Latin

the language of the Romans. It is related closely to the Greek language. Modern Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese are descended in part from the Latin. Many Latin words appear in these languages unchanged. The countries of South America and Central America, including Mexico, in which Spanish is the official language, are called sometimes Latin America. Latin is an inflected language. The uses of a noun are indicated by changes in the ending. When used as the subject of a verb, father is spelled pater; when it is the object of a verb, is is spelled patrem; while father used as a possessive is spelled patris. Similar changes take place in the endings of adjectives. Bonus pater, for instance, means a good father, but a good mother is written bona mater, the ending us being masculine, a feminine. Similar changes take place in the formation of a verb. Audio means I hear, audivisti, I have heard.

It is altogether unlikely that inflected Latin, as it appears in literature, was ever spoken by more than a mere fraction of the people of the Roman Empire. The peasantry, without doubt, spoke dialects, in which the inflections, that is to say, the changes in the termination of the words, had never been developed or had been dropped. Undoubtedly Virgil and Cicero had difficulty in understanding the various Latin dialects heard, if not in Rome, certainly in the various provinces of Italy. Scholars are of the opinion that in some of the mountain districts of the Apennines, there are communities whose language, passing for Italian, differs little from the language spoken in their villages during the reign of Augustus.

The Christian fathers of the western church spoke and wrote Latin naturally. The literature of the early Roman church was written in Latin, and services were conducted in that language. As the church was the custodian of learning, Latin was the language of the schools in western Europe until the time of the Reformation. Schoolboys everywhere from Italy to Scotland read Latin and were taught Latin grammar. Before the invention of printing nearly all manuscripts in the western world were written in Latin. University professors lectured in Latin. The first book printed was a Latin Bible. The Jesuit Colleges of France were noted for the excellence of their Latin. Calvin, Luther, Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Knox, the reformers, were educated in schoolrooms in which Latin was spoken as French and German are spoken today. James I of England, who caused the Bible to be translated into the English tongue, was taught to read and speak Latin by George Buchanan, a famous Scottish schoolmaster. Latin was the language of diplomacy until the end of the seventeenth century. Milton was employed by Cromwell in the day of the Commonwealth to translate state papers received from other countries and to write replies in Latin. He was known as the Latin secretary.

Seeing that textbooks were written in Latin, and that teachers imparted their instruction in that tongue, it is not strange that four-fifths of the borrowed words contained in an English dictionary are of Roman origin. The language still receives more attention in European schools than it does in America. According to recent statistics, a little over half of the students in American high schools and academies pursue the subject of Latin. The percentage of Latin students is higher in the corresponding schools of Europe.

The following list of words derived from the Latin mittere, to send or throw, will serve as an indication of what the English language owes the Latin:

The word mass in this list denotes the celebration of the eucharist. The word mass meaning a lump of matter is from a different root.

It must be borne in mind that many of these words are not, in their present form, direct derivatives of the Latin word. The root is found in the Latin form, but the word may have passed through the French, or through various changes in English before it appears as used today.

See Caesar; Catullus; Cicero; Horace; Juvenal; Livy; Lucretius; Martial; Ovid; Plautus; Pliny; Quintilian; Sallust; Seneca; Tacitus; Virgil; Literature