Ecclesiastical Latin

The Latin Church is developed in the context of the Catholic Church, grammatically simplified and enriched with neologisms form of Latin, which was created after 500 and still in use, including as an official language for church documents.

The Latin remained after the fall of the Roman Empire in its successor states, the common language in the correspondence. It stopped in the middle and western Europe (see Latin Church ), while the Greek was still maintained as a unifying language in the territory of the Eastern Churches.

Because the Latin for many who used it, only a second language and written language, it has been simplified compared to the classical Latin. The resultant of these needs so-called Church Latin modeled on the austere, simple language of Caesar, whose treatise De Bello Gallico is still used today as an entry into the Latin class. Caesar's writing also served to facilitate many trainee priests access to the Latin language of the liturgy.

In Western Europe in the Middle Ages, the Church Latin was the written language of all religious and secular documents or diplomacy - in correspondence of the Catholic Church in some cases until the 1960s. For example, the original language of all documents of the Second Vatican Council 1962-1965 a clear, relatively sophisticated form of the Latin Church. A suitable for modern usage Latin is look up since 1992 in the Lexicon Recentis latinitatis, published on behalf of the Vatican.

As the language of education and later the universities themselves held the " Latin Church " while the spoken languages ​​that developed from Vulgar Latin ( Romance Languages ​​), more altered. The Latin Church remained a world language not only for the clergy, but also for theologians, philosophers, lawyers and physicians.

As the global language of learning the Latin church was replaced in the Renaissance from the humanistic Latin, but remained in the Catholic Church exist where there as an official language in the liturgy or in Gregorian chant to the present day finds use.

The humanism of the 18th/19th. Century with its launch of a modern philology condemned the Church Latin anew, which had been preserved in some areas of life, such as in court and official language (see Latin in law) or the terminology of chemistry and medicine, in fragments. Popularly referred to this earlier, for humanistic educated unkempt -looking Latin as "Churches and Latin cuisine ".

One of the most famous works of the early church is the Latin Vita Sancti Severini of Eugippius. She is a treasure trove of details from the political turmoil at the end of the migration period for historians.