Hacker News Reader

The Vatican does this with latin too. It became a dead language nonetheless.

English always absorbed lots of words from many different languages. I suspect that this is a better recipe for language vitality than the "National bureau of new words" approach.

View on HN

The Vatican started doing that millenia after there were no native populations of latin-speakers left.

Latin lives on in Spanish, Portuguese, et al.

And in the same sense, your great-grandmother lives on in you. I'm not sure what you're getting at, especially because the Vatican has had an imperceptible effect on Spanish, Portuguese, et al.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com