Contemporary Latin

Contemporary Latin is the form of the Latin language used from the end of the 19th century through the present. Various kinds of contemporary Latin can be distinguished, including the use of single words in taxonomy, and the fuller ecclesiastical use in the Catholic church - but Living or Spoken Latin (the use of Latin as a language in its own right as a full-fledged means of expression) is the primary subject of this article. As a relic of the great importance of New Latin as the formerly dominant international lingua franca down to the 19th century in a great number of fields, Latin is still present in words or phrases used in many languages around the world, and some minor communities use Latin in their speech. The official use of Latin in previous eras has survived at a symbolic level in many mottos that are still being used and even coined in Latin to this day. Old mottos like E pluribus unum, found in 1776 on the Seal of the United States, along with Annuit cœptis and Novus ordo seclorum, and adopted by an Act of Congress in 1782, are still in use. Similarly, current pound sterling coins are minted with the Latin inscription ELIZABETH·II·D·G·REG·F·D (Dei Gratia Regina, Fidei Defensor, i.e. Queen by the Grace of God, Defender of the Faith). The official motto of the multilingual European Union, adopted as recently as 2000, is the Latin In varietate concordia. Similarly, the motto on the Canadian Victoria Cross is in Latin, perhaps due to Canada's bilingual status. Some common phrases that are still in use in many languages have remained fixed in Latin, like the well-known dramatis personæ or habeas corpus. In fields as varied as mathematics, physics, astronomy, medicine, pharmacy, and biology, Latin still provides internationally accepted names of concepts, forces, objects, and organisms in the natural world. The most prominent retention of Latin occurs in the classification of living organisms and the binomial nomenclature devised by Carolus Linnæus, although the rules of nomenclature used today allow the construction of names which may deviate considerably from historical norms. Another continuation is the use of Latin names for the constellations and celestial objects (used in the Bayer designations of stars), as well as planets and satellites, whose surface features have been given Latin selenographic toponyms since the 17th century. Symbols for many of those chemical elements of the periodic table known in ancient times reflect and echo their Latin names, like Au for aurum (gold) and Fe for ferrum (iron).