Latin is one of the most amazing languages. It is considered dead, since it has long gone out of colloquial use, but it is taught at universities, used in the scientific community, and many words from Latin are still in use. The Latin language has partially died, and partially survived as the language of science, medicine, terms.
Latin language
Latin, or Latin, is one of the oldest Indo-European languages that had a written language. It appeared among the peoples of ancient Italy around the second millennium BC, supplanted other languages spoken by the Italians, and became the main one in the western Mediterranean. The language reached its greatest flowering in the first century BC, when the development of the so-called classical Latin began - the literary language in which Cicero, Horace, Virgil, Ovid wrote. Latin improved simultaneously with the development of Rome and its formation as the largest state in the Mediterranean.
Further, this language survived the periods of postclassics and late Latin, in which similarities with the new Romance languages were already outlined. In the IV century, medieval Latin was formed, which was significantly influenced by Christianity. The Bible was translated into Latin, and since then it has become a sacred language. All theological works were written in it. Figures of the Renaissance also used Latin to write their works: Leonardo da Vinci, Petrarch, Boccaccio wrote in it.
Latin is a dead language
Gradually, the Latin language disappeared from the speech of people, in the Middle Ages, more and more often local dialects were used as an oral language, but Latin lived in religious texts, scientific treatises, biographies and other works. The rules for the pronunciation of sounds were forgotten, the grammar changed a little, but the Latin language lived on.
Officially, it can be called a dead language since the 6th century, after the fall of the Roman Empire, when barbarian states began to flourish and Latin gradually disappeared from everyday use. Linguists call a dead language a language that does not exist in everyday life, is not used in live oral communication, but exists in the form of written monuments. If there is not a single person who speaks the language as a native, then the language is considered dead.
But Latin is a special dead language that can hardly be called such. The fact is that it is still actively used in many areas of life. Latin is widely used in medicine and biology, as well as in other sciences, but even in ordinary life, people still use some proverbs and sayings in Latin.
In addition, Latin is actively used by the Catholic Church, it is the official language of the Vatican, the Holy See and the Order of Malta.
