Latin

• 1. Introduction

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  Latin, known to its speakers as lingua Latina, has been declared dead for centuries. Yet right now, in Vatican City, an automated teller machine dispenses instructions in Latin. Soldiers in the United States Marine Corps carry a Latin motto on their seal. And more than 500,000 students in Germany open a Latin textbook each year. How does a language with no native speakers still manage to be so stubbornly alive? Latin began as the tongue of a small people called the Latins, living in a region around Rome called Latium, in what is now Lazio, Italy. Through the expansion of the Roman Republic, it grew from a local dialect into the dominant language of the entire Italian Peninsula, then spread across the Roman Empire. What happened after that empire fell is a story about how languages transform, persist, and leave permanent marks on nearly every corner of the modern world.

• 2. From Kingdom to Classical Tongue

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  Old Latin, the earliest recorded form of the language, dates to the Roman Kingdom, traditionally founded in 753 BC. It persisted through the Republic until around 75 BC, and its traces survive in the comedies of Plautus and Terence, where fragments of everyday speech were embedded in the dialogue. Writing in Old Latin ran in more than one direction. Before eventually settling into the left-to-right system still used today, early Latin writing was either right-to-left or boustrophedon, meaning alternate lines ran in opposite directions, like the back-and-forth path of an ox plowing a field. During the late Republic and into the early empire, roughly from 75 BC to AD 200, a new and more prestigious form emerged: Classical Latin. This was not an organic evolution so much as a conscious invention. Orators, poets, historians, and other educated writers shaped a standard form that was then taught in grammar and rhetoric schools. Those schools functioned as an informal language academy, dedicated to maintaining educated speech across the vast territory of the empire. The Latin alphabet itself was devised from the Etruscan alphabet, which was in turn drawn from the Greek alphabet and ultimately the Phoenician. When the alphabet was first adapted from Etruscan, it contained only 21 letters. The letter G was added later to represent a sound previously spelled with C, while Z was temporarily dropped because the language had no use for it. The letters K, Y, and Z were eventually restored to handle sounds borrowed from Greek.

• 3. Vulgar Latin and the Spoken World

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  Cicero himself named the informal register of Latin sermo vulgi, meaning "the speech of the masses." Philologists call this Vulgar Latin, and for a long time, some nineteenth-century scholars believed it was almost a separate language running in parallel with the written form. That view is now widely dismissed. Vulgar Latin is better understood as informal speech at any point in the language's history, and particularly the kind of spoken Latin that had begun to diverge from written norms in the post-Imperial period. Because informal speech was rarely written during the Classical period, evidence for it is fragmentary. Philologists have pieced together what they can from individual words cited by classical authors, from inscriptions on curse tablets, and from graffiti found on walls. Each region of the Roman Empire developed its own spoken dialects. Without any central institution to enforce uniformity, those dialects drifted apart. By the 9th century at the latest, they had become distinct enough that the earliest recognizable Romance writings began to appear. The Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 cut off communications between major Romance-speaking regions, and that rupture accelerated the divergence of what would become Spanish and Portuguese from the languages developing elsewhere. The spoken Latin that became Romanian followed a separate path, largely cut off from the unifying influence of the western empire.

• 4. Latin After Rome

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  When the Western Roman Empire fell in 476, Latin did not fall with it. Germanic peoples who moved into the former imperial territory adopted Latin as the language best suited for legal and formal uses. In the East, the Byzantine Empire initially retained Latin as the language of government and legislation, even though most of its population spoke Greek, Syriac, or Coptic. Latin enjoyed one last formal flowering in the East under the great codification of laws known as the Corpus Iuris Civilis, assembled under Justinian I, himself a native Latin speaker. After Justinian's death, the empire's territorial retreat and the upheaval of the Muslim conquests pushed Latin to the margins. By the 11th century, the Byzantine state had retained Latin mainly on coinage and in certain court ceremonies, often in a ritual and fossilized form. A surviving letter from the late 9th century shows the Carolingian emperor Louis II mocking the Byzantine imperial chancery for struggling to write proper Latin, using that linguistic failure as an argument in his dispute over who rightfully held the title of Roman emperor. In the West, Medieval Latin served the church, scholarship, and diplomacy across Europe from roughly 700 to 1500. It spread into regions that had never spoken Latin at all, including Germanic and Slavic lands, where it became the shared medium of communication among member states of the Holy Roman Empire. Without the Roman institutions that had once enforced standardization, Medieval Latin was more flexible in its forms, and new words entered freely from vernacular languages.

