"New" Latin words

Question

Proposal: Latin Language

Is it acceptable to ask or answer using terms from neo-Latin and Contemporary Latin (created to describe more modern things or ideas)? For instance, Contemporary Latin has a word for car—autoraeda. Are these still considered Latin, or does the site focus on classical and maybe medeval Latin?

Note: a dictionary of such words exists in the Latinitas Recens which has a mirror here

Answer 1

I'm all for including contemporary Latin. On other language sites, questions about variants (ancestors, dialects, other languages from the same language family) of the language are considered on-topic, be they literary, spoken, extinct, or otherwise. On these sites appropriate tags are used to maintain order. For example,

• German.SE
  old-german austrian swiss-german standard-german yiddish bavarian swabian ...
• English.SE
  middle-english old-english american-english australian-english british-english north-american-english new-zealand-english british-dialect ...
• Japanese.SE
  classical-japanese ainu okinawan kansai-ben ...
• French.SE
  francais-classique quebec france afrique ...
• Chinese.SE
  old-chinese classical-chinese mandarin cantonese taiwanese hakka hokkien literary-chinese ...

For Latin, we can do the same:

• Latin.SE
  contemporary-latin classical-latin vulgar-latin old-latin medieval-latin ...

On other language sites, questions about the contemporary language are most frequent. For Latin, the situation is reversed in that Contemporary Latin is less common than Classical Latin or Medieval Latin (for now!). That doesn't matter, though, and I think Contemporary Latin should be on-topic (and questions about Contemporary Latin be tagged accordingly).

Answer 2

Latin, or some version of it, is still used as an official language by the Holy See; and official translation dictionaries are maintained for words and phrases that are not present in or before medieval Latin ("social media", "computer", "television", etc.). So I think it's perfectly on-topic to discuss contemporary Latin. (How else could one discuss translation questions for Catholic encyclicals, for example?)