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igcselatin	Mrs. Marilyn McMahon
Island School, Hong Kong
http://www.island.edu.hk
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           Welcome to the homepage of Cambridge International Exams (CIE) IGCSE Latin Course activities. This homepage contains comprehensive information and online activities about the language of Latin including vocabulary and grammar, its history and its culture. Below is a brief history of Latin:

          Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. However, Latin is defined as a "dead langauge" because it is no longer spoken (except in some Christian rituals) but it survives through the vast body of literatrue and inscriptions that have been preserved. Therefore, students of Latin are mostly required to read Latin, rather than wirte Latin. Latin gained wide usage as the formal language of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire. An inflectional and synthetic language, Latin relies little on word order, conveying meaning through a system of affixes attached to word stems. The Latin alphabet, derived from the Greek, remains the most widely-used alphabet in the world.

          Although now widely considered an extinct language with very few fluent speakers, Latin has had a major influence on many languages that are still thriving, and continues to see wide use in areas such as academia. All Romance languages are descended from Vulgar Latin, and many words adapted from Latin are found in other modern languages, such as English, Italian, French, Spanish and Romainian, and over 50% English came from Latin. Moreover, in the Western world, Latin was the lingua franca, the learned language for scientific and political affairs, for more than a thousand years, eventually being replaced by French in the 18th century and English in the late 19th. Ecclesiastical Latin remains the formal language of the Roman Catholic Church to this day, and thus the national language of the Vatican. The Church used Latin as its primary liturgical language until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Latin is also still used — drawing heavily on Greek roots — to furnish the names used in the scientific classification of living things. The modern study of Latin, along with Greek, is known as Classics.

         The activities and links below are here to help you in your language studies and preparations for your exams. We hope you will find them useful, informative and at the same time benefiting from them. Suggestions and comments are most welcome. Enjoy your surfing!

Calendar events

Mon Jul 13, 2009 Untimed / All day Idus

Sat Aug 01, 2009 Untimed / All day Kalendae

Wed Aug 05, 2009 Untimed / All day Nonae

Thu Aug 13, 2009 Untimed / All day Idus

Tue Sep 01, 2009 Untimed / All day Kalendae

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