Latin in the News: Medieval Latin as a Second Language

From James Fallows at the Atlantic, a post on why non-native speakers of a language can often understand each other more easily. Medieval Latin is a case in point. As no one's first language, it became far more streamlined than classical Latin, as one of Fallows' readers points out:

Medieval Latin is a much simpler form of Latin than classical, Roman Latin because it was everyone's second language. Over centuries, Irish, Italians, and Norwegians all speaking to one another in the same language simplified and streamlined it, to make it easier for everyone to understand. It was a working language, the language of the church and professional elites everywhere. One aspect of understanding what Renaissance was and why it happened was that Petrarch and others like him noticed how much more complex, sophisticated, and, to their ears, beautiful, the classical Latin of Cicero and Horace was. They then tried to recreate that flowery, rhetorical style in their own day and time, in large part because they thought that the beauty and sophistication of the language also helped it convey beautiful and sophisticated ideas.

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