Latin: Encyclopedia II - Latin - History

Latin - History

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.

Latin - Legacy

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.

Latin - 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 six noun cases:

1. Nominative (used as the subject of the verb or the predicate nominative),
2. Genitive (used to indicate relation or possession, often represented by the English of or the addition of 's to a noun),
3. Dative (used of the indirect object of the verb, often represented by the English to or for. The common verbs used with this case are giving, showing and telling.),
4. Accusative (used of the direct object of the verb, or object of the preposition in some cases),
5. Ablative (separation, source, cause, or instrument, often represented by the English by, with, from),
6. Vocative (used of the person or thing being addressed).

In addition, some nouns have a locative case used to express location (otherwise expressed by the ablative with a preposition such as in), but this survival from Proto-Indo-European is found only in the names of lakes, cities, towns, small islands, and a few other words related to locations, such as "house", "ground", and "countryside". Latin itself, being a very old language, is far closer to Proto-Indo-European than are most modern Western European languages; it has, in fact, about the same relationship with PIE as modern Italian or French has to Latin.

There are six general tenses in Latin (technically they are tense/aspect/mood complexes). The indicative mood can be used with all of them. The subjunctive mood, however, has only present, imperfect, perfect, and pluperfect tenses. These tenses in the subjunctive mood do not completely correlate in meaning to the tenses in the indicative. The following examples are of the first conjugation verb "laudare" ("to praise") in the indicative mood and the active voice:

1. Present (laudo, "I praise," "I am praising")
2. Imperfect (laudabam, "I was praising")
3. Future (laudabo, "I shall praise," "I will praise")

1. Perfect (laudavi, "I praised," "I have praised")
2. Pluperfect (laudaveram, "I had praised")
3. Future perfect (laudavero, "I shall have praised," "I will have praised")

The future perfect tense can also imply a normal future idea (like in "When I will have run...") and so may also sometimes be included in the primary sequence.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki