New Latin

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New Latin
Spoken in: Europe
Language extinction: developed into Recent Latin by the 20th century
Language family: Indo-European
 Italic
  Latino-Faliscan
   New Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-1: la
ISO 639-2: lat
ISO 639-3: lat
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

New Latin (or Neo-Latin) is a post-medieval version of Latin, used approximately in the period 1600–1900.

Contents

[edit] Extent

Classicists use the term "Neo-Latin" to describe the use of the Latin language for any purpose, scientific or literary, after the Renaissance (for which purpose they often use the date 1600), although, for example, the editors of I Tatti Renaissance Library call their Renaissance Latin language texts Neo-Latin as well. The end of the New Latin period is unspecified, 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.

[edit] Notable scientific works in New Latin since 1600

Other notable works in Neo-Latin include:

Latin in this period came to be regarded as a medium for "serious" and learned expression; this view left little room for the use of Latin as a literary medium, for poetry, or for creative fiction (outside of translations made by ethnographers and folklorists). One of the last writers of any significant literary reputation to have written a large body of purely literary work in Latin was John Milton, better known for his English poetry. However, some lighter pieces were produced in Neo-Latin, for instance Johannes Kepler's scientific fantasy Somnium (1634) and Ludvig Holberg's satire Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum (1741) [6].

Other, later, authors, including Max Beerbohm and Arthur Rimbaud, have written Latin verse, but these texts have been either school exercises or occasional pieces.

[edit] Abandonment

The reasons for the abandonment of Latin as the primary international intellectual language varied, and it is difficult to pinpoint a single cause, especially since there was no sharp cutoff, but rather a slow diminuendo occupying the greater part of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Although Latin was supreme as an international language in the 17th century, in the early decades of the 18th century its place as a language of international diplomacy came to be taken by French, 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. 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.

Nonetheless, Latin held a place of educational pre-eminence until the second half of the nineteenth century, when its value was increasingly questioned; in the twentieth century, educational philosophies such as that of John Dewey dismissed its relevance. Nevertheless, throughout this period Ecclesiastical Latin continued to maintain its position of pre-eminence in the Roman Catholic Church.

Among the possible causes of the final abandonment of Latin as the primary international intellectual language were:

  • The growth of romantic nationalism in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and the consequent increase in emphasis on local traditions and languages.
  • The greater prominence given to scientific over humanistic subjects, including Latin (despite the fact that many of the foundational scientific texts were written in Latin).
  • The growth of a feeling that Latin was esoteric and irrelevant, and that international communication would be better served by learning foreign languages directly, than by using an auxiliary medium such as Latin. The later 19th century, however, felt the absence of Latin as an auxiliary language, and such languages as Volapük and Esperanto were invented to fill the gap.
  • The increasing classical emphasis of Latin classes, whose texts, vocabulary, and grammar were (and are) drawn almost exclusively from the Roman period, and which placed little value on the ability to write about contemporary subjects in Latin.

With attempts to bring non-classical vocabulary into Latin condemned as barbarous, and the natural tendency of amateur Latin writers to approximate the syntax and style of their native tongue condemned as solecism, it was easier for writers to use their own languages and avoid condemnation for imperfect Latin. Disappointment with the levels of proficiency achieved in Latin by education was a frequently expressed theme. This perceived level of failure was in fact related to the exclusive teaching of classical Latin as an object of antiquarian study, and the use of classical norms rather than looser or contemporary usage as the standard to which written and spoken Latin should aspire. As Latin came to be less used outside the schoolroom, many Latin students went on to forget most of the Latin they had once known.

[edit] Relics

Among the lasting inheritances of New Latin is the system of binomial nomenclature and classification of living organisms devised by Carolus Linnaeus; 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.[1] 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.

[edit] References

  • IJsewijn, Jozef with Dirk Sacré. Companion to Neo-Latin Studies. 2 vols. Leuven University Press, 1990-1998.
  • Waquet, Françoise, Latin, or the Empire of a Sign: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (Verso, 2003) ISBN 1-85984-402-2; translated from the French by John Howe.

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ For instance, the scientific name of the shearwater genus Puffinus is a New Latin loanword derived from the English term "puffin" for some entirely unrelated seabirds. Puffinus shearwaters were usually called mergus in Classical Latin. This was a catchall term for seabirds, which in New Latin became the genus name for another unrelated group of birds.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Look up New Latin in
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Ages of Latin
v • d • e
—75 BC    75 BC – 200    200 – 900    200 – 1300    1300 – 1600    1600 – 1900   1900 – present
Old Latin    Classical Latin    Vulgar Latin    Medieval Latin    Renaissance Latin   New Latin    Recent Latin
See also: History of Latin, Latin literature, Vulgar Latin, Ecclesiastical Latin, Romance languages, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum