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A Natural History or Latin tells its history from its origins over 2500 years ago to the present. Brilliantly conceived, popularizing but authoritative, and written with the fluency and light touch that have made Tore Janson's Speak so attractive to tens of thousands of readers, it is a masterpiece of adroit synthesis.
overview of Roman history and culture along with a history of the rise, spread, and decline of Latin, its change from mother tongue of an empire to a language of wider communication, and its place in Western cultures and languages today. More distracting than the least relevant anecdotes are the sometimes extensive expressions of the
Latin was spoken by the ancient Romans, who dominated much of Europe and the Mediterranean world from the 1st century BC to the 5th century AD. Latin was the language of the Roman Empire, and it was spoken by soldiers, scholars, merchants, and politicians throughout the Roman world. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Latin continued to be used ...
History of Latin. An irreverent but true chronology by Timothy J. Pulju. 753 BC Traditional date of the founding of the city of Rome by Romulus, a fictional character who killed his twin brother Remus, populated his city with escaped convicts, and found wives for his subjects by kidnapping Sabine women who had come for a visit. At this stage ...
Written Latin. What is true of babies tends to be true of societies. They begin by speaking and only later pick up writing. Languages, as a rule, begin their lives orally. Materials like alphabets can take centuries to appear. The invention of writing is a watershed moment in the history of any language.
Vulgar Latin, as in this political graffito at Pompeii, was the language of the ordinary people of the Roman Empire, distinct from the Classical Latin of literature.. Vulgar Latin (in Latin, sermo vulgaris) is a blanket term covering vernacular usage or dialects of the Latin language spoken from earliest times in Italy until the latest dialects of the Western Roman Empire, diverging significantly after 500 CE, evolved into the early Romance languages, whose writings began to appear about the ...
Etruscan alphabet. Latin alphabet, the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world, the standard script of the English language and the languages of most of Europe and those areas settled by Europeans. Developed from the Etruscan alphabet at some time before 600 bce, it can be traced through Etruscan, Greek, and Phoenician scripts ...
