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New Latin
The term New Latin or Modern Latin or Neo-Latin is used to describe the phase of natural development of the Latin Language, from the end of the Medieval Latin period at about 1500 A.D, to the present. This should be distinguished from reinvigorated use of the Classical Latin language which developed during the same time period ? although the two are tightly interlinked, and the line between actual "New Latin" and "bad Classical Latin" is never exactly definable. The heyday of New Latin was its first two centuries, when in the continuation of the Medieval Latin tradition, it served as the primary language of science, education, and to some degree diplomacy in Europe. Classic works such as Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687) were written in the language. By about 1700 A.D., the growing movement for the use of national languages (already found earlier in literature and the Protestant religious movement) had reached academia, and an often-cited example of the transition is Newton's writing career, which began in New Latin and ended in English (e.g. Opticks, 1704). New Latin remained in vigorous use in the Catholic Church, however, through the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65, with all priests expected to have competency in it, and all Catholic school students studying the language. It is still today the official language of the Church and the Vatican State, and widespread use of the Latin Mass has recently been re-approved by Pope Benedict XVI. It has also remained the language of the binomial nomenclature system for biology, and is in vigorous and productive use for that purpose today. In legal affairs, a vast number of terms and phrases were incorporated into English (and other modern languages) from New Latin, producing what is humorously called "Legalese", and much of this terminology remains in use today, although in recent decades there has been some movement towards a populist "Plain English" in the law. In secular academic use, however, New Latin declined sharply and then continuously after about 1700 A.D., and by the 20th Century had become little more than a hobby for Latin enthusiasts. But parallel to the slow decline of New Latin per se, was the rise of an increasingly re-"purified" Classical Latin as the subject of language learning and Classical Latin literature studies. This Classical Latin revival itself peaked in the late 19th Century, and declined during the 20th Century. Today New Latin is unknown as an academic subject in schools and universities (except for advanced historical language studies), and it is Classical Latin which is the "Latin" that is studied by language learners, and typically still used for limited cultural purposes such as mottoes and occasionally the naming of academic journals or organizations.
ExtentClassicists use the term "Neo-Latin" to describe the use of the Latin language for any purpose, scientific or literary, after the Renaissance. The beginning of the period is imprecise; however, the spread of secular education, the acceptance of humanistic literary norms, and the wide availability of Latin texts following the invention of printing mark the transition to a new era at the end of the 1400s. The end of the New Latin period is likewise indeterminate, but Latin as a regular vehicle of communicating ideas became rare after the first few decades of the 19th century, and by 1900 it survived primarily in International Scientific Vocabulary cladistics and systematics. The term "New Latin" came into widespread use towards the end of the 1890s among linguists and scientists. At the beginning of the period, Latin was a universal school subject, and indeed, the pre-eminent subject for elementary education in Western Europe and those places which shared its culture. All universities required Latin proficiency (obtained in local grammar schools) to obtain admittance as a student. New Latin was, at least in its early days, an international language used throughout Catholic and Protestant Europe, as well as in the colonies of the major European powers. As an auxiliary language to the local vernaculars, it appeared in a wide variety of documents, ecclesiastical, legal, diplomatic, academic, and scientific. While a text written in English, French, or Spanish at this time might be understood by a significant cross section of the learned, only a Latin text could be certain of finding someone to interpret it anywhere between Lisbon and Helsinki. PronunciationNew Latin had no single pronunciation, but a host of local variants or dialects, all distinct both from each other and from the historical pronunciation of Latin at the time of the Roman Republic and Empire. As a rule, the local pronunciation of Latin used sounds identical to those of the dominant local language; the result of a concurrently evolving pronunciation in the living languages and the corresponding spoken dialects of Latin. Despite this variation, there are some common characteristics to nearly all of the dialects of New Latin, for instance:
The following table illustrates some of the variation of New Latin consonants found in various countries of Western Europe, compared to the Classical Latin pronunciation of the 1st centuries BCE-CE[1]. In Eastern Europe, the pronunciation of Latin was generally similar to that used in Germany.
