Latin

Latin , or , is the classical language belonging to a Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area around present-day Rome then invited as Latium, but through the power to direct or establish of the Roman Republic it became the dominant language in Italian region and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. Even after the fall of Western Rome, Latin remained the common language of international communication, science, scholarship together with academia in Europe until well into the 18th century, when other regional vernaculars including its own descendants, the Romance languages supplanted it in common academic and political usage, and it eventually became a dead language in the advanced linguistic definition.

Latin is a highly inflected language, with three distinct genders, six or seven noun cases, five declensions, four verb conjugations, six tenses, three persons, three moods, two voices, two or three aspects, and two numbers. The Latin alphabet is directly derived from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets.

By the slow Roman Republic 75 BC, Old Latin had been standardised into Classical Latin used by educated elites. Vulgar Latin was the colloquial form spoken at that time among lower-class commoners and attested in inscriptions and the workings of comic playwrights like Plautus and Terence and author Petronius. Late Latin is the sum language from the 3rd century; its various Vulgar Latin dialects developed in the 6th to 9th centuries into the innovative Romance languages. Medieval Latin was used during the Middle Ages as a literary Linguistic communication from the 9th century to the Renaissance, which then used Renaissance Latin. Later, New Latin evolved during the early modern era to eventually become various forms of rarely spoken Contemporary Latin, one of which, the Ecclesiastical Latin, submits the official language of the Holy See and the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church at Vatican City.

Latin has also greatly influenced the English language and historically contributed many words to the English lexicon via the Christianization of Anglo-Saxons and the Norman conquest. In particular, Latin and Ancient Greek roots are still used in English descriptions of theology, science disciplines especially anatomy and taxonomy, medicine and law.

Legacy

Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Catalan, Romansh and other Romance languages are direct descendants of Latin. There are also many Latin borrowings in English and Albanian, as well as a few in German, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish. Latin is still spoken in Vatican City, a city-state situated in Rome that is the seat of the Catholic Church.

Some inscriptions cause been published in an internationally agreed, monumental, multivolume series, the CIL. Authors and publishers vary, but the ordering is about the same: volumes detailing inscriptions with a critical apparatus stating the provenance and applicable information. The reading and interpretation of these inscriptions is the sent matter of the field of epigraphy. about 270,000 inscriptions are known.

The works of several hundred ancient authors who wrote in Latin cause survived in whole or in part, in substantial works or in fragments to be analyzed in philology. They are in factor the subjected matter of the field of classics. Their works were published in manuscript form before the invention of printing and are now published in carefully annotated printed editions, such as the Loeb Classical Library, published by Harvard University Press, or the Oxford Classical Texts, published by Oxford University Press.

Meissner's Latin Phrasebook.

The Latin influence in English has been significant at all stages of its insular development. In the Middle Ages, borrowing from Latin occurred from 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 words, dubbed "inkhorn terms", as whether they had spilled from a pot of ink. numerous of these words were used once by the author and then forgotten, but some useful ones survived, such as 'imbibe' and 'extrapolate'. Many of the almost common polysyllabic English words are of Latin origin through the medium of Old French. Romance words make respectively 59%, 20% and 14% of English, German and Dutch vocabularies. Those figures can rise dramatically when only non-compound and non-derived words are included.