Latin

Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. It gained wide usage as the formal language of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire. An inflectional and synthetic language, Latin relies little on word order, conveying meaning through a system of affixes attached to word stems. The Latin alphabet, derived from the Greek, remains the most widely used alphabet in the world.

Although now widely considered an extinct language with very few fluent speakers and almost no native ones, Latin has had a major influence on many languages that are still thriving, and continues to see wide use in areas such as academia. All Romance languages are descended from Vulgar Latin, and many words adapted from Latin are found in other modern languages, including English. Moreover, in the Western world, Latin was the lingua franca, the learned language for scientific and political affairs, for more than a thousand years, eventually being replaced by French in the 18th century. Ecclesiastical Latin remains the formal language of the Roman Catholic Church to this day, and thus the official language of the Vatican. The Church used Latin as its primary liturgical language until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Latin is also still used--drawing heavily on Greek roots--to furnish the names used in the scientific classification of living things. The modern study of Latin, along with Greek, is part of the Classics.

History

The Duenos inscription, from the 6th century BC, is the second-earliest known Latin text.Latin is a member of the family of Italic languages, and its alphabet, the Latin alphabet, is based on the Old Italic alphabet, which is in turn derived from the Greek alphabet. Latin was first brought to the Italian peninsula in the 9th or 8th century BC by migrants from the north, who settled in the Latium region, specifically around the River Tiber, where the Roman civilization first developed. Latin was influenced by the Celtic dialects and the non-Indo-European Etruscan language in northern Italy, and by Greek in southern Italy.

Although surviving Latin literature consists almost entirely of Classical Latin, an artificial and highly stylized and polished literary language from the 1st century BC, the actual spoken language of the Roman Empire was Vulgar Latin, which significantly differed from Classical Latin in grammar, vocabulary, and eventually pronunciation. Also, although Latin remained the main written language of the Roman Empire, Greek came to be the language spoken by the well-educated elite, as most of the literature studied by Romans was written in Greek. In the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which became the Byzantine Empire, Greek eventually supplanted Latin as both the written and spoken language.

Legacy

The language of Rome has had a profound impact on later cultures, as demonstrated by this Latin Bible from AD 1407.The expansion of the Roman Empire spread Latin throughout Europe, and over time Vulgar Latin evolved and dialectized in different locations, gradually shifting into a number of distinct Romance languages beginning around the 9th century. These were for many centuries only spoken languages, Latin still being used for writing. For example, Latin was the official language of Portugal until 1296, when it was replaced by Portuguese. Many of these languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, and Romanian, flourished, the differences between them growing greater over time.

Classical Latin and the Romance languages differ in a number of ways, and some of these differences have been used in attempts to reconstruct Vulgar Latin. For example, the Romance languages have distinctive stress, whereas Latin had distinctive length of vowels. In Italian and Sardo logudorese, there is distinctive length of consonants and stress, in Spanish only distinctive stress, and in French even stress is no longer distinctive. Another major distinction between Romance and Latin is that all Romance languages, excluding Romanian, have lost their case endings in most words, except for some pronouns. Romanian retains a direct case (nominative/accusative), an indirect case (dative/genitive), and a vocative.

There has also been a major Latin influence in English. Although English is Germanic rather than Romanic in origin--Britannia was a Roman province, but the Roman presence in Britain had effectively disappeared by the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasions--English borrows heavily from Latin and Latin-derived words, drawing from ecclesiastical usage and from Romance languages like French. In fact, after the Battle of Hastings, the new King of England, William the Conqueror, spoke French, and French became the accepted language of the court and nobility, drastically changing the pre-invasion English tongue. However, English grammar is independent of Latin grammar, though prescriptive grammarians in English have been heavily influenced by Latin. Attempts to make English grammar follow Latin rules--such as the prohibition against the split infinitive--have not worked successfully in regular usage.

From the 16th to the 18th centuries, English writers created huge numbers of new words from Latin and Greek roots. These words were dubbed "inkhorn" or "inkpot" words, as if they had spilled from a pot of ink. Many of these words were used once by the author and then forgotten, but some remain. Imbibe, extrapolate, dormant and inebriation are all inkhorn terms carved from Latin words. In fact, the word etymology is derived from the Greek word etymologia, meaning "true sense of the word". It is said that 80% of all scholarly English words are derived from Latin, in a large number of cases by way of French.

Grammar

Latin is a synthetic inflectional language: affixes (which usually encode more than one grammatical category) are attached to fixed stems to express gender, number, and case in adjectives, nouns, and pronouns, which is called declension; and person, number, tense, voice, mood, and aspect in verbs, which is called conjugation. There are five declensions (declinationes) of nouns and four conjugations of verbs.

There are seven noun cases:

Nominative (used as the subject of the verb or the predicate nominative),

Genitive (used to indicate relation or possession, often represented by the English of or the addition of 's to a noun),

Dative (used of the indirect object of the verb, often represented by the English to or for. The common