I don't think that was me, calling Latin a dead language. Of course, it was far from that. The key point about Latin is not that it was a dead language but that learning it constituted "education" until the nineteenth century. It became the secret handshake of the ruling class and it became the model for all "disciplines" : it was stable, it was entirely generated by rules, and it conferred power and authority in the same way that a degree from the ivy leagues does today.
To understand how the study of Latin colored all our assumptions about learning and disciplines is to understand the making of the Western mind and the making of our notions of how to create knowledge and certainty. And the only way to understand this is to study Latin or Greek, which takes about ten weeks in an intensive workshop. I highly recommend it.
"Latin was killed as a lingua franca by the scientific revolution; Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, even Newton wrote some of their stuff in Latin, but their great works were in their several vernaculars, and Galileo made a point of writing in Tuscan."
Yes and no. Before the Renaissance, you basically had medieval latin, which served as a kind of learned universal vernacular (it had the same syntax as the vernaculars but a latinate vocabulary) and the vernaculars themselves, which were fast-changing and were driving everyone to despair with the prospect of "carving in sand." During the Renaissance you have the unearthing of classical Latin and Greek as well as the emergence of the vernaculars (aided and stabilized by the printing press). The champions of classical Latin were courtiers, fighting over diminishing jobs, as disparate medieval courts were unwoven and rewoven at the national level. The relatively esoteric knowledge of classical/Augustan Latin, with people specializing in difficult and esoteric writers raised the bar for court positions and created an ideal of a high, universal, stable, ruled language (something medieval latin was NOT, it was also a changing language)....which eventually was translated into the ideal of mathematics as an objective, universal, stable, and ruled language. (Yes, this is what my diss is all about.) For a magnificent book about court status and the resurgence of classical Latin, see Margaret Slauch.... (can't quite remember the name. I read it just before I quit academia.)
So,it would be truer to say that the language ideal embodied by classical Latin was taken over by the sciences and their dependence on the newly invented Algebra (1591). Classical Latin itself continued to constitute the "education" of the ruling class and to act as their right of passage into power. Orwell, understood this well and described it in "Such Were the Joys..."
Joanna