Abbi Brand, age 9, of San Diego, California, for her question:

What use is  a dead language?

Every country needs an everyday language for chattering and gossiping, foe reading and writing. So long as people keep ,using it, it is a busy, living language. If people stop using it, it becomes a dead language. It goes cut of everyday style. But a dead language may find other: useful work to do.

Nobody knows when our ancestors started main words. They lived and worked around in small family groups, The members of each tribe awiags and bit by bit their words grew into a language. The members of the tribe could use their own 131nguage. But they were baffled by the other languages that had grown up along with other tribes. All these different tongues were living languages because they were kept busy and useful every day. And a living language is somewhat like a living person. It grows and it changes. It keeps on growing and changing as long as a group of people keep using it as their very own work day language.

In the modern world, there are more than 2,700 living languages. Many are spoken by small groups of a few hundred people. Every year, a few new names are added fot new inventions and a few stodgy old words are replaced with smarter new ones. Bvepy year, a living language grows and changes. We use the English language and so did Ring Henry VIII. But the language has changed a great deal in 400 years. If King Henry heard one of our TV shows, most likely he would think that he was to a foreign tongue.

Julius Caesar conquered many lands and ordered the different peoples to use Latin, the language of Rome. But each country used its own style of Latin. French and Spanish, Romanian and Portuguese grew from Latin. Even the Romans changed to an Italian form of Latin. Finally, no one was using the Latin of ancient Rome as an everyday language. Meantime, the language of ancient Greece also changed and separated into different dialect Latin and Greek became dead languages. Their old sayings changed no more and no more.

Latin and Greek became dead languages. Their old sayings changed no more and no more new words or names were added.

Sometimes a dead language is lost and forgotten soon after the people stop using it. But this did not happen to Latin and Greek. There were wise men and great thinkers who spoke these ancient languages. And these scholars wrote down their ideas for the future. For hundreds of years, students learned Latin and Greek to read these great works as they were written. No new words could be added to the dead languages. But many of their old words were borrowed to create new words for languages that were still living.

For example, the old Latin word for tongue was "lingua." We borrowed it to create our word "language."

Scientists found another use for the old dead languages. Experts from different countries often do not understand each other's living languages. But they know the words they need in Latin or Greek. Experts around the world use the same scientific terms taken from dead languages. The Latin name for "cat" was "fells" and the dead word cannot be changed' to kitty or pussycat. To scientists, a cat is a feline, and animal experts everywhere know the cat tribe as the family Felidae.

For hundreds of years, scholars wrote their reports in the dead language of Latin and even took Latin names for themselves. Karl von Linne of Sweden was known to the world of science as Carolus Linnaeus. In the 18th Century, Linnaeus invented a system to sort and classify all the animals and plants. This wise man chose to borrow words from dead languages to name the different orders, families and other groups. The words he borrowed give hints and clues about the members in each group. Modern science has brought his system up to date.