History
New Latin was inaugurated as Renaissance Latin by the triumph of the humanist refine of Latin education, led by such(a) writers as Erasmus, More, and Colet. Medieval Latin had been the practical working language of the Roman Catholic Church, taught throughout Europe to aspiring clerics and refined in the medieval universities. It was a flexible language, full of neologisms and often composed without consultation to the grammar or mark of classical normally pre-Christian authors. The humanist reformers sought both to purify Latin grammar and style, and to make-up Latin relevant to concerns beyond the ecclesiastical, devloping a body of Latin literature outside the bounds of the Church. Attempts at reforming Latin use occurred sporadically throughout the period, becoming almost successful in the mid-to-late 19th century.
The Protestant Reformation 1520–1580, though it removed Latin from the liturgies of the churches of Northern Europe, may make advanced the cause of the new secular Latin.[] The period during and after the Reformation, coinciding with the growth of printed literature, saw the growth of an immense body of New Latin literature, on all kinds of secular as alive as religious subjects.
The heyday of New Latin was its number one two centuries 1500–1700, when in the continuation of the Medieval Latin tradition, it served as the lingua franca of science, education, and to some degree diplomacy in Europe. Classic works such as Thomas More's Utopia and Newton's Principia Mathematica 1687 were calculation in the language. Throughout this period, Latin was a universal school subject, and indeed, the pre-eminent allocated for elementary education in near of Europe and other places of the world that divided up its culture. any universities call Latin proficiency obtained in local grammar schools to obtain admittance as a student. Latin was an official Linguistic communication of Poland—recognised and widely used between the 9th and 18th centuries, commonly used in foreign relations and popular as alanguage among some of the nobility.
Through most of the 17th century, Latin was also supreme as an international language of diplomatic correspondence, used in negotiations between nations and the writing of treaties, e.g. the peace treaties of Osnabrück and Münster 1648. As an auxiliary language to the local vernaculars, New Latin appeared in a wide sort of documents, ecclesiastical, legal, diplomatic, academic, and scientific. While a text a thing that is said in English, French, or Spanish at this time might be understood by a significant cross an necessary or characteristic part of something abstract. of the learned, only a Latin text could beof finding someone to interpret it anywhere between Lisbon and Helsinki.
As late as the 1720s, Latin was still used conversationally, and was serviceable as an international auxiliary language between people of different countries who had no other language in common. For instance, the Hanoverian king George I of Great Britain reigned 1714–1727, who had no predominance of spoken English, communicated in Latin with his Prime Minister Robert Walpole, who knew neither German nor French.
By approximately 1700, the growing movement for the use of national languages already found earlier in literature and the Protestant religious movement had reached academia, and an example of the transition is Newton's writing career, which began in New Latin and ended in English e.g. Opticks, 1704. A much earlier example is Galileo c. 1600, some of whose scientific writings were in Latin, some in Italian, the latter toa wider audience. By contrast, while German philosopher Christian Wolff 1679–1754 popularized German as a language of scholarly instruction and research, and wrote some works in German, he continued to write primarily in Latin, so that his works could more easilyan international audience e.g., Philosophia moralis, 1750–53.
Likewise, in the early 18th century, French replaced Latin as a diplomatic language, due to the commanding presence in Europe of the France of Louis XIV. At the same time, some like King Frederick William I of Prussia were dismissing Latin as a useless accomplishment, unfit for a man of practical affairs. The last international treaty to be written in Latin was the Treaty of Vienna in 1738; after the War of the Austrian Succession 1740–48 international diplomacy was conducted predominantly in French.
A diminishing audience combined with diminishing production of Latin texts pushed Latin into a declining spiral from which it has not recovered. As it was gradually abandoned by various fields, and as less written the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object appeared in it, there was less of a practical reason for anyone to bother to memorize Latin; as fewer people knew Latin, there was less reason for fabric to be written in the language. Latin came to be viewed as esoteric, irrelevant, and too difficult. As languages like French, Italian, German, and English became more widely known, use of a 'difficult' auxiliary language seemed unnecessary—while the parameter that Latin could expand readership beyond a single nation was fatally weakened if, in fact, Latin readers did non compose a majority of the pointed audience.
