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What’s with this “Wren” thing?
The oldest extant version of the fable
we
are presenting here appeared in 1913 in the first volume of a two-volume anthology
of Low
Saxon folktales (Plattdeutsche
Volksmärchen “Low German Folktales”)
collected by Wilhelm Wisser (1843–1935). Read
more ...
Lingua Latina
Latin
A
Latin inscription in Wroxeter, England—one
of many witnesses
of Britain’s
Roman past
Language
information: Latin is the oldest fully extant Romance language, the language of the Roman
empire, the Roman Catholic Church and of pre-contemporary European learning.
It continues to be used in writing, to some extent also as a non-native spoken
language.
Latin originated
in
the ancient country of Latium, an area around the city of Rome, and from there
developed into the language of the Roman Republic
and
the
Roman Empire, later also into the lingua franca of Christianity and into the
lingua franca of virtually all scholarly disciplines
as
well. The early development of Latin owes much to Etruscan and Greek influences,
and
there
appear to be some early influences from Umbrian and Oscan as well.
The Latin
script,
which is also known as the “Roman script” and is now the most extensively used
script throughout
the
world,
grew
mostly
out
of
the Etruscan and Greek scripts.
Being a synthetic
type of language with an extensive inflexional system, Latin has relatively
flexible sentence structure. Its phonology has short and long vowel phonemes
which are
distinguished in
writing only in textbooks.
The
spread of Latin as a lingua franca at the
farthest extent of Roman power under under Trajan in 117 CE. During
medieval times, Latin became a lingua franca throughout Europe and
later spread as the foremost language of learning throughout the
world.
There
are the following main
varieties of Latin: Old (or Ancient, –75 BCE), Classical (–200 CE), “Vulgar” (–900 CE), Medieval (–1300 CE), Reinaissance (–1500 CE), New (–1900 CE) and Contemporary (–present). There are indications that at least since Classical Latin times there were Jewish varieties of Latin: Judeo-Latin, also known as La‘az.
The distinction
between Classical and Vulgar Latin existed already in Roman times and roughly
corresponds to
literary/oratory
and everyday
spoken
varieties respectively. Old Latin was archaic already in Roman times.
Vulgar Latin
developed
into
a
multitude
of
dialects as the Roman empire expanded, non-Romans adopted Latin and new Latin
dialects
thus
developed
on
substrates
of
indigenous
languages of distant annexed lands. These “Vulgar” Latin dialects gradually developed into the various Romance languages of today
(e.g. Italian, Franco-Provençal, French, Norman, Picard, Walloon, Occitan,
Catalan-Valencian-Balearic, Castilian,
Portuguese,
Galician,
Asturian, Corsican, Sardinian, Sicilian, Ladin, Friulian, Rhaetic, Romanian,
Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian). As has Latin itself, some of these descendants
(especially French, Spanish, Portuguese
and Italian)
have influenced Germanic, Celtic and Slavonic languages to variously high degrees.
Furthermore,
by way of colonization, they have not
only influenced numerous non-European languages but became the bases of contact
languages all over the world.
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