Latin
Indo-European language of the Italic branch From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Latin is an Italic language that was developed in Ancient Rome. Short Latin texts have been found from about the 5th century BC and longer texts from about the 3rd century BC.
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History
Classical Latin was used in the 1st century BC and was the official language of the Roman Empire. It was widely used in the western part of the Mediterranean. The Romance languages developed from its spoken informal version, called Vulgar Latin.
Latin was important to Christianity for many centuries. It is still spoken today during some religious activities. It is an official language in the Vatican, where the Pope leads the Roman Catholic Church.[2] People in the Vatican sometimes speak to one another in Latin if they have different first languages. The Mass of the Catholic Church is often done entirely in Latin. It is called is the Mass of the Roman Rite (Extraordinary Form).
Latin was once the most important language in most of Europe during the Middle Ages. It was taught in many European schools, and all universities used it as their teaching language. Latin began to lose its importance in the Reformation, but it was still often used by writers of scientific books and encyclopedias. Until around 1900, many universities accepted dissertations written in Latin.
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Today
Due to not being spoken as a first language in modern times, Latin is termed a 'dead language'.
Classics
People still read Latin classics such as the poems of Virgil, the memoirs of Caesar and the speeches of Cicero.
Science
Also, Latin is widely used as an international auxiliary language, notably in the Catholic Church and by biologists when they describe and name new species.
Medicine
Some terms used in medicine to name parts of the body (such as bones), and names of some diseases, are also written in Latin.
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Varieties
There are three types of Latin: Classical Latin, Vulgar Latin and Ecclesiastical Latin. Classical Latin was used by the educated Romans and is still studied around the world. Vulgar Latin was the more common spoken variety used by the common Romans and was learned by the peoples conquered by them. Ecclesiastical Latin is common in Italian schools and still used by the Roman Catholic Church.
Romance languages
As people from other regions of Europe learned Vulgar Latin during Roman conquests, each region developed its own language, which was a simplified form of Latin. Those languages are called Romance languages and are still spoken today.
Types
The five Romance languages with the largest number of speakers are Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian. The Romance languages are very similar to one another, and speakers of one Romance language can understand many words and sentences in both texts and spoken conversations from another Romance language. For example, speakers of Portuguese can often understand Spanish. It can be said that the Romance languages are modern dialects of Latin.
Grammar
Latin has a similar inflection structure to Ancient Greek but a different alphabet.
Latin has seven different noun cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative and locative. The vocative case is almost always the same as the nominative case. The locative usually takes the form of the dative. Only place names and some nouns have the locative case. Latin nouns are declined, or changed, according to how they are used in the sentence. A noun can be declined five different ways. These ways are called declensions. The declensions are numbered 1 to 5 (first declension, second declension etc.), each having different endings that identify the noun's declension. When a noun is declined, twelve forms are made, two for each of the noun cases (the locative is omitted).
A similar thing is done to verbs, called conjugation. When a verb is conjugated, six forms are made. There are five factors that can change a verb: person, number, tense, voice and mood. In all, there are 120 possible forms Latin verbs.
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Writing
Latin used to be written on plates of wax. There was little space and so words were run together, with no space between words. Sometimes papyrus was used, but that was expensive. Punctuation was an ancient idea but came to Latin later.[3] Lowercase letters (small letters) are relatively-modern inventions. The Roman alphabet was derived from Etruscan . The following is the introduction to the Metamorphoses by Ovid (Book 1, lines 89–100) amd describes the Golden Age.
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Post-Roman age
After the fall of the Roman Empire, many people still used Latin. Scholars such as Thomas Aquinas, Petrarch, Erasmus, Luther, Copernicus, Descartes and Newton wrote in Latin. For example, Hugo Grotius published his De jure belli ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace) in Latin as late as 1625, which is one of the bases of international law.
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Related pages
References
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