7 Liberal Arts . Rhetoric

from Wikipedia

Latin is an old language that was spoken by the Romans and others during ancient and medieval times. No one speaks Latin as a first language anymore, which makes it a dead language. However, many people around the world study it in school and in other places because it is considered important to understand the past societies and even how current languages work.



Latin is used today in taxonomy to give technical names to species and groups of species of living things. Some terms used in medicine to name parts of the body (such as bones) and diseases are also written in Latin.

Since Latin was very important to Christianity through many centuries, it is still spoken today during some religious activities such as prayers and cults. For the same reason, it is considered official in Vatican, where the Pope, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, lives. People in the Vatican sometimes communicate in Latin (if they have different mother tongues) and sometimes in ceremonies.

Varieties



There were two types of Latin, Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin. Classical Latin was the kind of Latin used by the educated Romans and is the one used by the Roman Catholic Church and studied by many students around the world and Vulgar Latin was the more common spoken variety used by the common non-educated Romans and the variety taught to the peoples conquered by the Romans.

Latin was the most important language in most of Europe in the Middle Ages. It was taught in many European schools, and all universities used Latin as the teaching language. Latin began to lose its importance in the Reformation, but it was still often used by authors of scientific books and encyclopedias. Until about 1900 many universities accepted dissertations written in Latin.



When people from other regions of Europe learned Vulgar Latin during Roman conquests, they did not speak and write it correctly in most cases, and so in the course of time each of these regions developed its own language, that is a simplified form of Latin. Those languages are called Romance languages and they are still spoken to this day. The five Romance languages with the largest number of speakers are Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian.

The Romance languages are very similar to each other, and speakers of one Romance language can understand many words and sentences (in both texts and spoken conversations) from another Romance language. For example, speakers of Portuguese can well understand Spanish. It can be said that the Romance languages are modern dialects of Latin.

The National Archives

Introduction to reading medieval Latin documents
Latin was the official language of many documents written in England before 1733. This step-by-step beginners’ guide to medieval Latin, created by our experts, will help you gain the necessary skills to read documents from this period.



This tutorial is a beginners' guide to the Latin used in documents between 1086 and 1733. It is the first online tutorial to help you learn the Latin from this period.

Try our new Advanced Latin.

Trivium Education

Applying knowledge and understanding expressively comprises Wisdom or, in other words, it is systematically useable knowledge and understanding– to explore and find the proper choice of methods for cogently expressing the conclusions of grammar and logic on a subject in writing and/or oral argumentation (oratory).



The annunciation of those conclusions is called a statement of rationale, the set of instructions deduced from the rationale for the purpose of application (of those conclusions) in the real world is called a statement of protocols.