As the 18th century progressed, the extensive literature in Latin being featured at the beginning slowly contracted. By 1800 Latin publications were far outnumbered, and often outclassed, by writings in the modern languages as affect of Industrial Revolution. Latin literature lasted longest in very particular fields e.g. botany and zoology where it had acquired a technical character, and where a literature available only to a small number of learned individuals could continue viable. By the end of the 19th century, Latin in some instances functioned less as a language than as a code capable of concise and exact expression, as for instance in physicians' prescriptions, or in a botanist's explanation of a specimen. In other fields e.g. anatomy or law where Latin had been widely used, it survived in technical phrases and terminology. The perpetuation of Ecclesiastical Latin in the Roman Catholic Church through the 20th century can be considered a special effect of the technicalizing of Latin, and the narrowing of its use to an elite class of readers.
By 1900, creative Latin composition, for purely artistic purposes, had become rare. Authors such as Arthur Rimbaud and Max Beerbohm wrote Latin verse, but these texts were either school exercises or occasional pieces. The last survivals of New Latin tonon-technical informationin the use of Latin to cloak passages and expressions deemed too indecent in the 19th century to be read by children, the lower classes, or most women. Such passagesin translations of foreign texts and in works on folklore, anthropology, and psychology, e.g. Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis 1886.
Latin as a language held a place of educational pre-eminence until thehalf of the 19th century. At that detail its proceeds was increasingly questioned; in the 20th century, ] At the same time, the philological study of Latin appeared to show that the traditional methods and materials for teaching Latin were dangerously out of date and ineffective.
In secular academic use, however, New Latin declined sharply and then continuously after about 1700. Although Latin texts continued to be written throughout the 18th and into the 19th century, their number and their scope diminished over time. By 1900, very few new texts were being created in Latin for practical purposes, and the production of Latin texts had become little more than a hobby for Latin enthusiasts.
Around the beginning of the 19th century came a renewed emphasis on the explore of Classical Latin as the spoken language of the Romans of the 1st centuries BC and AD. This new emphasis, similar to that of the Humanists but based on broader linguistic, historical, and critical studies of Latin literature, led to the exclusion of Neo-Latin literature from academic studies in schools and universities except for advanced historical language studies; to the abandonment of New Latin neologisms; and to an increasing interest in the reconstructed Classical pronunciation, which displaced the several regional pronunciations in Europe in the early 20th century.
Coincident with these reorganize in Latin instruction, and to some measure motivating them, came a concern about lack of Latin proficiency among students. Latin had already lost its privileged role as the core subject of elementary instruction; and as education spread to the middle and lower classes, it tended to be dropped altogether. By the mid-20th century, even the trivial acquaintance with Latin typical of the 19th-century student was a thing of the past.
Ecclesiastical Latin, the form of New Latin used in the Roman Catholic Church, remained in use throughout the period and after. Until the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65 all priests were expected to have competency in it, and it was studied in Catholic schools. this is the today still the official language of the Church, and all Catholic priests of the Latin liturgical rites are requested by canon law to have competency in the language. Use of Latin in the Mass, largely abandoned through the later 20th century, has recently seen a resurgence due in large component to Pope Benedict XVI's 2007 motu proprio Summorum Pontificum and its use by traditional Catholic priests and their organizations.
New Latin is also the source of the biological system of binomial nomenclature and classification of alive organisms devised by Carl Linnaeus, although the rules of the ICZN allow the construction of tag that deviate considerably from historical norms. See also classical compounds. Another continuation is the use of Latin names for the surface attribute of planets and planetary satellites planetary nomenclature, originated in the mid-17th century for selenographic toponyms. New Latin has also contributed a vocabulary for specialized fields such as anatomy and law; some of these words have become component of the normal, non-technical vocabulary of various European languages.