from your book: Non scholae, sed vitae discimus. Thank you for your illusions and also many thanks to your wife. I am so happy that we still have people in this world who regard knowledge of Latin and Greek essential to scholarly development. I have always been interested in the origin of words especially from Latin and Greek.īecause the schools do not teach Latin and Greek as they once did, your book would be invaluable in helping students with the English language thereby enriching their thought process. Now that Im retired, Ill have more time. Its been over 45 years since I studied Latin and Greek in college and unless one keeps it up, one tends to forget. You no doubt spent a great amount of time in research. Later, European colonial and commercial contacts spread them to the Americas, Africa, and Asia. It superseded the native tongues of certain conquered European people, although it was also influenced by their local speech practices and by the linguistic characteristics of colonists and later of invaders. This vernacular, known as Vulgar Latin, was spread by soldiers and colonists throughout the Roman Empire. The spread of some Romance languages to other parts of the world, especially the Western Hemisphere, included the colonizing and empire-building of the mother countries of these languages, notably Spain, Portugal, and France.Īll of the Romance languages are descended from Latin and they are called "Romance languages" because their parent tongue, Latin, was the language of the Romans: however, the variety of Latin that was their common ancestor was not classical Latin but the spoken or popular language of everyday usage, which is believed to have differed greatly from classical Latin by the time of the Roman Empire. French is probably the most internationally significant, but Spanish, the official language of nineteen American countries and Spain and Equatorial Guinea, has the most speakers.Īmong the more important Romance languages are Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Occitan, Rhaeto-Romanic, Romanian, and Spanish. The major Romance languages are French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian are national languages. Romance languages consists of groups of related languages derived from Latin, with nearly 920 million native speakers. Modern knowledge of the language is based on statements of Roman grammarians concerning "improper" usages, and on a certain number of inscriptions and early manuscripts, "lapses" in the writings of educated authors, some lists of "incorrect" forms and glossaries of Classical forms, and occasional texts written by or for people of little education. Written materials in Latin almost always make use of Classical Latin forms hence, written documentation of Vulgar Latin is uncommon. The form of Latin that was the commonly spoken language of the western Roman Empire. The common speech of the ancient Romans, which is distinguished from standard literary Latin and is the ancestor of the Romance languages.Ģ. These basic words and their related forms can be seen in this carpo-, carp- (cerp-) unit of "to pluck, to pick out, to gather, to select" words.ġ. The result is that the idea of "plucking" streams through the three widely divergent words just as a scarce thread of color can be woven through the carpet with which this excerpt started. It's like "plucking" from the cookie jar until the cookies become "scanty" and scarce.Īnother related word is excerpt, from Latin excerptus ( ex, "out" and carpo, "pluck") which refers to something that has been "plucked out" of its context. Then there is the term scarce, which English inherited from the French escars, "scanty", originally from the Latin ex, "out", and carpo, "pluck". The word carpet, for example, ultimately derives from the Latin carpo, which meant to "pluck" or to "card" wool, and it is believed that the first carpets were of wooly cloth made of unravelled threads. It appears to be impossible that such far-flung words as carpet, scarce, and excerpt all come from the same Latin verb however, they do, and their histories show the astonishing and unpredictable way some words have developed.