Vatican ATM displays instructions in Latin | Hacker News Reader

Vatican ATM displays instructions in Latin

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22 points_zzaw15 comments

Being a language nerd I've tried very hard to find these in Vatican City, but unfortunately I'm pretty sure there aren't any available to regular tourists. (Side note: the gift shop at the Vatican also doesn't sell bibles, which I find even weirder.)

I...did not know that. I’m legitimately amazed.

That’s like if Disneyland didn’t sell any books about Disney or something.

That made me wonder what version of the bible would be sold in the VC. Looks like the "official" bible of the RCC is the "Nova Vulgata"[1]- and that was only declared the official version in 1979, revised in '86.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_Vulgata

> Looks like the "official" bible of the RCC is the "Nova Vulgata"

That's the official Latin Bible, which has a special role given that Latin remains the oficial language of the Holy See, but since 1943 the new official Bibles in local languages have not been based on the official Latin translation (before the Nova Vulgata, the Clementine Vulgate of 1592), so the Nova Vulgata is not really the singular official Bible of the Catholic Church the way the Clementine Vulgate was before Divino afflante Spiritu [0] (e.g., the official American English Bible, the NAB, was first published and adopted in 1970, before the Nova Vulgata, and has since bien revised in 1986 and 2011.)

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divino_afflante_Spiritu

These are almost certainly ATMs for the Institute for The Works of Religion; essentially a private bank for the Holy See & its employees. Those ATMs may not be in publicly accessible. I’ve looked too.

Posted in this Twitter thread was an interesting obituary of the priest who was responsible for that Latin ATM translation:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/27/obituaries/reginald-foste...

He was also in charge of the Pope's Latin Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/pontifex_ln

Makes sense. Catholic leaders from dozens of different countries speaking dozens of different languages convene in the Vatican often. The lingua franca of the Vatican is Latin, so, regardless of your mother's tongue, you can use the ATM.

> The lingua franca of the Vatican is Latin

Italian, actually, but Latin remains the official language of the Holy See (Italian being the main working language and French the main diplomatic language, because who needs simple?), to which the State of Vatican City is subordinate, however.

How do they work with modern things in a dead language? I doubt Latin has a word for computer or the Internet. Do they have some team that creates new words?

Of course they're in Latin, but I want to know if they dispense denarii.

On a side note I found an ATM in Southern Japan that had a Portuguese language option, that amazed me.

There was a lot of Japanese immigration to Brazil, and recently there has been a movement of their descendants "returning" to Japan. These descendants are 2nd-4th generation Brazilians and often only speak Portuguese, resulting in the signs you mention in Japan.

I always imagined it was related to Portuguese adventures to Formosa and perhaps beyond, to Japan. But I did have lunch at a Japanese-Brasilian's house this weekend...

Some neighborhoods around Boston had a Portuguese option at their ATMs. Got ripped out and replaced with Spanish when the banks upgraded their software at some point, but since the neighborhoods were still heavily Brazilian that didn’t make sense.

deus ex ATM

This is blessed.

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