts who were deeply hostile to Byzantine rule. (By the 700s the Copts hated the Arabs.) Arabic was the conquerors' administrative language, pushing aside Greek and Coptic in common use. The Arabs introduced paper about 1000 AD, putting an end to papyrus. The modern world, whether narrowly reflected in Roman Catholic worship by laity or broadly disseminated via secular education, has a good handle on Latin. It is being vigorously forgotten to death. The Vatican City wheezes the last Latin gasps wherein celibate (heterosexually, anyway; maybe) denizens interminably refresh and extend an otherwise mercifully deceased language with perserverative doggedness. Consider one example of their tedious series of triumphs rendering Latin relevant to our departing millennium: "sonorarum visualiumque taeniarun cistellulae." Four words and 41 letters now Officially encapsulate the subtle linguistic conceptualization of "videotape" (nine letters). One suspects a 30 minute dose of MTV's Beavis and Butthead would transmogrify into a two hour syllabic adoration. Perhaps the folks packaged in watered silk raiment ought to give "Frog Baseball" an ecumenical run, going mano a mano with ambitious competition rising - Klingon. My bet is on Klingon. Scholars lament that of an estimated (which means "nobody knows") 9000 languages scattered across the globe when Europe began its 16th Century expansion, 2000 or fewer retain lay speakers. Good. Let's cut the crap and proceed with civilization. Latin - it's the wrong thing to do.