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Comment by magicmouse | Hacker News Reader

The Latin language was destroyed by pompous academicians who refused to allow the language to grow organically. The Academie Francaise has set in motion the destruction of the importance of the french language, because if you don't allow flexibility in your language, eventually people abandon it. Dante's Inferno was i believe one of the first novels done in the vernacular Italian. They can claim they are protecting it, but it will be washed away like a sandcastle because they don't see the forces at work from their little chairs.

They won't even let words in like "Computer". or CPU. Sorry, but when was the last time anyone cared about computer research in the french language? They are crippling themselves by not adopting some english. The Japanese managed to adopt Elevator (e-re-be-ta), because didn't have the concept before Mr. Otis, so acknowledging inventions external to your country is part of not living on an island.

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> They won't even let words in like "Computer". or CPU

What do you mean? French has a perfectly acceptable word for computer ("ordinateur") and CPU is called CPU in French. Or processeur. Elevator is ascenceur, and I don't see a problem with that?

Latin never died or was destroyed, it was indeed “allowed to grow organically” and the dialects it grew into (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, etc.) are now spoken by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Since you seem to be generalising to Latin languages, I just want to point out that in colloquial Spanish in Mexico (some regions, it is a big country) there are a lot of influences from English.

Spanish is the most spoken Latin language and each region has differences in how they use the language, just like the UK/US/Australia,... in how they use English.

EDIT: btw, my wife uses the word "computadora" for computer.. seems close enough. I think others use Ordenador in Spanish which is close to the French "ordenateur" or something like that.

Always amazed when people with absolutely no knowledge of a subject tend to come out with a final statement. (2 minutes to use google translate and to read the elevator page of Wkipedia just show how clueless you are...).

Who were the pompous academics who destroyed Latin and what did they do, exactly?

> They won't even let words in like "Computer". or CPU

To be honest that point is moot, they have words for the common terms, and if it's too esoteric it will be either used as-is or adapted.

The standardization has an importance only where the formal version is "needed" (but it's not like no one can use a foreign word if it's needed)

An even better example Japanese example is ググる ("to google") which managed to make it in the closed class of verbs -- and it's even written in two different character sets!

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