Ch 3 · Lesson 30Latin · Chapter 3 · Lesson 30 · Themed review
Latina post Romam
Latin after the fall of Rome: the Church, the law courts, the universities and the sciences kept writing it for a thousand years, which is why your word list leans the way it does.
Practise this lesson
14-word session
A quick mix of exercises - recognise, recall, type and build each word. Miss one and it comes back round until it sticks.
Worth knowing
Latin after Rome: the language Europe kept writing
The last emperor in the West was deposed in 476. Latin did not notice. For more than a thousand years afterwards it was the written language of the Church, the law, the universities and the sciences, and most of the Latin that survives was written in those centuries rather than by Caesar or Cicero.
That is why this course meets in chapter 3. The word list is built from Latin texts that survived, and the Church wrote a great many of them.
Five books that kept Latin alive
| Field | Book | Date | The word you already know |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Church | Jerome's Bible, the Vulgate | from the 380s | |
| Law | Justinian's Corpus Iuris Civilis | 529-534 | |
| Astronomy | Copernicus, De revolutionibus | 1543 | |
| Physics | Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia | 1687 | |
| Biology | Linnaeus, Systema Naturae | 1735 | |
From the Middle Ages on, books like these were written in Latin because it was the one language every educated reader in Europe shared. A Polish astronomer and an English physicist could read each other without a translator.
How long it lasted
- The Church: the Mass was said in Latin almost everywhere in the Western Church until the Second Vatican Council allowed the local language in 1963, while still ruling that Latin itself was to be preserved in the Latin rites.
- Government: Latin was the language of the Kingdom of Hungary's laws, parliament and courts until 1844, when an act of that year put Hungarian in its place.
- Botany: from 1935 to the end of 2011, the name of a new plant only counted if it came with a description in Latin. Since 2012 English is accepted as well.
What it means for your reading
Classical texts and later ones share the grammar almost exactly. What moves is the vocabulary: and are everywhere in medieval Latin and absent from Caesar. Your word list leans late, so expect Caesar to throw up some words you have not met, and expect the Vulgate to feel easier.
Try it
In . - In the beginning was the Word. (John 1:1)
. - A book about the nature of the world.
in . - The holy Church is on earth.
in . - I write letters in the book.
Sources: Jerome's preface to the Gospels, addressed to Pope Damasus; Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963), art. 36; Hungarian Act II of 1844; International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi and plants (Melbourne Code, 2012), art. 39.1-39.2.