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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.
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.
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.
"proto-literate" period from about 3500 BC (see Kish tablet); administrative records at Uruk and Ur from c. 2900 BC. Various texts from Ur during the Early Dynastic I–II period (c. 2800 BC) show syllabic elements with clear signs of the Sumerian language. [9] c. 2600 BC: Akkadian: A hymn to the sun-god Šamaš found at Tell Abū Ṣalābīḫ ...
The Romance languages, also known as the Latin [1] or Neo-Latin [2] languages, are the languages that are directly descended from Vulgar Latin. [3] They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family. The five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers are:
Most scholars consider that Etruscan is a pre-IE survival, a Paleo-European language [23] part of an older European linguistic substratum, [3] spoken long before the arrival of proto Indo-European speakers. Some scholars have earlier speculated that Etruscan language could have been introduced by later migrants.
Notable writers of Latin from Africa during the Imperial period include the novelist Apuleius, and the Church Fathers Tertullian and Augustine. Latin-speaking communities remained in North Africa, particularly around Carthage, during the period of the Vandal Kingdom (435–534), but died out by the late 7th century, with the Arab conquest. [112]
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...