• SplashJackson@lemmy.ca
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        17 days ago

        I thought they spoke Latin in the Vatican, aren’t they Latino? Otherwise how do we get such classical Christian idioms like “Romanes eunt domus”?

          • samus12345@lemmy.world
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            17 days ago

            There’s Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese…there are more Germanic-derived ones than Latin-derived, aren’t there?

              • samus12345@lemmy.world
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                17 days ago

                I’d have to get a list of every country considered “western” and then figure out how many have predominantly Latin-derived and Germanic-derived languages. Too much work. “Nearly every” one of them would most certainly not be Latin-derived, though.

                • Confused_Emus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  17 days ago

                  Thankfully there’s an entire field of linguistics that’s already done the work. Quick Google search shows 22 Latin descendant languages, and 24 Germanic descendant languages. So slightly more, yeah.

            • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
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              17 days ago

              I was thinking like… English.
              Sure, it’s got German and French and Greek and just a mess of everything, but there’s a lot of Latin in there.

              • samus12345@lemmy.world
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                17 days ago

                English is a Germanic language that has had significant Latin and French (which added more Latin) injected into it over the years. It has to be the most mongrel widespread language in existence, which is probably why it’s such a mess when it comes to spelling. Still, it also has a lot of flexibility and word choices because of it.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      17 days ago

      “Luz” is an incredibly common name in Spanish speaking countries. It means light. “Luce” means light in Italian, but seems to be less common as a name. Lucifer means “Light-bringer”, and the myth of the light-bringer is much, much older than Christianity.

      Old religions thought things in the sky were gods. Venus orbits closer to the sun than the Earth, which means light reflecting from it is extremely bright, but that light is only visible near sunrise and sunset. During the rest of the day the brightness of the sun overwhelms the reflected light from Venus, and during the rest of the night it’s not visible because it’s near the sun, so it’s behind the earth. So, old religions talked about the brightest “god” in the sky, who disappeared when it got too bright or too dark. That led to the myth of the god who tried to be the brightest light and was cast down. That, of course, led to Satan, A.K.A. Lucifer.

      I guess the Catholic church was giving its followers too much credit in their understanding of words.

      • portuga@lemmy.world
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        16 days ago

        Satan == Lucifer is wrong though. Those were two concepts that got conflated together, much beyond their original meaning

        • merc@sh.itjust.works
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          16 days ago

          Almost everything in any religion is a “telephone game” retelling of things. These days they’re the same to most people which is what really matters.