0 a language that is no longer spoken by anyone as their main language:
1 a language that is no longer used for ordinary communication:
Latin is a dead language.
Farrell returns to the "dead language" issue in chap. 4, where his discussion is much more satisfying.
Doron's paper is a nice example of how considering data from a dead language can help shed light on a question that is raised by the study of contemporary languages.
It is easy to be misled by the phrase dead language.
Studying the grammar of a dead language means reconstructing it from incomplete evidence.
All that remains then is a novel that is a monument to/of dead language, where the content is disregarded in favor of the form.
Such nuances of phonetic detail, in any event entirely too speculative for the study of a dead language, seem only to have obscured whatever major generalizations might have been found.
But it has been suggested that some dead language might be revived, with an artificial extension of its vocabulary to meet modern needs.
The teaching was virtually identical for all three languages; they were all taught as a dead language.