Due to glibc missing a Latin locale I decided to create one myself. I'm trying to make the locale as neutral as possible and avoid using formats associated with a particular era of Latin. I stuck mostly with the i18n defaults, because most things specified in the locale configuration are arbitrary for Latin. I used the Unicode locale data summary for Latin as a base for my locale, but had to take some creative liberties.
Compile and install the locale after possible edits to your liking.
sudo ./install.sh
If for some reason you want to use your Linux distribution in Latin, Linux Mint Cinnamon seems to have a lot of translation done and works out of the box when you install the locale and set it as your language
This is the part of the locale I wrestled with the most. The problem is that Latin lacks a universal standard for describing dates and many different formats have been used accross history. I ended up using universal modern formats and taking inspiration from the formats of existing locales, like using abbreviated names of weekdays and months for datetime.
locale: en_US.UTF-8
date: 04/24/2024
time: 01:52:27 PM
datetime: Wed 24 Apr 2024 01:52:27 PM
locale: es_ES.UTF-8
date: 24/04/24
time: 13:52:27
datetime: mié 24 abr 2024 13:52:27
locale: fr_FR.UTF-8
date: 24/04/2024
time: 13:52:27
datetime: mer. 24 avril 2024 13:52:27
locale: it_IT.UTF-8
date: 24/04/2024
time: 13:52:27
datetime: mer 24 apr 2024, 13:52:27
locale: la
date: 2024-04-24
time: 13:52:27
datetime: Mer 24 Apr 2024 13:52:27
While Roman numerals could perhaps be cool and perhaps more appropriate for date and time, strftime only allows specifying 100 alternative numerals, which excludes a 4-digit year representation. This would also again raise the question of date formats aswell normal digital time representation not working in Roman numerals. I did however add the numbers 0-99 as alternative digits although they are not used by default in any formatting. But if you want to you can do things like this.
$ LC_TIME=la date +"hodie est die %Od mensis %B MM%Oy"
hodie est die XXIV mensis Aprilis MMXXIV
I took the names of weekdays and months straight from the Unicode locale summary, so Sunday is dies Solis (not dies Dominica) and Saturday is dies Saturni (not dies Sabbati) due to the latter (post AD 380) forms being described as alternative variants in the Unicode data. Months are by default in the genetive case, but have alternative variants in the nominative case, as is the case in for example practically all of the Slavic language locales.
$ LC_TIME=la date --date="1/1/2000" +%B
Ianuarii
$ LC_TIME=la date --date="1/1/2000" +%OB
Ianuarius