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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.
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.
British Latin or British Vulgar Latin was the Vulgar Latin spoken in Great Britain in the Roman and sub-Roman periods. While Britain formed part of the Roman Empire , Latin became the principal language of the elite and in the urban areas of the more romanised south and east of the island.
With the spread of Western Christianity the Latin alphabet spread to the peoples of northern Europe who spoke Germanic languages, displacing their earlier Runic alphabets, as well as to the speakers of Baltic languages, such as Lithuanian and Latvian, and several (non-Indo-European) Uralic languages, most notably Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian.
The Germanic tribes who later gave rise to the English language traded and fought with the Latin speaking Roman Empire.Many words for common objects entered the vocabulary of these Germanic people from Latin even before the tribes reached Britain: anchor, butter, camp, cheese, chest, cook, copper, devil, dish, fork, gem, inch, kitchen, mile, mill, mint (coin), noon, pillow, pound (unit of ...
Classical languages expert Bruno Rochette claims Latin had experienced a period of spread from the second century BC onwards, and especially so in the western provinces, but not as much in the eastern provinces because of Diocletian's reforms: there was a decline in the knowledge of Greek in the west, and Latin was asserted as the language of ...
The transmission of the Greek Classics to Latin Western Europe during the Middle Ages was a key factor in the development of intellectual life in Western Europe. [1] Interest in Greek texts and their availability was scarce in the Latin West during the Early Middle Ages, but as traffic to the East increased, so did Western scholarship.
The area of present-day England was part of the Roman province of Britannia from 43 AD. [7] The province seems unlikely ever to have been as deeply integrated into Roman culture as nearby Continental provinces, however, [8] and from the crisis of the third century Britain was often ruled by Roman usurpers who were in conflict with the central government in Rome, such as Postumus (about 260 ...