Latin

Latin originates from the Etruscan province of Italy back from the age of antiquity. With the growth of the Roman Empire, Latin became the the lingua franca of the Mediterranean Sea. Latin pushed out the indigenous languages, especially the Celtic languages of Europe and replaced them. After the fall of the Roman Empire Latin progressively vanished as a spoken language except to act as a language for academia and the Roman Catholic Church.

Latin has had an indelible mark on the history of Europe. The Romance Languages: Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Romanian among other minor languages are all descended from Latin. Latin was critical to science and literature on a continental scale in Europe until it was replaced by French in the 17th century. Latin still maintains a position within science, for example in the naming of species. Latin also maintains a central position within the Roman Catholic faith.

Latin in "Bluff"
Latin had regained its status as the lingua franca of academia. The crew of the William Howells used Latin in most interactions.

Latin in Gunpowder Empire
In Agrippan Rome, daily life was conducted in neoLatin, a language which developed out of Classical Latin during the Empire's more than two thousand years of existence. Classical Latin was still extensively used as the language of the government administration as well as in literature. Knowledge of Classical Latin was a major status symbol marking out the Empire's rich.

Knowledge of Classical Latin, gained through the Home timeline's implants was a major asset for Jeremy Solters and his sister Amanda when suddenly stranded in besieged Polisso. Their perfect knowledge of Latin marked them as members of the elite, and forced local rich people to take them seriously despite their youth. When challenged by Roman government agents to produce a report about the origin of the goods which they were selling, which actually came from the Home timeline, Jeremy used the ambiguities of Latin grammar to compose an impressive-looking report which contained no real information.

Latin in Household Gods
When Nicole Gunther was transported back to the time of the Roman Empire, the gods Liber and Libera provided her with a complete knowlege of the Latin langugue, including even literacy in it (which her remote ancestress, whose body Nicole Gunther inhabited, did not have). When later coming in contact with the Emperor Marcus Aurelius and his aides, she relaised that the Latin with which she had been provided was a provincial dialect in which the final consonants were not voiced (anticipating the later develoipment of French and other Latin-descended languagus) while members of the Imperial Court spoke a far more refined and "pure" form of Latin.

On returning to the Twentieth Century Nicole Gunther retained her knowlege of Latin, as she found by looking up a text in that languge. She had little practical use for it, but it helped convince her that her time in the Roman Empire had been a reality and no illusion.