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  • In early AD, the Roman Catholic Church dramatically gained power and influence over the Ancient

  • Rome.

  • With Latin as the Church’s preferred language, it too became the language of the Empire,which

  • at its height was estimated to cover roughly a quarter of the earth’s population..To

  • put that into perspective, today English is known to some degree by the same fraction

  • - about a quarter of the world.

  • So, imagine that roughly 2,000 years from now, NOBODY knows English, and studying it

  • is a rare speciality.

  • Today, Latin might not beextinct”, which would mean it has no living speakers, but

  • it is certainlydead”, as it has fallen out of use as a method of communication.

  • So, what happened to Latin?

  • Well, it didn’t so much die, as it changed - into Romanian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish

  • and French, which we conveniently know as the Romance languages.

  • Romance, forRome”.

  • There are a number of other languages that developed out of Latin, but those five are

  • the most commonly spoken.

  • Within all of those languages are Latin roots, tenses, grammar, and other intricacies.

  • And that’s not surprising, since all the countries where Romance languages are popular

  • also made up the Western Roman Empire.

  • It was only around the fall of the empire that Latin died and these new languages were

  • born.

  • So why did that happen?

  • Well, mainly, because Latin is incredibly complex.

  •  It is unique from other languages in that it ishighly inflected”, meaning that

  • nearly every word is potentially modified based on tense, case, voice, aspect, person,

  • number, gender, and mood.

  • As a result, the meaning is always clear, although difficult to parse in a sentence.

  • It’s one of the reasons we continue to use it for highly technical fields where clarification

  • is of the utmost importance, like classifying species or in medical terminology.

  • When the Roman Empire collapsed, each distinct ethnic region appropriated their own version

  • of what was called Vulgar Latin.

  • Vulgar here meanscommon”.

  • While standard Latin was incredibly useful for description, simple communication did

  • not have to rely on complex grammar.

  • As we know from different dialects in English, like African American Vernacular English or

  • Chicano English, grammar, word choice, and even sentence structure end up naturally diverging

  • from the quote-unquotecorrectversion.

  • So a Latin word like thenumber three”, “tres”, translates into tre in Italian,

  • tres in Spanish, and trois in French, all similar but culturally distinct.

  • Nonetheless, due to the overwhelming prevalence of Latin in early Western literature, medicine,

  • and science, Latin as a language of antiquity never quite went extinct, and today a huge

  • number of technical fields maintain its usage.

  • Even English still uses a huge number of Latinate roots, despite modern English developing out

  • of Old English, and before that, Proto-German.

  • According to some estimates, more than 60% of English is made up of Greek or Latin roots,

  • mostly Latin, as a result of English being heavily influenced by French.

  • In the end, although Latin is dead, it lives on in languages spoken by roughly a billion

  • people around

  • the world.

In early AD, the Roman Catholic Church dramatically gained power and influence over the Ancient

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拉丁語是如何成為一種死語言的? (How Did Latin Become A Dead Language?)

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    BH 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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