A cartoon from Oxford Latin Course vol. 1 "I saved Latin. What did you ever do?" —Max Fischer, "Rushmore"
"Latin is a language as dead as it can be; it killed the ancient Romans and now it's killing me." —A couplet which is traditional among Latin students
Latin is an ancestor of a variety of modern languages. It is still spoken by a small number of people, mostly in academic or religious circles. There are a few Latin courses at UC Davis ("LAT") and the study of Latin is a part of the Classics program at UCD. The Elementary Latin courses, at least in 2004, were taught using "Oxford Latin Course," which features oddly drawn cartoons that follow a fictional version of the life of the Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus, better known as in English as Horace.
A common misunderstanding is that Latin is "extinct" or a "dead language". This is true only insofar as Old English (a general name used to describe English between the fifth and twelfth centuries approximately) and 7th century Arabic are extinct. In other words, Latin didn't die out but rather changed a little with each generation of speakers (as every language in every time and place has done, without exception), and differently in different places, so that today the Latin spoken in Iberia has become what we call Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and Galician, the Latin spoken in the former Roman province of Gaul has become what we call French and Provençal, etc. This fact can be understood readily if one looks at a text in a very early form of one of the Romance languages and compares it to Latin and the modern form of that language.
For instance, here is a sample of Old Spanish from 1044:
Et si in uia fillarent eos, debent uenire ad uillam et accipere fidiatorem, et si negarent et dixerint quod non inciderunt ligna, cum quale se custiero acceperit amano pro iurare, debent referire illi de Uilla Gundissaluo cum altero simile; et illi de Uilla Gundissaluo istas defesas non habuerunt deuetatas de pascere, solumodo de matera et ligna cedere; et cuesta braço de ambas partes defesa de Matrize, et de alteris uillis non debent ibi pascere.