OrthographyNew Latin texts are primarily found in early printed editions, which present certain features of spelling and the use of diacritics which are distinct from the Latin of antiquity, medieval Latin manuscript conventions, and representations of Latin in modern printed editions. CharactersIn spelling, New Latin, in all but the earliest texts, distinguishes the letter u from v and i from j. In older printed texts, including most from the first decades of the 17th century, v was used in initial position (even when it represented a vowel, e.g. in vt, later printed ut) and u was used elsewhere, e.g. in nouus, later printed novus. By the middle decades of the 1600s, the letter v was used for the consonantal sound of Roman V, which in most pronunciations of Latin in the New Latin period was (and not ), as in vulnus "wound", corvus "crow". Where the pronunciation remained , as after g, q and s, the spelling u continued to be used for the consonant, e.g. in lingua, qualis, and suadeo. The letter j generally represented a consonantal sound (pronounced in various ways in different European countries, e.g. , , , ). It appeared, for instance, in jam "now" or jubet "orders" (now spelled iam and iubet). It was also found between vowels in the words ejus, hujus, cujus (now normally spelled eius, huius, cuius), and pronounced as a consonant. J was also used when the last in a sequence of two or more is, e.g. radij (now spelled radii) "rays", alijs "to others", iij, the Roman numeral 3; however, ij was for the most part replaced by ii by 1700. In common with texts in other languages using the Roman alphabet, Latin texts down to c. 1800 used ? (the long s) for s in positions other than at the end of a word; e.g. ip?i??imus. The diphthongs ae and oe were rarely if ever so written; instead the digraphs æ and ? were used, e.g. Cæsar, p?na. More rarely (and usually in early 17th-century texts) the e caudata is found substituting for either. DiacriticsThree kinds of diacritic were in common use: the acute accent ´, the grave accent `, and the circumflex accent ?. These were normally only marked on vowels (e.g. í, è, â); but see below regarding que. The acute accent marked a stressed syllable, but was usually confined to those where the stress was not in its normal position, as determined by vowel length and syllabic weight. In practice, it was typically found on the vowel in the syllable immediately preceding a final clitic, particularly que "and", ve "or" and ne, a question marker; e.g. idémque "and the same (thing)". By some printers, however, this acute accent was placed over the q in que when that clitic followed, e.g. eorumq?ue "and their". The acute accent fell out of favor by the 19th century. The grave accent had various uses, none related to pronunciation or stress. It was always found on the preposition à (variant of ab "by" or "from") and likewise on the preposition è (variant of ex "from" or "out of"). Most frequently, it was found on the last (or only) syllable of various adverbs and conjunctions, particularly those which might be confused with prepositions or with inflected forms of nouns, verbs, or adjectives. Examples include certè "certainly", verò "but", primùm "at first", pòst "afterwards", cùm "when", adeò "so far, so much", unà "together", quàm "than". In some texts the grave was found over the clitics que et al., in which case the acute accent did not appear before them. The circumflex accent represented metrical length (generally not distinctively pronounced in the New Latin period) and was chiefly found over an a, when that represented an ablative singular case, e.g. eâdem formâ "with the same shape". It might also be used to distinguish two words otherwise spelled identically, but distinct in vowel length; e.g. hîc "here" differentiated from hic "this", fugêre "they have fled" (=f?g?runt) distinguished from fugere "to flee", or senatûs "of the senate" distinct from senatus "the senate". It might also be used for vowels arising from contraction, e.g. nôsti for novisti "you know", imperâsse for imperavisse "to have commanded", or dî for dei or dii. Notable works (1500-1900)
Erasmus by Holbein Literature and biography
Scientific works
Other technical subjects
History of New LatinNew Latin was inaugurated by the triumph of the humanist reform of Latin education, led by such writers as Erasmus, More, and Colet. Medieval Latin had been the practical working language of the Roman Catholic Church, taught throughout Europe to aspiring clerics and refined in the medieval universities. It was a flexible and living language, full of neologisms and often composed without reference to the grammar or style of classical (usually pre-Christian) authors. While accepting many of the strengths of Medieval Latin, the humanist reformers sought both to purify Latin grammar and style, and to make Latin applicable to concerns beyond the ecclesiastical, creating a body of Latin literature outside the bounds of the