Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderFact

Latin did not die with the Western Roman Empire in AD 476. Scholars across Europe wrote in it for well over a thousand years, while the everyday Latin of ordinary people slowly turned into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Romanian.

Ikigai Daily

HistoryLanguage

The story behind the card

Linguists call the spoken, everyday form “Vulgar Latin”, from vulgus, the common people; Cicero called it “the speech of the masses”. Between the 6th and 9th centuries it drifted apart region by region into the Romance languages, which hundreds of millions of people speak today. Written Latin, meanwhile, stayed Europe's shared language of learning into the early 19th century. Schools taught largely in Latin until around 1700, and Isaac Newton published his laws of motion and gravity in Latin, in the Principia of 1687. Scientific names still follow the Latin system of Carl Linnaeus, which gives every species a two-part name such as Homo sapiens, “wise human”. Latin is also the official language of the Holy See, the central government of the Catholic Church, and law and medicine are full of Latin terms, from habeas corpus, the right of a detained person to be brought before a judge, to vertebra.

Türkçe oku
Latince, Batı Roma İmparatorluğu'nun MS 476'da yıkılmasıyla ölmedi. Avrupa'nın dört bir yanındaki bilginler bin yılı aşkın bir süre bu dilde yazmayı sürdürdü. Halkın konuştuğu gündelik Latince ise zamanla İtalyanca, İspanyolca, Portekizce, Fransızca ve Rumenceye dönüştü.

Dilbilimciler halkın konuştuğu bu gündelik dile “Halk Latincesi” der; Cicero da ondan “kalabalıkların dili” diye söz etmişti. Bu dil 6. ile 9. yüzyıllar arasında bölgeden bölgeye farklılaşarak “Roman dilleri” denen dil ailesine dönüştü; bugün yüz milyonlarca insan bu dilleri konuşuyor. Yazıda ise Latince 19. yüzyılın başlarına kadar Avrupa'da bilimin ve eğitimin ortak dili olmayı sürdürdü. Okullarda 1700 dolaylarına kadar dersler büyük ölçüde Latince yapılıyordu. Isaac Newton da hareket ve kütle çekimi yasalarını ortaya koyduğu Principia'yı 1687'de Latince yayımladı. Canlıların bilimsel adları bugün hâlâ Carl Linnaeus'un Latince sistemine göre verilir: Her türün Homo sapiens (“bilge insan”) gibi iki sözcüklü bir adı vardır. Latince, Katolik Kilisesi'nin merkezî yönetimi olan Papalığın da resmî dilidir. Hukukta ve tıpta da “habeas corpus” (tutuklanan kişinin yargıç önüne çıkarılma hakkı) ya da “vertebra” (omur) gibi Latince terimler bolca kullanılır.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Latin
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderHistory

Greek scholars from Byzantium were teaching in Italy long before the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453. The conquest sped up a movement of teachers, manuscripts and ideas that had begun more than half a century earlier.

In 1396 Coluccio Salutati, the chancellor of Florence, invited the Byzantine diplomat and scholar Manuel Chrysoloras to teach Greek in the city. He arrived in 1397 and taught there until 1400. One of his pupils, the historian Leonardo Bruni, remembered it as a rare chance: no one in northern Italy, he wrote, had studied Greek for seven hundred years. Chrysoloras's Erotemata (Questions) became the first Greek grammar widely used in western Europe. In 1438–1439 the Council of Florence, called to reunite the Catholic and Orthodox churches, brought more Byzantine thinkers west. The philosopher Gemistos Plethon lectured on Plato, and Bessarion of Trebizond, today's Trabzon, stayed on in Italy as a cardinal. In 1468 Bessarion gave his library, with 482 Greek manuscripts, to Venice, where it became the core of the Biblioteca Marciana.

Ikigai DailyRead card
StillnessHistory

The phrase ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ was coined by the English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton for his 1839 play Richelieu, where the French cardinal says it. The idea that words beat weapons is far older, but this wording is his, and within a few years it had become a stock saying.

Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy opened at the Covent Garden Theatre in London on 7 March 1839, with the famous actor William Charles Macready as Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to King Louis XIII of France. In Act 2 the cardinal says that under the rule of truly great men the pen is mightier than the sword: in a master's hand it can stop emperors in their tracks, and a state can be saved without any sword at all. Others had said something similar long before. A copy of the teachings of the Assyrian sage Ahiqar from about 500 BC says that the word is mightier than the sword, and a line in Shakespeare's Hamlet says that many who wear swords are afraid of goose-quill pens. Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) also gave English ‘the great unwashed’, a sneering name for the masses, and the novel opening ‘It was a dark and stormy night’.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Richelieu (1839)Read card
WonderHistory

After William of Normandy won the Battle of Hastings in 1066, French became the language of England's kings and nobles for about three centuries. Thousands of French words entered English, which is why it often has two words for one thing, such as ‘begin’ and ‘commence’ or ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’.

After the Norman Conquest, England used three languages: French at court and among the nobility, Latin in the Church and in official records, and English among ordinary people. Every king after the Conquest spoke French as his first language until Henry IV, who took the throne in 1399 and was the first whose mother tongue was English. French borrowing peaked between 1250 and 1400, and about a third of English vocabulary is now estimated to come from French, including crown, justice, parliament and marriage. The famous story that English peasants kept ‘cows’ and ‘pigs’ while Norman lords ate ‘beef’ and ‘pork’ is largely a myth, popularised by Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe in 1819: for centuries the French words were used for the live animals as well as the meat.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

On 10 December 1948 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: 30 articles setting out the rights and freedoms that belong to every person. It has since been translated into more than 500 languages, and Guinness World Records lists it as the most translated document in the world.

The declaration was written just after the Second World War, when the new United Nations wanted a common standard of rights for all peoples and nations. A commission chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of the American president Franklin D. Roosevelt, prepared it. The Canadian legal scholar John Humphrey drew up the first draft, and the French jurist René Cassin, the Chinese diplomat P. C. Chang and the Lebanese philosopher Charles Malik helped shape the final text. The UN General Assembly adopted it at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris: 48 countries voted in favour, Turkey among them, none voted against and eight abstained. It is not a treaty, so it does not bind countries by law, but many later treaties and national constitutions build on it. The UN's collection of translations passed 500 in 2016, and 10 December is marked every year as Human Rights Day.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderLanguage

English 'salary' comes from Latin salarium, a word built on sal, 'salt'. The popular story that Roman soldiers were paid in salt has no good evidence behind it: they received a regular wage in coin.

The only ancient writer to connect the two words is Pliny the Elder. In his Natural History, from the AD 70s, he says that salt played a part in public offices and military service and that this is where salarium comes from; he never says soldiers were paid in salt. Roman soldiers received a regular wage in coin, the stipendium, and the Greek historian Polybius records a foot soldier's daily pay in the 2nd century BC. Salt mattered to Rome, as the name of the ancient Via Salaria, the 'salt road', shows, but it was cheap. The 'paid in salt' story seems to have grown out of Latin dictionaries of the 1700s and 1800s, which guessed at a 'salt money' allowance that no ancient text mentions. Nor is 'worth one's salt' Roman: the phrase is first recorded in English in 1830.

Merriam-WebsterRead card
Next card in the archiveMuch of ancient Greek philosophy and science reached us through Byzantine scribes, who kept copying the old texts by hand in Constantinople for more than a thousand years. Before and after the city fell in 1453, Greek scholars carried many of these manuscripts to Italy.Read next →