Re: 18th century tankards

Graeme Wall wrote:


It was always the language of the Jewish religion, as Latin was the
Catholic.
I suppose it counts as revived, as the Jewish people used Aramaic as their
formal language from around 500BC. However it remained in everyday use
for
religious purposes in the whole of the Jewish diaspora whereas Latin lost
that position in the Reformation.



What happened is more complex than that. Not so much lost as transformed or
promoted.

The European world until the Renaissance had a religious Latin, very little
Greek and non-existent Hebrew. Then Erasmus came along, superstar.

He and other scholars rediscovered classical Latin, Greek and Hebrew, partly
so as to translate the Bible accurately (hence the gathering pace of the
Reformation). This rediscovery really transformed the ancient languages into
scholastic languages rather than being, as in the case of Latin, religious
(Latin remained, of course, in use in some Anglican parish registers and all
English legal documents for some time; and so it was still an international
language, even if only the Catholic church used it wholeheartedly in
religion.).

Latin and Greek continued as academic/scholastic languages. A classical
education became the sign of a gentleman and, at least in the flowering of
nineteenth-century middle-class education, the basic requirement of an
imperial administrator.

And, if Catholics used Latin for the betterment of the soul, English
Protestants used it for the placation of the stomach. Grace was in Latin
..... the first thing I was told to learn when I arrived at uni. in 1971 was
the college's Latin grace ... 'Nos miseri homines et egeni, pro cibis ...',
etc..

Chris


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