Editing Latin (section)

=== Influence on present-day languages ===
The [[Latin influence in English]] has been significant at all stages of its insular development. In the [[Middle Ages]], borrowing from Latin occurred from ecclesiastical usage established by Saint [[Augustine of Canterbury]] in the 6th century or indirectly after the [[Norman Conquest]], through the [[Anglo-Norman language]]. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, English writers cobbled together huge numbers of new words from Latin and Greek words, dubbed "[[inkhorn term]]s", as if they had spilled from a pot of ink. Many of these words were used once by the author and then forgotten, but some useful ones survived, such as ''imbibe'' and ''extrapolate''. Many of the most common [[polysyllabic]] English words are of Latin origin through the medium of [[Old French]]. Romance words make respectively 59%, 20% and 14% of English, German and Dutch vocabularies.<ref>{{cite book |last=Finkenstaedt |first=Thomas |author2=Dieter Wolff |title=Ordered Profusion; studies in dictionaries and the English lexicon |publisher=C. Winter |year=1973 |isbn=978-3-533-02253-4}}</ref><ref>Uwe Pörksen, German Academy for Language and Literature's Jahrbuch [Yearbook] 2007 (Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2008, pp. 121–130)</ref><ref name="Walter">{{cite book |url=https://pure.knaw.nl/ws/files/475024/Van_der_Sijs_Loanwords_in_the_World's_Languages.pdf |title=Loanwords in the World's Languages: A Comparative Handbook |page=[https://books.google.com/books?id=HnKeVbwTwyYC&pg=PA370 370] |publisher=Walter de Gruyter |year=2009 |access-date=9 February 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170326062334/https://pure.knaw.nl/ws/files/475024/Van_der_Sijs_Loanwords_in_the_World%27s_Languages.pdf |archive-date=26 March 2017 |url-status=live}}</ref> Those figures can rise dramatically when only non-compound and non-derived words are included.
[[File:Romance 20c en (cropped).png|thumb|Range of the Romance languages, the modern descendants of Latin, in Europe]]
The influence of Roman governance and [[Roman technology]] on the less-developed nations under Roman dominion led to the adoption of Latin phraseology in some specialized areas, such as science, technology, medicine, and law. For example, [[Linnaean taxonomy|the Linnaean system]] of plant and animal classification was heavily influenced by ''[[Natural History (Pliny)|Historia Naturalis]]'', an encyclopedia of people, places, plants, animals, and things published by [[Pliny the Elder]]. Roman medicine, recorded in the works of such physicians as [[Galen]], established that today's [[medical terminology]] would be primarily derived from Latin and Greek words, the Greek being filtered through the Latin. Roman engineering had the same effect on [[scientific terminology]] as a whole. Latin law principles have survived partly in a long [[list of Latin legal terms]].

The [[Logudorese]] dialect of the [[Sardinian language]] and [[Italian language|Standard Italian]] are the two closest contemporary languages to Latin.<ref>{{cite book |title=Story of Language |last=Pei |first=Mario |author-link=Mario Pei |page=28 |year=1949 |publisher=Lippincott |isbn=978-0-397-00400-3}}</ref>