• 5. Renaissance Recovery and Neo-Latin

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  Petrarch saw Latin not as a dead language but as a literary version of the spoken tongue, and his engagement with classical texts in the 14th century helped spark a wider movement to recover and purify the language. Renaissance humanists began scrutinizing classical texts with new critical rigor, producing more accurate editions through the 15th and 16th centuries. Scholars including Isaac Casaubon and Joseph Scaliger published comprehensive editions of classical authors. Despite that careful work, the rush to bring manuscripts into print led to the circulation of inaccurate copies for several centuries. Latin education in this period was extensive: schooling was conducted largely in Latin until approximately 1700, and until the end of the 17th century, the majority of books and nearly all diplomatic documents were written in Latin. The shift away from spoken Latin toward purely written Latin was gradual, taking several centuries longer than the decline in Latin's use as a publishing language. Neo-Latin literature was vast and covered poetry, prose fiction, letters, and nonfiction across theology, law, philosophy, historiography, and the sciences. Isaac Newton's Principia is among the most famous examples. Latin also served as a medium for translating important vernacular works, including those of Descartes, to reach a broader European readership. By the early 19th century, modern national languages had supplanted Latin in common academic and political use, though its written legacy by then was enormous and largely unread.

• 6. The Catholic Church's Living Latin

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  The Catholic Church required that Mass be conducted in Latin until the Second Vatican Council, held between 1962 and 1965, when the use of vernacular languages was permitted. Even after that shift, Latin retained its official standing. It remains the language of the Roman Rite, the official language of the Holy See, and the primary language of its public journal, the Acta Apostolicae Sedis. The working language of the Roman Rota, the church's highest judicial body, is also Latin. Postgraduate courses in canon law at pontifical universities are taught in Latin, and papers are written in the same language. Vatican City is home to the world's only automatic teller machine that gives instructions in Latin. The Tridentine Mass, also known as the Extraordinary Form or Traditional Latin Mass, is celebrated exclusively in Latin. The Mass of Paul VI, usually celebrated in the local vernacular, can be and often is said in Latin, particularly at multilingual gatherings where no single vernacular language can serve all participants. A small number of Latin services are also held in Anglican churches, including an annual service in Oxford delivered with a Latin sermon, a relic from the period when Latin was the normal spoken language of the university.

• 7. Latin in Law, Mottos, and Daily Life

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  Canada's national motto, A mari usque ad mare, meaning "from sea to sea," is in Latin, as are most of its provincial mottos. The Canadian Victoria Cross replaced the English inscription "For Valour" with the Latin Pro Valore, a practical solution for a bilingual country. Spain's motto, Plus ultra, meaning "even further," derives from the personal motto of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, who adopted it following Columbus's discovery of the New World. The motto inverts an ancient phrase, Non terrae plus ultra, reportedly inscribed as a warning on the Pillars of Hercules at the Strait of Gibraltar. The United States carries E pluribus unum, "Out of many, one," which served as the unofficial national motto until 1956 and appears on all presently minted coinage. The motto's 13 letters were chosen to represent the original Thirteen Colonies. Switzerland uses its Latin name Helvetia on coins and stamps because no single language can represent all four of its official languages; it also uses the international vehicle code CH and the internet domain .ch for Confoederatio Helvetica. Several American states carry Latin mottos: Kansas uses Ad astra per aspera, "Through hardships, to the stars"; Virginia carries Sic semper tyrannis, "Thus always to tyrants"; Michigan's motto is modeled on the inscription Sir Christopher Wren placed in St. Paul's Cathedral. Military organizations also rely heavily on Latin, including the United States Marine Corps with Semper Fidelis, the Coast Guard with Semper Paratus, and the Royal Air Force with Per ardua ad astra.

• 8. Latin's Mark on English and Modern Education

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  Romance words account for 59% of the English vocabulary, 20% of German, and 14% of Dutch. In the Middle Ages, Latin borrowings entered English through ecclesiastical usage established by Saint Augustine of Canterbury in the 6th century, and later through the Anglo-Norman language following the Norman Conquest. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, English writers coined enormous numbers of new words from Latin and Greek roots, which critics at the time called "inkhorn terms," as if they had spilled from an ink pot. Many of those coinages were used once and forgotten, but some survived, including imbibe and extrapolate. The Linnaean system of plant and animal classification drew heavily on Historia Naturalis, the encyclopaedia compiled by Pliny the Elder. Roman medicine, recorded by physicians including Galen, established the vocabulary that still underlies medical terminology today. Latin law principles survive in a long list of Latin legal terms still used in courts worldwide. About 270,000 Latin inscriptions are now known, collected in the internationally agreed multivolume series called the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. In Germany, over 500,000 students study Latin each year, down from more than 800,000 in 2008. The standard introductory Latin textbook in many American courses is Wheelock's Latin, first published in 1956 and written by Frederic M. Wheelock. The Living Latin movement, active at institutions including the University of Kentucky and Iowa State University, teaches the language for both spoken and written communication rather than as a text to be decoded, and the National Junior Classical League, with more than 50,000 members, continues to recruit new students into the language every year.