ABSTRACT
Along with Oscan, Umbrian and Faliscan, Latin belongs to the Italic branch of Indo-European. From being the local language of a small group (the people of Latium, which stretched from Rome and the Tiber down to the Oscan border), Latin spread in the wake of Roman conquest to become the administrative, literary and liturgical language of the Roman Empire and, in all three spheres, one of the world’s most important languages. Historically, the following periods may be distinguished:
Pre-classical: seventh to second century bc. The earliest known inscription dates from the seventh century. In the third and second centuries, literature, under Greek influence, makes its appearance (Plautus, Terence).
Classical: second century bc to second century ad. The Golden and Silver Ages of Latin literature.
Vulgar Latin, including the patristic period: second to fifth centuries. Includes, for example, Jerome’s translation of the Bible (the Vulgate) and the works of St Augustine.
Medieval period: sixth to fourteenth centuries. Literary Latin continued to be used as a sort of katharevousa (see Greek) vis-à-vis the emergent and divergent demotics based on its own matrices (the Romance Languages).
Fifteenth century to present day. Classical Latin of the Golden Age was rediscovered at the time of the Renaissance. Literary Latin continued to be used by scholars up to the eighteenth century, e.g. by Sir Isaac Newton, Samuel von Pufendorf; and for liturgical purposes in the Roman Catholic Church (obligatory till the late twentieth century).
Following its transformation into the daughter Romance languages (including Anglo-Norman and the Romance component in English) Latin continued to provide a repertory of root words for many semantic fields, especially cultural and technical, in a variety of languages.
