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Disco to minigolf, Latin gets new lifeBy Associated Press,© St. Petersburg Times published May 14, 2003 VATICAN CITY - Some might consider Latin a dead language, but a dictionary of modern Latin published by the Vatican has become a liber venditissimus - a bestseller. It is a project to keep the language updated, even if they didn't have dishwashers, discos and miniature golf in Roman times. The Vatican's publishing house has just come out with a combined edition of the Latin-Italian dictionary after two earlier volumes, one covering the letters A-L and the second M-Z, sold out. Five hundred copies have been printed with a sale price of $115. "There's still life out there," said the Rev. Claudio Rossini, director of the Libreria Editrice Vaticana. The two volumes contain about 15,000 modernized Latin words, many of them compounds of existing Latin words. Dishwasher is escariorum lavator and disco is orbium phonographicorum theca. A committee is working on a new volume, adding mainly words from the computer and information fields. Publication is expected in two or three years. Behind the project is the Vatican's Latin Foundation, set up by Pope Paul VI in the 1970s to help keep Latin alive in the Roman Catholic Church. Latin's use had started to wane seriously after the Vatican decreed that Mass could be celebrated in local languages. Pope John Paul II has often lamented his own clerics no longer speak Latin, which is offered as an optional course in many seminaries around the world.  © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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