The whole Movies in Dead Languages thing is getting to be quite a fad. We've had Aramaic in The Passion, Algonquian in The New World; Mel Gibson is making something in Yucatec Maya. Now Vin Diesel wants to make a Hannibal film in Greek, Latin and Punic!

Glossophile that I am, I’m hardly going to gripe about these interests entering popular culture. The results of these efforts are open to question, though: the Passion continues to sound immensely dreary to me, and what I’ve heard about the Algonqiuan (see link) makes it sound marginally credible at best. But why isn’t anyone interested in making some movies in the many, many dying languages out there, instead of going after tongues that deader than doornails? Someone write an epic screenplay about the Livonians, please!