LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Latin: Latin Language
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Lorenzo Valla's (1407–1457) ambitious Elegantiae linguae latinae libri sex (printed 1471; Six books of the elegances of the Latin language) was a widely circulated work that proposed such reforms. Valla, like Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536), never advocated a slavish imitation of the classical authors. Other humanists... were proponents of Ciceronianism, the view that Cicero, considered by many to be the best Latin author of the classical world, should be the model for contemporary Latin usage. This meant that Ciceronians would only use words and constructions found in Cicero's writings. This movement was especially popular in Rome since Ciceronian language lent the majesty and authority of imperial Rome to the ideology and theology of the Renaissance papacy.
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Latin is a member of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European language family that includes other Romance languages. Italic speakers were not native to Italy. They migrated to the Italian Peninsula in the 2nd millennium BC. Before their arrival, Italy was populated by Etruscans, a non-Indo-European-speaking people, in the north, and by Greeks in the south. Latin developed in west-central Italy in an area along the River Tiber known as Latium which became the birthplace of the Roman civilization.
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The Latin language was not native to Italy but was brought into the Italian Peninsula in prehistoric times by Italic peoples who migrated from the north. Latin is a member of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European languages; among non-Italic Indo-European languages, it is related especially closely to Sanskrit and Greek and to the Germanic and Celtic subfamilies. In Italy, Latin was originally the dialect of the region around Rome. Within the Italic languages Latin, Faliscan, and other dialects formed a Latinian group distinct from other Italic languages, such as Oscan and Umbrian. Early Latinian inscriptions survive from the 6th century
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After having lasted 2,200 years, Latin began a slow decline around the 1600s. But Vulgar Latin was preserved: it had split into several regional dialects, which by the 800s had become the ancestors of today's Romance languages. English, though being a Germanic language, derives about 50-60% of its vocabulary from Latin, largely by way of French, but partly through direct borrowings made especially during the 1600s in England. This ... includes a large number of words of Greek origin borrowed into Latin itself.
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By the seventeenth century... the attempts by humanists to restore classical Latin became overshadowed by the rise of the vernacular languages and the discoveries of the scientific revolution. Many European vernacular languages, such as French, English, and Italian, were highly developed and had become classical languages in their own right by this time. Each could boast of their own great writers, such as Dante (1265–1321) and Shakespeare (1564–1616). Furthermore, people still had to come up with new words to describe the new discoveries in science and technology that surpassed those of the Romans. Although scholars of the scientific revolution were trained in classical Latin, the number of academic works written in the vernacular began to increase rapidly. For example, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) published some of his scientific results in Italian, Isaac Newton (1642–1727) in English, and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716) in French.
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Some of the differences between Classical Latin and the Romance languages have been used in attempts to reconstruct Vulgar Latin. For example, the Romance languages have distinctive stress on certain syllables, whereas Latin had this feature in addition to distinctive length of vowels. In Italian and Sardo logudorese, there is distinctive length of consonants as well as stress; in Spanish and Portuguese, only distinctive stress; while in French length and stress are no longer distinctive. Another major distinction between Romance and Latin is that all Romance languages, excluding Romanian, have lost their case endings in most words, except for some pronouns. Romanian exhibits a direct case (nominative/accusative), an indirect case (dative/genitive), a vocative and is the only language which has retained the neuter gender and at least a partial declension from Latin.[3]
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Latin Language