Church. The Protestant Reformation (1520-1580), though it removed Latin from the liturgies of the churches of Northern Europe, may have advanced the cause of the new secular Latin. The period during and after the Reformation, coinciding with the growth of printed literature, saw the growth of an immense body of New Latin literature, on all kinds of secular as well as religious subjects. Through most of the 17th century, Latin was supreme as an international language, used in negotiations between nations and the writing of treaties. In the 18th century, however, Latin came to experience a decline. Starting in the 1710s, French replaced Latin as a diplomatic language, due to the commanding presence in Europe of the France of Louis XIV. At the same time, some (like King Frederick William I of Prussia) were dismissing Latin as a useless accomplishment, unfit for a man of practical affairs. These two factors combined to push Latin into a death spiral from which it never recovered; as it was gradually abandoned by various fields, and as less written material appeared in it, there was less of a practical reason for anyone to bother to learn Latin; as fewer people knew Latin, there was less reason for material to be written in the language, to appeal to a diminishing audience. With both a shrinking literature and readership, Latin came to be viewed as esoteric, irrelevant, and worst of all, too difficult. As languages like French, German, and English came to be more widely known, recourse to a 'difficult' auxiliary language would seem unnecessary; while the argument that Latin could be used to expand readership beyond a single nation was fatally weakened if, in fact, Latin readers did not compose a majority of the intended audience. As the 18th century progressed, the extensive literature in Latin being produced at the beginning slowly contracted, until by 1800 it was only a trickle. It lasted longest in very specific fields (e.g. botany) where it had acquired a technical character, and where a literature available only to a small number of learned individuals could remain viable. The perpetuation of Ecclesiastical Latin in the Roman Catholic Church through the 20th century can be considered a special case of the same. Even with the decline in the production of Latin literature, Latin as a language held a place of educational pre-eminence until the second half of the nineteenth century. At that point its value was increasingly questioned; in the twentieth century, educational philosophies such as that of John Dewey dismissed its relevance. At the same time, the philological study of Latin appeared to show that the traditional methods and materials for teaching Latin were dangerously out of date and ineffective. The late 19th and early 20th century saw a revolution in Latin teaching which, however, either arrived too late to be effective or, perhaps, by disrupting traditional pædagogical structures, contributed to the abandonment of Latin. Part of this revolution involved a reorientation of Latin pædagogy to focus almost exclusively (in texts, vocabulary, and grammar) on classical texts from the early Roman period (e.g. Cæsar and Cicero) while deprecating the Latinity of more recent centuries. Latin thus came to be taught as a "dead language", relevant only in a certain historical context, and incapable of being applied to contemporary subjects. By 1900, very few new texts were being created in Latin. Schools which had traditionally taught Latin to the upper classes, less as practical measure than as an "accomplishment", found themselves teaching a greater diversity of students, including many to whom Latin had neither practical nor sentimental value. The result, seen in the first decades of the twentieth century, was a decline in Latin proficiency; Latin instruction, for the first time, being required to justify its own existence; and upon failing to do so, being abolished or severely restricted in many schools. The result was that by the mid-20th century, even the trivial acquaintance with Latin typical of the 19th-century student was a thing of the past. RelicsAmong the lasting inheritances of New Latin is the system of binomial nomenclature and classification of living organisms devised by Carolus Linnæus; the need for apt names within an (at least superficially) Latin structure continues to drive the development of new Latin or quasi-Latin vocabulary today.[2] Another continuation is the use of Latin names for the surface features of planets and planetary satellites (planetary nomenclature), originated in the mid-17th century for selenographic toponyms. References
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See alsoExternal links
af:Nieu-Latyn cs:Nová latina de:Neulateinische Literatur es:Neolatín fr:Néo-latin la:Lingua Neolatina no:Nylatin pt:Neolatim zh:???? Source: Wikipedia | The above article is available under the GNU FDL. | Edit this article
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