Ever wanted to understand Latin?
Latin (lingua Latīna, pronounced [laˈtiːna]) is an ancient Indo-European language that was spoken in the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire and had de facto status as the international language of science and scholarship in mid and western Europe until the 17th century. It is the base language for the languages spoken in France, Italy, Romania, and the Iberian peninsula and through them to Central and South America. The conquests of Rome spread the language throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe. It existed in two forms: Classical Latin, used in poetry and formal prose, and Vulgar Latin, spoken by the people. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of the Roman Catholic Church Latin became the ecclesiastical language of the Roman Catholic Church and the lingua franca of educated classes in the West.
After having lasted 2,200 years, Latin began a slow decline around the 1600s. But Vulgar Latin was preserved: it had split into several regional dialects, which by the 800s had become the ancestors of today's Romance languages. English, though being a Germanic language, derives as much as 60% of its vocabulary from Latin,[1] largely by way of French, but partly through direct borrowings made especially during the 1600s in England.
Latin lives on in the form of Ecclesiastical Latin spoken in the Roman Catholic Church. Latin vocabulary is also still used in science, academia, and law. Classical Latin, the literary language of the late Republic and early Empire, is still taught in many primary, grammar, and secondary schools, often combined with Greek in the study of Classics, though its role has diminished since the early 20th century. The Latin alphabet, together with its modern variants such as the English and French alphabets, is the most widely used alphabet in the world.[citation needed]
Latin is a member of the Italic languages and its alphabet is based on the Old Italic alphabet, derived from the Greek alphabet. In the 9th or 8th century BC Latin was brought to the Italian peninsula by the migrating Latins who settled in Latium, around the River Tiber, where Roman civilization would develop. During those early years Latin came under the influence of the non-Indo-European Etruscan language of northern Italy.
Although surviving Roman literature consists almost entirely of Classical Latin, the actual spoken language of the Western Roman Empire was Vulgar Latin, which differed from Classical Latin in grammar, vocabulary, and (eventually) pronunciation.
Although Latin long remained the legal and governmental language of the Roman Empire, Greek became the dominant language of the well-educated elite, as much of the literature and philosophy studied by upper-class Romans had been produced by Greek (usually Athenian) authors. In the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which would become the Byzantine Empire after the final split of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires in 395, Greek eventually supplanted Latin as the legal and governmental language; and it had long been the spoken language of most Eastern citizens (of all classes).
To write Latin, the Romans invented the Latin alphabet, basing it on the Etruscan Alphabet, which itself was based on the Greek alphabet. The Latin alphabet lives today in modified form as the writing system for Romance, Celtic, Slavic, and Germanic languages. English is a Germanic language and is written with a form of the Latin alphabet.
The ancient Romans did not use punctuation, macrons, the letters j and u, lowercase letters, or interword spacing (though dots were occasionally placed between words that would otherwise be difficult distinguish). So, a sentence originally written as:
LVGETEOVENERESCVPIDINESQVE
would be rendered in a modern edition as
Lūgēte, Ō Venerēs Cupīdinēsque
and translated as
Mourn, O Venuses and Cupids
The expansion of the Roman Empire spread Latin throughout Europe, and, eventually, Vulgar Latin began to dialectize, based on the location of its various speakers. Vulgar Latin gradually evolved into a number of distinct Romance languages, a process well underway by the 9th century. These were for many centuries only oral languages, Latin still being used for writing.
For example, Latin was still the official language of Portugal in 1296, after which it was replaced by Portuguese. Many of these "daughter" languages, including Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, and Romansh, flourished, the differences between them growing greater and more formal over time.
Out of the Romance languages, Italian is the purest descendant of Latin in terms of vocabulary,[2] though Sardinian is the most conservative in terms of phonology.[3]
Some of the differences between Classical Latin and the Romance languages have been used in attempts to reconstruct Vulgar Latin. For example, the Romance languages have distinctive stress on certain syllables, whereas Latin had this feature in addition to distinctive length of vowels. In Italian and Sardo logudorese, there is distinctive length of consonants as well as stress; in Spanish and Portuguese, only distinctive stress; while in French length and stress are no longer distinctive. Another major distinction between Romance and Latin is that all Romance languages, excluding Romanian, have lost their case endings in most words, except for some pronouns. Romanian exhibits a direct case (nominative/accusative), an indirect case (dative/genitive), and a vocative, but linguists have said that the case endings are a Balkan innovation.
There has also been a major Latin influence in English. English is Germanic in grammar, largely Romance in vocabulary, with Greek influence. Sixty percent of the English vocabulary has its roots in Latin[1] (although a large amount of this is indirect, mostly via French). In the medieval period, much of this borrowing occurred through ecclesiastical usage established by Saint Augustine of Canterbury in the 6th Century, or indirectly after the Norman Conquest—through the Anglo-Norman language.
From the 16th to the 18th centuries, English writers cobbled together huge numbers of new words from Latin and Greek roots. These words were dubbed "inkhorn" or "inkpot" words, as if they had spilled from a pot of ink. Many of these words were used once by the author and then forgotten, but some were so useful that they survived. Imbibe, extrapolate, dormant and employer are all inkhorn terms created from Latin words. Many of the most common polysyllabic "English" words are simply adapted Latin forms, in a large number of cases adapted by way of Old French.
Latin mottos are used as guidelines by many organizations.
More of it later.
) I think its time we all got together for our first nets since international duty, Jaz will have to try on his new box size XXS anyway.
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