The mother tongue of the Roman Empire and the lingua franca of the
West for centuries after Rome's fall, Latin survives today
primarily in classrooms and texts. Yet this "dead language" is
unique in the influence it has exerted across centuries and
continents. Jurgen Leonhardt has written a full history of Latin
from antiquity to the present, uncovering how this once parochial
dialect developed into a vehicle of global communication that
remained vital long after its spoken form was supplanted by modern
languages. Latin originated in the Italian region of Latium, around
Rome, and became widespread as that city's imperial might grew. By
the first century BCE, Latin was already transitioning from a
living vernacular, as writers and grammarians like Cicero and Varro
fixed Latin's status as a "classical" language with a codified
rhetoric and rules. As Romance languages spun off from their Latin
origins following the empire's collapse-shedding cases and genders
along the way-the ancient language retained its currency as a world
language in ways that anticipated English and Spanish, but it
ceased to evolve. Leonhardt charts the vicissitudes of Latin in the
post-Roman world: its ninth-century revival under Charlemagne and
its flourishing among Renaissance writers who, more than their
medieval predecessors, were interested in questions of literary
style and expression. Ultimately, the rise of historicism in the
eighteenth century turned Latin from a practical tongue to an
academic subject. Nevertheless, of all the traces left by the
Romans, their language remains the most ubiquitous artifact of a
once peerless empire.
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