Latin

Indo-European language of ancient Italy. Latin has passed through four influential phases: as the language of (1) republican Rome, (2) the Roman Empire, (3) the Roman Catholic Church, and (4) Western European culture, science, philosophy, and law during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. During the third and fourth phases, much Latin vocabulary entered the English language. It is the parent form of the Romance languages, noted for its highly inflected grammar and conciseness of expression.

The direct influence of Latin in Europe has decreased since Renaissance times but is still considerable, and indirectly both the language and its classical literature still affect many modern languages and literatures. The insistence of Renaissance scholars upon an exact classical purity, together with the rise of the European nation-states, contributed to the decline of Latin as an international cultural medium.

Latin vocabulary has entered English in two major waves: as religious vocabulary from Anglo-Saxon times until the Reformation, and as the vocabulary of science, scholarship, and the law from the Middle Ages onwards. In the 17th century the makers of English dictionaries deliberately converted Latin words into English, enlarging the already powerful French component of English vocabulary into the language of education and refinement, placing ‘fraternity’ alongside ‘brotherhood’, ‘comprehend’ beside ‘understand’, ‘feline’ beside ‘catlike’, and so on. Many ‘Latin tags’ are in regular use in English: ‘habeas corpus’ (‘you may have the body’), ‘ipse dixit’ (‘he said it himself’), ‘non sequitur’ (‘it does not follow’), and so on. English that consists of many Latin elements is ‘Latinate’ and often has a grandiose and even pompous quality.

Today, with fewer students studying Latin in schools and universities, there is a tendency to make Latin words more conventionally English; for example, ‘cactuses’ rather than ‘cacti’ as the plural of ‘cactus’. This tendency is accompanied by some uncertainty about usage, for example whether words like ‘data’ and ‘media’ are singular or plural. They are technically plural and are so treated by scholars, writers, and editors.