Latin in the History of English

This page forms part of an etymology course that gives an outline of the development of English. It is written in a sequence that you may want to follow. The best place to start, if you want to follow the whole course, is Etymology course, or, if you are only interested in English, Development of English. You may also arrive at any of these articles from other links. For more information about the history of English, you should of course read a good history of the language, such as Baugh (1993), Strang (1970), or Crystal (2005)

Latin, the language of the ancient Romans, has undergone many changes in the two thousand years since the Roman was the greatest empire in Western Europe. Of these, three particular phases may be distinguished with a direct effect on the English language. (This is to leave aside the influence of the Romance languages which arose from the ashes of classical Latin.)

• Up until the fifteenth century, many people, particularly in the Church, used Latin as the language of their daily speech on professional matters. The variety that they used would have been hard for an educated Roman of the classical period to understand: he would have found it barbarous. But Vulgar Latin. or as we now call it medieval Latin, was a living language, spoken naturally enough and developing along with the society that used it. It was spoken internationally - in England as much as any other European country.
• A movement known as humanism began in Italy in the fourteenth century, and spread to England in the fifteenth. This movement took as its first principle the recreation of classical Latin. By so doing, it stifled the real everyday use of Vulgar Latin, and forced it into the straitjacket of a dead language which was learned in school rather than spoken at work. The fact that it dealt very largely with writing that predated the acceptance of Christianity reduced the association of Latin with the Church - hence the label of 'humanist'.
• Finally, with the Reformation - a movement which has been ascribed by some writers at least in part to the development of humanism - Latin ceased to be the language of religion. From now, it was the language of scholarship and Higher Education.

Much of the information in this page is derived from Blake, 2002. You may also want to consult Latin and Romance languages for information less centred on the English language.