Studies in the Latin of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

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Excerpt from Studies in the Latin of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

It is an interesting as well as a significant fact that Latin, the language that has played the most important part of any perhaps in the history of the civilized world, has during almost its whole literary existence been the language of a class, holding itself aloof from the household tongue of the common people even when most intimately related to it. At the very time of its greatest degradation it was to a certain extent aristocratic in its character, its traditions, and its sympathies. This fact is significant; for upon it probably depended the very possibility of Latin's continuing a world language. No form of speech could long withstand the discrete, disintegrating tendencies of the commons, though it might continue to serve for a long period as the universal tongue of the narrower sympathied, but, from the point of view of nationality, more liberally educated classes. It is no ordinary phenomenon that this language, so foreign in its very essence to modern life, should still remain the touchstone of culture through all the enlightened world. If we can throw though it be but a partial and transient light upon some of the features of its genesis and history that help to explain this fact, the object of the present writer will have been attained.

The literary language of Rome at the time of Cicero and Augustus was a cultivated variety of the Roman dialect of Latin. It represented the result of a process of differentiation that had been going on for over two centuries, separating the originally homogeneous speech into a cultivated and a vulgar dialect, a process that had been hastened and emphasized by the introduction of Greek culture at Rome, and by the political importance which the conquests of Rome's generals had given to her language in the legal and administrative world.

As such, the literary idiom of Rome must be distinguished from the dialect of the Roman com…

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