Roots
Latin effect
 Deepti

Latin may today be almost a dead language but where English is concerned, it has exerted a major influence down the ages. This influence was felt from the very beginning when the Germanic tribes came into contact with the Roman Empire and many Latin words became a part of their vocabulary even before the Angles, Saxons and Jutes invaded England. These included words like cheese, mill and street. When the Roman missionaries brought the Christian culture to England around the seventh century, they too brought more loanwords from Latin. These were mostly words from the register of religion; words like bishop, mass and monk.

Developments in science in the tenth century brought more technical and scientific words from Latin because most academic activity was in Latin. Right up to the renaissance, English kept borrowing words like tolerance, index and requiem from Latin for its registers of science, religion and law. It was during the renaissance that a large number of Latin words became a part of the English lexicon. These words blended in so well that when Shakespeare used words like castigate, auspicious and critic, he was given the credit of coining these loan words from Latin.

While most such loans blended into the language, the words that figure now retain their Latin nature. An indispensable condition or a prerequisite is a sine qua non, which is an expression from Latin that means ‘without which not’. The Latin ipso facto literally means ‘by the fact itself’ and is an expression frequently used by lawyers to convey the idea of ‘something being obvious from certain facts’. The Latin word florere means ‘to flourish’ and has led to the word ‘floruit’ which refers to the period during which a person, movement or trend is or was active. When any two things move side by side or in tandem, the expression pari passu is apt. Pari passu literally means ‘with equal step’.

For expressing the idea of starting afresh, English has taken loans from two languages. One loanword taken from French is de nouveau and the other is de novo from Latin. Literally speaking, in their language of origin, both words mean ‘from new’.