Quote:
Originally Posted by Pulpmeister
It seems logical to me that formal Latin, which was the language of literature, temple, courts, and the ruling class, but not of the common people, died out as a spoken language around the time of the fall of the Roman empire...
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Except, of course, that it didn't
. Spoken Latin is alive and well today - it's the official language of the Vatican, for example. Latin was the language of European scholarship - both spoken and written - until at least the early part of the 18th century. Most universities taught all their classes in Latin, and every educated man could speak and read Latin. The reason that the area around the Sorbonne University in Paris is still called today "the Latin quarter" is that most people who lived and worked there in the Middle Ages spoke Latin.