Pope Tweets in Latin

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. You may know that you can now follow Pope Francis on Twitter.

In fact, he tweets in several languages, including English, Spanish, and Arabic, but he’s also tweeting, believe it or not, in Latin.

Are there a lot of people following him in Latin?

Yes. Well, there are at least 213,000 people who read the Pope’s Latin Twitter feed.

Nice!

Isn’t that great? It’s interesting to me because Latin is such an efficient language.

You know, it’s an inflected language, which means that there’s a whole lot of meaning packed into one word, which is probably really handy if you only have 140 characters.

But the other thing that I’ve been thinking about lately is the fact that there’s the challenge of bringing an ancient language into the 21st century.

I mean, how in the heck in Latin do you say email or hot dog or something like that?

Yeah, I don’t even know. Lots of this stuff just doesn’t translate.

Exactly.

Or it didn’t. Now it does.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, there are people at the Vatican whose job it is to come up with those words.

And it seems to me that it’s sort of the problem that dictionary editors run into when they’re trying to define a word.

Yeah, it’s hard, particularly if you have something really dense like a nuclear term where you have to describe physics in a simple way that the average person can understand.

How do you simplify something so complex in such a tiny amount of space?

Yeah, it’s literally the problem.

We’ll talk a little bit more about new Latin coinages later in the show.

But for now, if you have a question about any aspect of language, you can give us a call at 877-929-9673 or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.