Occasionally I see portions of web sites are written in Latin. Does anyone know why?

Question

These are websites that should have nothing to do with Latin, so I am confused. Any ideas?

I studied 4 years of Latin in HS, but I don't recognize some of these words.

Answer 1

I think the answer from chuck g is correct. I have often seen this.

I think some web designers have learned that this technique is useful when they are setting up a "demo" site for someone, to give them a rough idea of what their site could look like. They want to have some text on the pages, but they want to put something that's just nonsense, for a couple of reasons.

First, it just saves time. They could try to make up content that would be similar to what the client, or potential client, would want on their site, but some people might be so turned off by something that was put together quickly that they wouldn't be able to get beyond that and have some faith that the final product could be tailored to what they wanted.

Second, the web designer doesn't want the demo site to be picked up by any search engines, such as Google, while it has that dummy text on it. If legitimate words and sentences are used, the search engines might index the site, and that dummy site would start being returned to people who were entering those terms in their search engine. This can be bad, because Google might notice what was going on, and this would make the dummy site look like a spam site: many spammers have built sites that contain phrases they think will be common search terms, so innocent web surfers may be directed to their bogus sites by search engines that don't want to be misused in this way. So it's a defense mechanism, to keep from having the site's URLs downgraded by the search engines as potential spam sites.

Edit:

You are correct -- these pages don't contain real Latin words, phrases or sentences, the text is just made up of nonsense words that look like Latin.

Additional edit:

I tried a Google search for "nonsense Latin" and found this reference:
http://www.bojates.com/words/2003/09/01/nonsense-latin

The page that will generate the gibberish for the web site designer to use is here:
http://www.tecknik.net/loremipsum/

It says:
"Lorem Ipsum is a piece of pseudo-Latin dummy text that has been used in printing since the 16th century. It doesn't mean anything when translated, but had been derived from the text of Cicero's De Finibus - an essay on the theory of ethics, written in 45 BC."

Answer 2

In the past when someone would create a website, they would add Latin phrases to text boxes. This is where certain information would go, that is not known at that time by the programmer.

Now this may have nothing to do with what you issue is, but I have had this happen to me in the past. This was the very reason. The text was never changed out.

Answer 3

You must be younger..,

I remember when as a student in High School it was mandatory to take Latin.

Today's youth can not even cope with basic English, so I see your dilemma.

It was a beautiful language which is ONE of the major foundations of our modern day English.

We could not live with-out it!

Answer 4

I suggest you have changed the font of your Internet Explorer and are seeing symbols (represented as Latin) that the new font can not understand.

Go to Internet Explorer and Font and ensure you are using:

Times New Roman
Latin based
Courier New

As the Font settings...

Hopefully this shoudl resolve the problem
S.xxs

Answer 5

Why not add a comment and tell us one or two of these sites, so we can view them and make an answer at least based on sight.

Answer 6

Have you used BabelFish?
Seems like you have a translator active