Latin is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Considered a dead language, Latin was originally spoken in Latium, the lower Tiber area around Rome. Through the expansion of the Roman Republic it became the dominant language in the Italian Peninsula and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. Even after the fall of Western Rome, Latin remained the common language of international communication, science, scholarship and academia in Europe until well into the 18th century, when regional vernaculars supplanted it in common academic and political usage. For most of the time it was used, it would be considered a "dead language" in the modern linguistic definition; that is, it lacked native speakers, despite being used extensively and actively.
Lexicology is the branch of linguistics that analyzes the lexicon of a specific language. A word is the smallest meaningful unit of a language that can stand on its own, and is made up of small components called morphemes and even smaller elements known as phonemes, or distinguishing sounds. Lexicology examines every feature of a word – including formation, spelling, origin, usage, and definition.
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.
Neo-Latin is the style of written Latin used in original literary, scholarly, and scientific works, first in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries' Italian Renaissance, and then across northern Europe after about 1500, as a key feature of the humanist movement. Through comparison with Latin of the Classical period, scholars from Petrarch onwards promoted a standard of Latin closer to that of the ancient Romans, especially in grammar, style and spelling. The term Neo-Latin was however coined much later, probably in Germany in the late 1700s, as Neulatein, spreading to French and other languages in the nineteenth century.
Semantics is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and computer science.
A noun is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.
An idiom is a phrase or expression that usually presents a figurative, non-literal meaning attached to the phrase. Some phrases which become figurative idioms, however, do retain the phrase's literal meaning. Categorized as formulaic language, an idiom's figurative meaning is different from the literal meaning. Idioms occur frequently in all languages; in English alone there are an estimated twenty-five million idiomatic expressions.
A loanword is a word at least partly assimilated from one language into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because they share an etymological origin; and calques, which involve translation. Loanwords from languages with different scripts are usually transliterated, but they are not translated. Additionally, loanwords may be adapted to the phonology, phonotactics, orthography, and morphology of the target language. When a loanword is fully adapted to the rules of the target language, it is distinguished from native words of the target language only by its origin. However, often the adaptation is incomplete, so loanwords may conserve specific features distinguishing them from native words of the target language: loaned phonemes and sound combinations, partial or total conserving of the original spelling, foreign plural or case forms or indeclinability.
International scientific vocabulary (ISV) comprises scientific and specialized words whose language of origin may or may not be certain, but which are in current use in several modern languages.
A gloss is a brief notation, especially a marginal one or an interlinear one, of the meaning of a word or wording in a text. It may be in the language of the text or in the reader's language if that is different.
A classical language is any language with an independent literary tradition and a large body of ancient written literature.
Medieval Latin was the form of Literary Latin used in Roman Catholic Western Europe during the Middle Ages. In this region it served as the primary written language, though local languages were also written to varying degrees. Latin functioned as the main medium of scholarly exchange, as the liturgical language of the Church, and as the working language of science, literature, law, and administration.
Although English is a Germanic language, it has Latin influences. Its grammar and core vocabulary are inherited from Proto-Germanic, but a significant portion of the English vocabulary comes from Romance and Latinate sources. A portion of these borrowings come directly from Latin, or through one of the Romance languages, particularly Anglo-Norman and French, but some also from Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish; or from other languages into Latin and then into English. The influence of Latin in English, therefore, is primarily lexical in nature, being confined mainly to words derived from Latin and Greek roots.
Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact with and influence each other. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Language contact can occur at language borders, between adstratum languages, or as the result of migration, with an intrusive language acting as either a superstratum or a substratum.
Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Modern Written Arabic (MWA) is the variety of standardized, literary Arabic that developed in the Arab world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and in some usages also the variety of spoken Arabic that approximates this written standard. MSA is the language used in literature, academia, print and mass media, law and legislation, though it is generally not spoken as a first language, similar to Contemporary Latin. It is a pluricentric standard language taught throughout the Arab world in formal education, differing significantly from many vernacular varieties of Arabic that are commonly spoken as mother tongues in the area; these are only partially mutually intelligible with both MSA and with each other depending on their proximity in the Arabic dialect continuum.
Neoclassical compounds are compound words composed from combining forms derived from classical languages roots. Neo-Latin comprises many such words and is a substantial component of the technical and scientific lexicon of English and other languages, via international scientific vocabulary (ISV). For example, Greek bio- combines with Latin -graphy to form biography.
Spanish is a Romance language which developed from Vulgar Latin in central areas of the Iberian peninsula and has absorbed many loanwords from other Romance languages like French, Occitan, Catalan, Portuguese, and Italian. Spanish also has lexical influences from Arabic and from Paleohispanic languages such as Iberian, Celtiberian and Basque.
Linguistic purism or linguistic protectionism is the prescriptive practice of defining or recognizing one variety of a language as being purer or of intrinsically higher quality than other varieties. Linguistic purism was institutionalized through language academies, and their decisions often have the force of law.
English prefixes are affixes that are added before either simple roots or complex bases consisting of (a) a root and other affixes, (b) multiple roots, or (c) multiple roots and other affixes. Examples of these follow:
In linguistics, specifically the sub-field of lexical semantics, the concept of lexical innovation includes the use of neologism or new meanings in order to introduce new terms into a language's lexicon. Most commonly, this is found in technical disciplines where new concepts require names, which often takes the form of jargon. For example, in the subjects of sociology or philosophy, there is an increased technicalization in terminology in the English language for different concepts over time. Many novel terms or meanings in a language are created as a result of translation from a source language, in which certain concepts were first introduced.
