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Latin: Latin Language
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Latin remained a living language throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period. Medieval Latin... differed considerably from the language spoken within the Roman Empire. New words had filtered their way into the language to meet the needs of political, ecclesiastical, and academic institutions, which were almost entirely medieval products. Words had changed meaning over the centuries, some of the grammatical rules had been altered, vernacular words had crept in, and spelling and pronunciation were inconsistent. Efforts were made by humanist scholars to stress the importance of classical Roman authors, particularly Cicero, Virgil, and Horace, as models for their own writings. Medieval Latin was considered by many humanists to be barbarous in comparison with the elegance of classical Latin.
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Latin has borrowed words from many sources. Prominent among those sources is Greek which provided many religious terms. Various Germanic languages spoken by the Germanic tribes who invaded western Europe were ... major sources of new words. Classical Latin also borrowed words from Vulgar Latin which, in turn, borrowed words from the local languages.
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Latin survives as the official tongue of Vatican City and as the official language of communication of the Roman Catholic Church. Until the 1960s, it was ... the language of the Roman Catholic liturgy and is still so used under certain conditions. During the Middle Ages it flourished as the language of the universities, scholars, and writers. It was the language of diplomacy in Europe as late as the 17th cent. and was still widely used in scholarly writing in the 19th cent. Today, although the language has a diminished role in the school curriculum, Latin roots continue to serve as a major source for the derivation of new terms in the sciences and technologies.
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To write Latin, the Romans invented the Latin alphabet, basing it on the Etruscan Alphabet, which itself was based on the Greek alphabet. The Latin alphabet lives today in modified form as the writing system for Romance, Celtic, Slavic, Germanic (inter alia English) and many other languages. The ancient Romans did not use punctuation, macrons, the letters j and u, lowercase letters, or interword spacing (though dots were occasionally placed between words that would otherwise be difficult to distinguish). So, a sentence originally written as:
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Even though Latin is no longer spoken today, as the lingua franca of the Western world for over a thousand years, it has exerted a major influence on many living languages. Most modern Western Indo-European languages, have directly or indirectly borrowed words from Latin, and it still has limited use in academia, medicine, science, and law. The study of Classical Latin language and literature, including the works of Roman writers and poets, such as Ovid and Virgil, is part of the curriculum in schools and universities of many countries.
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In the 5th century BC, Latin was just one of many Italic languages spoken in central Italy. Latin was the language of the area known as Latium (modern Lazio), and Rome was one of the towns of Latium. The earliest known inscriptions in Latin date from the 6th century BC and were written using an alphabet adapted from the Etruscan alphabet.
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