Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Vulgar Latin (in Latin, sermo vulgaris) is a blanket term covering vernacular usage or dialects of the Latin language spoken from earliest times in Italy until the latest dialects of the Western Roman Empire, diverging significantly after 500 AD, evolved into the early Romance languages, whose writings began to appear about the 9th century.
A language like Latin is not extinct in this sense, because it evolved into the modern Romance languages; it is impossible to state when Latin became extinct because there is a diachronic continuum (compare synchronic continuum) between ancestors Late Latin and Vulgar Latin on the one hand and descendants like Old French and Old Italian on the ...
Medieval Latin is the written Latin in use during that portion of the post-classical period when no corresponding Latin vernacular existed, that is from around 700 to 1500 AD. The spoken language had developed into the various Romance languages; however, in the educated and official world, Latin continued without its natural spoken base.
Latin became the language of conquered areas because local people started speaking it, and not because the population was displaced by Latin-speakers. [24] Latin was not imposed officially on peoples brought under Roman rule. [25] Saint Augustine observed that Romans preferred for Latin to be adopted per pacem societatis, through a social pact ...
This happened to Latin, which (through Vulgar Latin) eventually developed into the Romance languages, and to Sanskrit, which (through Prakrit) developed into the New Indo-Aryan languages. Such a process is normally not described as "language death", because it involves an unbroken chain of normal transmission of the language from one generation ...
Although Latin continued to be spoken by many of the British elite in western Britain, [38] by about 700, it had died out. [39] The incoming Latin-speakers from the lowland zone seem to have rapidly assimilated with the existing population and adopted Brittonic. [35]
Medieval Latin had an enlarged vocabulary, which freely borrowed from other sources. It was heavily influenced by the language of the Vulgate, which contained many peculiarities alien to Classical Latin that resulted from a more or less direct translation from Greek and Hebrew; the peculiarities mirrored the original not only in its vocabulary but also in its grammar and syntax.
The Latin script originated in archaic antiquity in the Latium region in central Italy.It is generally held that the Latins, one of many ancient Italic tribes, adopted the western variant of the Greek alphabet in the 7th century BCE [1] from Cumae, a Greek colony in southern Italy – making the early Latin alphabet one among several Old Italic scripts emerging at the time.