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Latin influence through Celtic Transmission.
When the English migrated from the Continent to Britain in the mid-fifth century, they found the island already inhabited. Celtic people had been there for many centuries.
Despite the long Roman occupation, the British Celts continued to speak their own language.
However, the relations between the Celts and English were such that the Latin influence of this period remains the slightest of all influences which Old English owed to contact with Roman civilisation.
The Christianising of Britain.
The greatest influence of Latin upon Old English was occasioned by the reintroduction of Christianity into Britain in 597.
The leader of this band was St. Augustine.
In the course of the 7th century the new faith spread rapidly.
The Christian missionaries not only introduced literacy. They also brought a huge Latin vocabulary, some of which was taken over into Old English. The Anglo-Saxons had encountered Latin before, in Europe, when several Latin words entered their language – such as weall ‘wall’, straet ‘street’, ceap (‘bargain’, ‘cheap’), and win (‘wine’), and they brought these words with them to Britain, but there were a few dozens.
Latin words borrowed in Middle English Times.
After the Norman Conquest, during the Middle English period (1150-1500),
especially in the 14th-15th centuries, several thousand words came into the language directly from Latin. The 1384 translation of the Bible initiated by John Wycliffe, for example, contained over 1,000 Latin words not previously known in English. Most of theses words were professional or technical terms, belonging to such fields as religion, medicine, law and literature.
Many Latin words having to do with religion appeared in English, among them ‘collect’, ‘dirge’, ‘mediator’ and ‘Redeemer’. To this, might be added legal terms such as ‘client’, ‘conviction’, ‘subpoena’; words having to do with scholastic activities such as ‘dissolve’, ‘equal’, ‘essence’, ‘medicine’, ‘mercury’, ‘opaque’, ‘orbit’, ‘quadrat’ and ‘recipe’.
Latin words borrowed in Early Modern English.
The main actor promoting the flood of new publications in the sixteenth century was the renewed interest in the classical languages and literatures, and in the rapidly developing fields of science, medicine, and the arts. This was also the age of the Reformation, of Copernicus, and the Discovery of America.
The focus of interest was vocabulary. There were no words in the language to talk accurately about the new concepts, techniques, and inventions which were emerging in Europe, and so writers began to borrow them.
Some Renaissance Foreign Words incorporated to Early Modern English from Latin and Greek are:
Absurdity, benefit, capsule, disability, emancipate, fact, glottis, habitual, idiosyncrasy, immaturity, impersonal, lunar, monopoly, necessitate, obstruction, pancreas, relaxation, scheme, temperature, utopian, vacuum.
When dealing with the didactic approach of the content of this topic, we have to differentiate two clear parts, the historical and the linguistic one.
In order to deal with the historical part of the content, it could be taught in the form of a text and questions for levels like ESO 4th Year and Bachillerato. At lower levels like ESO 1st, 2nd and 3rd, we can resort to timelines in order to show the historical period where these events
took place. For all the levels, we can teach vocabulary grouped in different categories:
• Army: Legions, armour, tactics.
• Worship: God, temple, ritual.
• Technology: road, machine, aqueduct, building.
• Entertainment: Gladiator, chariot.
• Regarding the linguistic part of the content in the topic it has to be approached because of the great number of loanwords that poured into the language after the Roman conquest.
• Look at the etymology of certain words in order to find out about their origin.
• Students are expected to learn about the influence of Latin, not only from a linguistic approach but also from a social point of view, since the semantic choice between words tends to emphasize the importance of different groups of users. For instance, the exposure to Latin has been sustained throughout much of the recorded history of English, and it is this that helps give the language its European flavour, in that many of our words are quickly recognisable to speakers of French, Italian and Spanish
• We can also make use of videos and flashcards in order to teach this content in a more fun and practical way.
The content of this topic connects especially with the legislation in force, LOMCE 8/2013, the organic law on the improvement of education, RD 1105/2014 the national decree that regulates the curricula in the Spanish territory for Secondary Education and Decrees 220/2015 and 221/2015 which regulate the curricula for Secondary and Bachillerato stages in the Autonomous Commtopicy of Murcia. It is stated in Content Blocks No.1, 2, 3 & 4, Understanding Written and Oral Texts and Producing Oral and Written Texts, that students have to be familiar with sociocultural values of the foreign language.
The content of this topic deals with Competence in Linguistic Communication which appears in Order ECD 65/2015 of January 21st, where the relationships among contents, assessment criteria and key competences are established. It also touches on the Cultural Awareness and Expression because learning a language is also learning a culture.