Latin Dead Language

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Language is integral to our culture. It is how we share ideas, express our beliefs, and collaborate with others to strive towards a worthy ideal. Though the primary language of our country is English, our national motto which was adopted in 1776 is “e pluribus unum”, meaning “out of many one” is Latin. Beyond this example, Latin has an extremely heavy influence on the English language. Though many people consider it to be a dead language, it is not as Latin continues to shape American lives as it is still used today to express our ideas and is used universally to classify phenomena and creatures in science.
Before language can be defined we must first recognize what it is comprised of: symbols, sounds, and speech. “Symbols are sounds or meanings …show more content…

Dialects are variations of a language that are spoken in a smaller region of a country, but Latin was spoken throughout the majority of the Roman Empire which comprised multiple modern-day countries. An example of a dialect would be Swedish and Danish, these are two separate languages but they share enough words and structural rules that the native speakers of these languages adjust to each other’s communication differences with little trouble. In addition, colloquialisms are words or phrases that are not formal and bad grammar occurs when the rules of a written language governing how sentences and phrases are organized are broken. In the United States an example of a colloquialism would the use of the word “y’all” in the South which is informal and the use of the alternative word “ you guys” in the North. In addition, an example of bad grammar would be the simple misspelling of a word. A language is a set of rules that govern how sentences and phrases are organized and Latin has own unique set of rules that sets it apart from all other languages, so it must be considered a …show more content…

A dead language is a language that is no longer spoken in everyday use. Examples of actual dead languages are Ancient Egyptian, Old Norse, Ancient Greek, and Coptic. In order for one to make a claim that it is a dead language one would have to ignore its continued presence, and influence on the majority of Romance languages such as English, Spanish, and French, Latin never died it simply transformed. Latin is actively used today throughout in many branches of science examples being medical, biology, botany, zoology, architecture, and geography. For example, the scientific classifications of all known living things are written in Latin using seven different groups: Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. Though no one is fluent in Latin anymore, it is commonly learned by scholars so it made a great lingua franca in the European scientific community. Latin’s influence on English is so prominent that if one studies Latin they tend to be able to intuitively recognize and define vocabulary words they have not encountered

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