The Lord’s Prayer in Latin:

Pater noster, qui es in caelis,
sanctificetur nomen tuum.
Adveniat regnum tuum.
Fiat voluntas tua,
sicut in caelo et in terra.
Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie,
et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut
et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris.
Et ne nos inducas in tentationem,
sed libera nos a malo.
Amen.

Latin, the ancient language of Rome and therefore of the West, was the main language of the Roman Empire and of the Catholic Church. Up until at least 1700 it was the language that anyone in the West with a good education would know. French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian come from Latin. So do most English words, directly or indirectly.

We tend to think of Latin as the language of Cicero and Caesar, which disappeared after the fall of Rome. It was nothing like that.

Latin continued to be spoken, but in time it turned into French and Italian and so on. And even after the Latin of the streets had become French, the priests and many of the top people continued to speak and write in Latin. Maybe not the high-flown Latin of Cicero, but Latin nonetheless.

Languages that come from Latin are called Romance languages. The following have at least a million speakers (the numbers are how many millions of speakers each has):

  • Latin
    • Classical Latin
    • Vulgar Latin
      • Sardinian (2)
      • Romanian (27)
      • Italian (62)
      • Ligurian (2)
      • Walloon (1)
      • French (120)
      • Haitian Creole ( 8)
      • Occitan (2)
      • Catalan (11)
      • Spanish (400)
      • Galician (4)
      • Portuguese (200)

These languages did not come from the Latin of Cicero, the sort of Latin found in books, but the Latin of the streets, known as Vulgar Latin. Just as Australian English did not come from Oxford and Cambridge, but from the streets of London.

As a language Latin works differently than English.

In English the relation between words in a sentence are shown by word order and by prepositions. In Latin this is largely done by word endings.

So where in English you would say:

I love the moon

in Latin you would say:

Amo lunam

In Latin you can change the order and say

Lunam amo

and it would mean the same thing. But in English if you said

Moon the love I

it would be strange and meaningless. Latin can do this because the -am at the end of lunam shows that it is the object of the verb, amo. So the order does not matter.

If you take Latin in school, most likely you will read Caesar first, then Virgil, then Horace and Cicero. But another way to do it is to start with the Latin Bible and writings from the Middle Ages where the Latin is looser and simpler. The Latin in Aquinas and the Bible is very easy to read.

If you speak English, then Latin is the best language to learn: most English words came from Latin - or from French, which in turn comes from Latin. English makes a lot more sense when you know Latin.

See also: