In this lesson you will learn where the Latin language came from, who used it, and why it is still studied today.
Latin began as the speech of one small people. In the middle of Italy there is a plain called Latium, and the people who lived there were called the Latins. Their language was therefore called Latin. On that plain, beside the river Tiber, the city of Rome was built. Rome was at first only one town among the towns of Latium, and its language was the ordinary language of its neighbours.
Rome grew. It mastered the rest of Latium, then the rest of Italy, and at last the greater part of the known world. Wherever Roman soldiers, governors and merchants went, the Latin language went with them, and in most places it stayed. In this way a local speech of one plain in Italy became the common language of an empire reaching from Britain to Syria.
While the empire was at its height, Latin was brought to its highest perfection by the writers of Rome. Cicero wrote his speeches and his letters; Caesar wrote the history of his own campaigns; Virgil, Horace and Ovid wrote poetry; Livy wrote the history of Rome from its founding. These men are the authors from whom the rules of Latin Grammar are drawn. When this course tells you that something is correct Latin, it means that this is how such writers wrote. Alvarez, whose grammar we follow, gathered his precepts from them and confirmed nearly every rule with a sentence taken from one of their books.
Then something happened that mattered more for the future of the language than the empire did. The Church took Latin as her own. The Scriptures were translated into Latin by Saint Jerome, and that translation, called the Vulgate, was read in the churches of the West for centuries. The great Latin Fathers — Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Gregory — wrote in Latin. The Mass was said in Latin. The councils of the Church made their decrees in Latin, and the popes have issued their documents in Latin down to the present day.
Because of this, Latin did not die with Rome. When the Roman state fell apart, the monasteries and cathedral schools kept the language alive, copying the old books by hand and teaching boys to read them. When the universities were founded, every lecture and every disputation was conducted in Latin. Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote every word of his work in Latin, and so did the other Scholastic masters. For more than a thousand years after Rome fell, a learned man anywhere in Europe could speak to a learned man anywhere else in Europe, because both of them had Latin.
That continued into modern times. Scientists published their experiments and discoveries in Latin. Lawyers, physicians and theologians all wrote in it. If you wanted your work to be read outside your own country, you wrote it in Latin.
Meanwhile the everyday speech of the common people in the old Roman lands kept changing, as everyday speech always does, and it changed differently in different places. Out of that changing speech grew Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Romanian. These are called the Romance languages, which means simply that they came from the language of Rome. They are Latin’s children.
English is not one of those children, but it is a near relation. A great part of the English vocabulary comes from Latin, some of it borrowed directly by scholars and some of it arriving through French. When you learn what a Latin word means, you will very often find that you have also learned an English word, or several.
You may hear Latin called a dead language. Take that carefully. It is true that no nation now learns Latin as its cradle-speech, and in that sense it is not a living tongue. But it has never gone out of use. It is still the official language of the Church. It is still read every day by people all over the world. And because no nation speaks it as its own, no nation can change it. Its grammar has stood fixed for many centuries, which is exactly what makes it fit to carry the Church’s teaching and the learning of the West without drifting.
That is why you study it. You study it because it is the language of the Church to which you belong. You study it because the greater part of what has been thought and written in the West was written in it, and a man who cannot read Latin must take that whole inheritance at second hand. And you study it because its grammar is exact and orderly, so that learning it trains you to think carefully about words — which will serve you in every other study you undertake.
In the next lesson you will learn how words are first given to things, and why any word means what it means.
Memory Work
- Latin was first the speech of the Latins, who lived in Latium, the plain in Italy where Rome was built.
- As Rome grew, Latin became the common language of the Roman Empire.
- The Latin we study is the Latin of the best Roman authors, such as Cicero, Caesar and Virgil.
- Saint Jerome translated the Scriptures into Latin, and that translation is called the Vulgate.
- The Church has used Latin from the early centuries to the present day.
- Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Romanian all grew out of Latin, and are called the Romance languages.
- A great part of the English vocabulary comes from Latin.
This lesson is a part of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy’s Latin Grammar I course.
