Latinisation of Names - Historical Background

Historical Background

Until modern times it was common in most cultures to translate names into the language being used with little regard for the culture from which the name came. During the age of the Roman Empire, translation of names into Latin (in the West) or Greek (in the East) was common. During the Medieval Period, following the collapse of the Empire in Western Europe, the main bastion of scholarship was the Roman Catholic Church, for whom Latin was the primary written language. Medieval priests, in fact, were almost exclusively the only scholars and scientists in Europe and, as a result, Latin became firmly established as the scholarly language for the West. Though during modern times Europe has largely abandoned Latin as a scholarly language, a variety of fields still use Latin terminology as the norm and, by tradition, it is still common in some fields to name new discoveries in Latin. And because Western science became dominant during the 18th and 19th centuries, the use of Latin naming in many scholarly fields has gained worldwide acceptance, at least when European languages are being used for communication.