There are three types of Latin: Classical Latin, Vulgar Latin, and Ecclesiastical Latin. Classical Latin was used by the educated Romans and is still studied around the world. Vulgar Latin was the more common spoken variety used by the common Romans and was learned by the peoples conquered by the Romans. Ecclesiastical Latin is common in Italian schools and still used by the Roman Catholic Church.
Latin was the most important language in most of Europe in the Middle Ages. It was taught in many European schools, and all universities used Latin as the teaching language. Latin began to lose its importance in the Reformation, but it was still often used by authors of scientific books and encyclopedias. Until about 1900 many universities accepted dissertations written in Latin.
As people from other regions of Europe learned Vulgar Latin during Roman conquests, each region developed its own language, a simplified form of Latin. Those languages are called Romance languages, and they are still spoken today. The five Romance languages with the largest number of speakers are Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian. The Romance languages are very similar to one another, and speakers of one Romance language can understand many words and sentences (in both texts and spoken conversations) from another Romance language. For example, speakers of Portuguese can often understand Spanish. It can be said that the Romance languages are modern dialects of Latin.
Latin has a similar inflection structure to Ancient Greek but a different alphabet.
Latin has seven different noun cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative and locative. The vocative case is almost always the same as the nominative case; however, if the nominative ends in -us, it changes to -e, and if the nominative ends in -ius, it changes to -i. The locative takes the form of the dative. Latin nouns are "declined", or changed, according to how they are used in the sentence. A noun can be declined five different ways. These ways are called declensions. The declensions are numbered 1 through 5 (first declension, second declension etc), each having different endings that identify the noun's declension. When a noun is declined, twelve forms are made, two for each of the noun cases (the locative is omitted).
A similar thing is done to verbs, called "conjugation". When a verb is conjugated, six forms are made. There are five factors that can change a verb: person, number, tense, voice, and mood. In all, there are 120 possible forms Latin verbs.
Latin used to be written on plates of wax. There was little space and so words were run together, with no space between words. Sometimes papyrus was used, but this was expensive. Punctuation was an ancient idea but came to Latin later. Lowercase letters (small letters) are relatively modern inventions. The Roman alphabet was derived from the Etruscan language.
The following is the introduction to the "Metamorphoses" by Ovid (Book 1, lines 89–100); it describes the Golden Age.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, many people still used Latin. Scholars such as Thomas Aquinas, Petrarch, Erasmus, Luther, Copernicus, Descartes and Newton wrote in Latin. As an example, Hugo Grotius published his "De jure belli ac pacis" (On the Law of War and Peace) in 1625, which is one of the bases of international law.
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages were a period of about a thousand years in European history. They started around the year 476 when the Western Roman Empire ended, and continued until around the time Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World in 1492. The 'Middle Ages' are called this because it is the time between the fall of Imperial Rome and the beginning of the Early modern Europe. This period of time is also known as the Medieval Age, the Dark Ages (due to the lost technology of the Roman empire), or the Age of Faith (because of the rise of Christianity and Islam). When used narrowly, the term "Dark Ages" refer only to a very early period, from 476 to 800 (when Charlemagne became Holy Roman Emperor). Because few could write, less is known about the Dark Ages than about earlier times.
The fall of the Roman Empire, and the invasions of barbarian tribes, devastated European towns and cities and their inhabitants. The Dark Ages are given this name because Europe was in disarray in comparison to the orderliness of classical antiquity and life was short and poor. Much of the knowledge that the Romans used (science, technology, medicine, and literature) was lost. The Dark Ages period was marked by mass migrations, wars and plagues. This lasted some 300 years until the development of feudalism partly diminished the continuous violence. Emperor Charlemagne was crowned in 800 , and he promoted order, education and civilization. Europe began to slowly regain what was lost during those centuries. The Late Middle Age was a tough period due to the Bubonic Plague and more wars which killed millions of people in Europe and Asia.
During the Middle Ages, Europe changed as the remains of the great Western Roman Empire slowly became independent, unified nation states such as England, Scotland, France (Which evolved from the realm of the Franks), Hungary, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Lithuania, Denmark and Norway.
Meanwhile, the remains of Eastern Rome had become the Byzantine Empire, which was started by Roman emperor Constantine in 330 , and likewise had a capital city named Constantinople. The Byzantine empire controlled Asia Minor and Northern Africa, and sometimes Southern Spain and southern Italy, but its lands were slowly eaten away by enemies like the Turks and the Franks.
As a walled city on a peninsula the city of Constantinople was difficult to attack. The Ottoman Turks eventually seized Constantinople in 1453. They called the city by its present-day name, Istanbul. The Fall of Constantinople is sometimes called the end of the Middle Ages.
Islam was founded in the early 7th century by the Islamic prophet, Muhammad. Muslims believe that the Qur'an is God's ultimate revelation to mankind. Islam quickly conquered much of the Middle East and North Africa and spread along the major trade routes of the old world, finding appeal with traders and travellers.
The Islamic religion soon split; between the Sunni Muslims and the Shi'a. The Sunni religion is the majority (roughly 85% of Muslims belong to this sect), Most Shi'a live in modern-day Iran and Iraq. The Sunni-Shi'a split has been compared to the Protestant Reformation within the Christian church much later in 1517.
Muslim conquests soon took formerly Christian territories in modern day Iraq, Syria, Egypt, North Africa and Spain. The Christians were able to keep France and other European countries. The Muslim Ottoman Empire eventually conquered parts of eastern Europe. Many Muslim states held of vast areas of land; making them superpowers of the Middle Ages.
During the much of the Middle Ages, Muslims achieved what is remembered as a golden age of knowledge. During these times of strife in Europe, many Muslim caliphs and Sultans gathered the ancient texts of great classical empires: such as the Caliphs of Andalusian Cordoba with Roman texts or the Anatolian Seljuk Sultans with Greek texts) and attempted to re-integrate this knowledge into their present time. During this time a Persian Muslim helped develop progress in algebra. The golden age of Islam ended with the Mongol invasions in the mid 13th century.
During the Middle Ages trade between countries became much more common. It was mostly through the Middle Eastern / Asian trade route known as the Silk Road. Arabs served as the middle men in international trade. Trade in this time was based on how valuable the item was. The items that had higher value, and low weight, travelled the farthest (gold, silk, etc...), and items that were heavier and worth less would travel mostly short distances. Food, for example, would mostly travel only within a few villages.