But Latin and Greek were common at the time of Jesus. It's unlikely Jesus would have known Latin beyond a few words, says Jonathan Katz, stipendiary lecturer in Classics at Oxford University. It was the language of law and the Roman military and Jesus was unlikely to be familiar with the vocabulary of these worlds.
Latin was used throughout the Roman Empire, but it shared space with a host of other languages and dialects, including Greek, Oscan and Etruscan, which give us a unique perspective on the ancient world.
There exists a consensus among scholars that the language of Jesus and his disciples was Aramaic.
Oscan. Oscan was the most widely spoken Italic language before the spread of Latin, prominent in Bruttium, Lucania, Campania, Samnium, and elsewhere throughout central and southern Italy.
To oversimplify the matter, Latin began to die out in the 6th century shortly after the fall of Rome in 476 A.D. The fall of Rome precipitated the fragmentation of the empire, which allowed distinct local Latin dialects to develop, dialects which eventually transformed into the modern Romance languages.
As Jonathan Katz, a Classics lecturer at Oxford University, told BBC News, Jesus probably didn't know more than a few words in Latin. He probably knew more Greek, but it was not a common language among the people he spoke to regularly, and he was likely not too proficient.
Dating back to at least 3500 BC, the oldest proof of written Sumerian was found in today's Iraq on an artifact known as the Kish Tablet. Thus, given this evidence, Sumerian can also be considered the first language in the world or one of the ancient languages.
After the Roman Empire fell, Classical Latin continued to be used for most writings. A different version, Vulgar Latin, became more commonly spoken by the average person in parts of Italy and eventually led to Classical Italian.
According to the 1st century C.E. Roman historian Suetonius, Julius Caesar spoke mainly Greek and not Latin, as was the case with most patricians at the time.
It was more of a gradual thing. As the barbarians slowly overtook the Empire, their languages mixed with the indigenous Latin and what we are left with today are Italian, French, Spanish, Romanian, etc. Every language is changing all the time (even the language you are speaking right now), in baby steps.
The Adamic language, according to Jewish tradition (as recorded in the midrashim) and some Christians, is the language spoken by Adam (and possibly Eve) in the Garden of Eden.
Jesus' name in Hebrew was “Yeshua” which translates to English as Joshua. So how did we get the name “Jesus”?
The Aramaic word for God is אלהא Elāhā ( Biblical Aramaic) and ܐܠܗܐ Alāhā ( Syriac), which comes from the same Proto- Semitic word (* ʾil-) as the Arabic and Hebrew terms; Jesus is described in Mark 15:34 as having used the word on the cross, with the ending meaning "my", when saying, "My God, my God, why hast Thou ...
Latin essentially “died out” with the fall of the Roman Empire, but in reality, it transformed — first into a simplified version of itself called Vulgar Latin, and then gradually into the Romance languages: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian. Thus, Classical Latin fell out of use.
The Holy Roman Empire was an attempt to revive the Western Roman Empire, whose legal and political structure deteriorated during the 5th and 6th centuries, to be replaced by independent kingdoms ruled by Germanic nobles. The Roman imperial office was vacant after the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476.
Latin replaced Oscan as the official language, and the city soon became Romanized in institutions, architecture, and culture. A riot in the amphitheatre at Pompeii between the Pompeians and the Nucerians, in 59 ce, is reported by the Roman historian Tacitus.
According to many sources, Italian is the closest language to Latin in terms of vocabulary.
Since all the Romance Languages are derived from Latin, it can never be called an 'Extinct Language'. There are no countries or states currently that use Latin as their mode of communication but interestingly, Latin is considered the official language of Vatican City, a sovereign state that is surrounded by Rome.
Rev. Fulco deliberately left out Greek and used Latin in the script, creating a distinction between the crude Latin spoken by the soldiers and the elegant Latin enunciated by Pontius Pilate.
The closest language to English is one called Frisian, which is a Germanic language spoken by a small population of about 480,000 people. There are three separate dialects of the language, and it's only spoken at the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany.
The Origins of Latin
It was the language of ancient Rome and was used throughout the Roman Empire for communication, administration, and literature. Latin evolved from the dialects of the Italic peoples of ancient Italy, and its earliest written records date back to the 7th century BCE.
Early Latin was used in the Roman Republic, certainly by 75 BCE, but possibly much earlier (the Roman Republic was formed in 509 BC). After some deliberation, Italian made its way on to the list as the most direct modern descendant of Latin – though any of the Romance languages could have made it, really.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
The world's youngest language, coming in at only 100 years old (officially), is the South African language of Afrikaans. Surprised? Afrikaans, the natively spoken language of 7 million South Africans, was born from the white Dutch, French, and German colonizers in South Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries.