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Facebook’s move to provide option for Latin translation support to its website has created a surge of interest in the language which is not used anymore by regular folks in daily life. It’s a good time to reflect upon this language which was a major player until the 17th century.
Latin was originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It spread throughout the Mediterranean region and a significant part of Europe as a result of Roman conquests. All the Romance languages including French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian have descended from Latin. Many other languages, especially the European ones, have either inherited or borrowed their vocabulary from Latin.
Latin played the role of an international language and was the primary language used by the academia and scientific community in Europe till the 17th century. Thus it was associated with progress and learning; several groundbreaking works in the fields of philosophy, science and religion were originally published in Latin. These books were so influential that there power has sustained to this day, drawing students from all over the world who aspire to study them and learn Latin for the purpose.
In the present day, Latin exists in the form of Ecclesiastical Latin which is used in edicts and papal bulls that are issued by the Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church is in fact the largest organization that uses Latin language for official and quasi-official work. Science, law and the academia also depend upon Latin vocabulary for their terminology. The Latin alphabet, when combined with its modern variants like the French, English and Spanish alphabets, is the most widely used worldwide.
Though it is not used commonly, Latin is far from being a dead language because of its illustrious history.
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2 Comments
This is very interesting – although it is not true that Latin is totally dead - before facebook translated its site, there were - and are - fully functioning normal social networks that operate entirely in latin - for example, Schola on the NING network http://schola.ning.com is a totally Latin language network, with over 1200 members……There is also a Latin revitalisation movement, that aims to teach the language as a living idiom, as it was taught throughout Europe until the mid 1700’s - because – now we have web 2.0, there are a huge number of resources online for the self taught student – for example, instead of going to the odd lecture a couple of times a week, Latinum had serialised George Adler’s latin text in audio, for free, and offers over 1000 audio lessons in latin, including huge amounts of ‘comprehensible input’. The goal is to get students up to a high level of fluency, fast – and the system works, witness its thousands of users.
Adler wrote a revolutionary textbook in the mid 1800’s, for teaching Latin through the medium of conversation. The textbook is available online for free as well.
http://latinum.mypodcast.com
You don’t need a University, or a professor to learn Latin, you just need an ipod and headphones.
i need articles on the contributions of the Latin language to the development of the legal institution