This 1963 stamp from Vatican City was part of a World Campaign Against Hunger. It depicts a scene from the Biblical story of the loaves and fishes, where Jesus fed a crowd of people from starting with a few pieces of bread and a couple fishes. The Latin phrase famelicis adiuvandis, on the sides of the stamp, translates as “helping people who are hungry.”
Latin is an official language of the Vatican. It was the language of the Roman Republic and Empire. As such it spread far and wide through Europe, Northern Africa, and the Middle East. In the wake of the fall of the Empire in the fifth century CE, local variants of Latin contributed to and evolved into what are now called the Romance Languages.
That name is not because they are romantic in the sense of love, but because they are related to the language of the Romans, Latin. The Romance Languages today include French, Spanish, and Italian.
Latin itself is no longer much spoken outside the Church, and it is considered a “dead” language, because it is no longer evolving with new words entering into the language. Latin has been taught regularly in schools in the U.S., and was required into the mid 20th century in many pre-college schools in the U.S. and the U.K.
Latin has long been used in science as a common language for naming things. Most sciences still use it for similar purposes, though biology seems to be the main user of Latin among the sciences currently.
In biology, Latin has long been used in official descriptions of organisms. The original descriptions could be pages and pages of Latin describing the organism in great detail. These descriptions technically became the scientific name of the organisms, the only way to reliably know two scientists were talking about the same thing.
Swedish botanist Carl Linné in the mid 1700s, formed a new system for naming using only two words, in Latin. This system of binomial nomenclature was adopted and remains the system of naming and referring to organisms, without need to constantly refer to the entire description of the organism. The naming rules require the names to be in the form of Latin, but don’t require them to actually be in Latin. For instance, Homo sapiens is Latin and is the scientific name for humans (Homo = Same, sapiens = knowing). Aha ha is the scientific name of an Australian wasp named in 1977, and is in no way shape or form actually Latin, but the word endings agree with Latin grammar.
The pronunciation of Latin has drifted over the last couple thousand years, and the Catholic Church, botanists, and zoologists all use different pronunciations for their uses of the language. Botanical and Church Latin are closer in pronunciation, with Zoological Latin using harder versions of several letter pronunciations (think c, as in circus, the second c being the harder sound).
I, myself, trained in both botany and zoology, and took some Latin language classes, and sometimes have difficulty understanding myself when I use the language.
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