The Latin for ‘tweet’ is pipo, so there is a certain ring to Papa pipat: for that, remarkably, is what the Pope is doing to some 200,000 followers. Since one of the things that is always said about Latin is that it is a very "economical" language, this would seem to make sense for the limited number of words that a tweet allows.
Latin has no equivalent for ‘the’, uses ‘a’ rarely, and expresses phrases with one word for which English uses a preposition (puellae = of/to/ for the girl); further, its verb forms make limited use of personal pronouns and auxiliaries (pipat = he/she/it tweets, is tweeting, does tweet).
The result is indeed a powerful brevity: salus populi suprema lex esto, said Cicero: ‘let the security of the people be the highest law’ – five words for 10. Medieval lawyers were not so sure about the security of the people: fiat iustitia, ruat caelum, they averred: ‘let justice be done, though the heavens fall in’ — four words for nine. But a problem arises when translating English into Latin, and at the most mundane level too.
We can do chairs and tables in Latin, because Romans had them. But what about ‘hot pants’? Brevissimae bracae femineae — ‘very short female trousers’ — is the Vatican's answer, according to its official Latin/English dictionary, losing entirely the implications of ‘hot’.
Things get more difficult with ‘hot-dog’: pastillum botello fartum, ‘a [sacrificial] cake stuffed with a small sausage’. Really? Most hopeless of all is the technological language. A jet is aerinavis celerrima, but ‘very fast airship’ misses the point: jet is a means of propulsion.
Email is inscriptio cursus electronici — ‘the writing connected with an electronic journey’. Not really. As for video phone — don't go there: the Latin takes up 40 letters and spaces. Suddenly we realise Latin is no longer an economical, or in this case very useful, language.
Let's face it: this is a complete waste of time. No language has ever hesitated to grab foreign words when they are useful. Why not just give new words Latin endings and be done with it — emailum, or perhaps escriptum, jetus and so on? There will be no problems of comprehension then; and after all, there are no Romans around to complain about it.