I remember back in the late 1950's and early 1960's there was an international movement to adopt Esperanto as an international language. The proponents of the movement said that Esperanto would be very easy for almost anyone to learn because the words and the grammatical structure are made up of a nicely mixed bag of language components that are recognizeable as being derived from various languages which most folks of Western Culture already have some familiarity with. I believe the Esperanto project was sponsored by the United Nations.
The drawback to adopting Esperanto is that it would be an evolving language and subject to changes in usage and changes in the meanings of words. Also the promoters of the newly invented language would quarrel and bicker with each other as to who should be the internationally accepted authority on correct usage and grammatical constructs and word definitions. Latin does not have any of these problems. Word meanings and proper usage do not change in Latin because it is a dead language. Also there are many internationally accepted authorities on the language who are all in agreement with each other except on perhaps a few very minor and unimportant and subjective points mostly involving elements of style. These authorities argue very little with each other about important things such as word meanings and grammar. Also most people of Western Culture already have some knowledge of Latin because it is required to be studied in school in many places. Latin used to be a required subject in public schools in the US during the days when I was a schoolboy, but unfortunately it is no longer a required subject nowadays. Some rudimentary knowledge of Latin is a must for anyone studying any kind of science or for those who study law or philosophy or world history or western religions. Most westerners who have a high school level of education or above already have some knowledge of Latin, even though their knowledge of the subject is just very rudimentary and limited and very basic in many cases. Because of the very elementary background that most educated westerners already have in Latin, it would be a lot easier for them to learn more about Latin than to start learning a newly invented and contrived language such as Esperanto. Furthermore, Latin is much more worth learning more about than Esperanto because there are thousands of volumes of great literature that have been written and published in Latin. Who ever heard of any great literary masterpieces, or any great works on history, law, warfare, religion, science, or philosophy written in Esperanto? In Latin there are many great works that have been written and published on all of these subjects. The Esperanto project was a big failure and no significant world motivators are giving any serious thought to reviving it. For use as an international language, why don't they consider adopting Latin instead of Esperanto? Sam Heywood -- This mail was written by user of The Arachne Browser: http://browser.arachne.cz/
