In the context of traditional European
classical studies, the "classical languages" refer to
Greek and
Latin, which were the literary languages of the Mediterranean world in
classical antiquity.
Greek was the language of
Homer and of
classical Athenian,
Hellenistic and
Byzantine historians, playwrights, and philosophers. It has contributed many words to the vocabulary of English and many other European languages, and has been a standard subject of study in Western educational institutions since
the Renaissance.
Latinized forms of Ancient Greek roots are used in many of the scientific names of species and in other scientific terminology.
Koine Greek, which served as a
lingua franca in the Eastern Roman Empire, remains in use today as a sacred language in some
Eastern Orthodox churches.
Latin became the lingua franca of the early
Roman Empire and later of the
Western Roman Empire. Despite the decline of the Western Roman Empire, the Latin language continued to flourish in the very different social and economic environment of
the Middle Ages, not least because it became the official language of the
Roman Catholic Church. In Western and Central Europe and in parts of northern Africa, Latin retained its elevated status as the main vehicle of communication for the learned classes throughout the Middle Ages and subsequently; witness especially the Renaissance and Baroque periods. This language was not supplanted for scientific purposes until the 18th century, and for formal descriptions in
zoology as well as
botany it survived to the later 20th century. The modern international
binomial nomenclature holds to this day: taxonomists assign a Latin or Latinized name as the scientific name of each
species.
When we realize that an educated
Japanese can hardly frame a single literary sentence without the use of Chinese resources, that to this day
Siamese and
Burmese and
Cambodgian bear the unmistakable imprint of the Sanskrit and
Pali that came in with Hindu Buddhism centuries ago, or that whether we argue for or against the teaching of Latin and Greek [in schools,] our argument is sure to be studded with words that have come to us from
Rome and
Athens, we get some indication of what early Chinese culture and
Buddhism, and classical
Mediterranean civilization have meant in the world's history. There are just five languages that have had an overwhelming significance as carriers of culture. They are classical Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Greek, and Latin. In comparison with these, even such culturally important languages as
Hebrew and
French sink into a secondary position.[2]
In this sense, a classical language is a language that has a broad influence over an extended period of time, even after it is no longer a
colloquialmother tongue in its original form. If one language uses roots from another language to coin words (in the way that many
European languages use Greek and Latin
roots to devise new words such as "telephone", etc.), this is an indication that the second language is a classical language.[citation needed]
The following languages are generally taken to have a "classical" stage. Such a stage is limited in time and is considered "classical" if it comes to be regarded as a literary "golden age" retrospectively.[citation needed] Thus,
Classical Greek is the language of 5th to 4th century BC
Athens and, as such, only a small subset of the varieties of the
Greek language as a whole. A "classical" period usually corresponds to a flowering of literature following an "archaic" period, such as
Classical Latin succeeding
Old Latin,
Classical Sumerian succeeding Archaic Sumerian, Classical Sanskrit succeeding
Vedic Sanskrit,
Classical Persian succeeding
Old Persian. This is partly a matter of terminology, and for example
Old Chinese is taken to include rather than precede
Classical Chinese. In some cases, such as those of
Persian and
Tamil, the "classical" stage corresponds to the earliest attested literary variant.[3]
Antiquity
Classical Sumerian (literary language of
Sumer, c. 26th to 23rd centuries BC)
Sumerograms were used in
Cuneiform writing even for non-Sumerian texts until the writing system went out of use around the first century AD
Middle English (language of
The Canterbury Tales, 14th to 15th centuries, with many divergent written dialects, but partially standardized based on London speech)
^Ramanujan, A. K. (1985),
Poems of Love and War: From the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil, New York: Columbia University Press. Pp. 329,
ISBN0-231-05107-7Quote (p.ix–x) "Tamil, one of the four classical languages of India, is a Dravidian language ... These poems (Sangam literature, 1st century BC to 3rd century AD) are 'classical,' i.e. early, ancient; they are also 'classics,' i.e. works that have stood the test of time, the founding works of a whole tradition. Not to know them is not to know a unique and major poetic achievement of Indian civilization."
^Encyclopædia Britannica, 2008. "Kannada literature" Quote: "The earliest literary work is the Kavirājamārga (c. AD 850), a treatise on poetics based on a Sanskrit model."
^Ogloblin, Alexander K. (2005).
"Javanese". In K. Alexander Adelaar; Nikolaus Himmelmann (eds.). The Austronesian Languages of Asia and Madagascar. London dan New York: Routledge. pp. 590–624.
ISBN9780700712861.
^K. Ramachandran Nair in Ayyappapanicker (1997), p.301
Ashdowne, Richard. 2009. "Accidence and Acronyms: Deploying electronic assessment in support of classical language teaching in a university context." Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 8, no. 2: 201–16.
Beach, Adam R. 2001. "The creation of a classical language in the eighteenth century: standardizing English, cultural imperialism, and the future of the literary canon." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 43, no. 2: 117+.
Coulson, Michael. 1976. Sanskrit: An Introduction to the Classical Language. Sevenoaks, Kent: Hodder and Stoughton.
Crooker, Jill M., and Kathleen A. Rabiteau. 2000. "An interwoven fabric: The AP latin examinations, the SAT II: Latin test, and the national "standards for classical language learning." The Classical Outlook 77, no. 4: 148–53.
Denizot, Camille, and Olga Spevak. 2017. Pragmatic Approaches to Latin and Ancient Greek. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Eschbach-Szabo, Viktoria, and Shelley Ching-yu Hsieh. 2005. "Chinese as a classical language of botanical science: Semiotics of transcription." Kodikas/Code. Ars Semeiotica: An International Journal of Semiotics 28, nos. 3–4: 317–43.
Gruber-Miller, John. 2006. When Dead Tongues Speak: Teaching Beginning Greek and Latin. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hymes, Robert. 2006. "Getting the Words Right: Speech, Vernacular Language, and Classical Language in Song Neo-Confucian 'Records of Words'." Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 36: 25–55.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23496297.
Koutropoulos, Apostolos. 2011. "Modernizing classical language education: communicative language teaching & educational technology integration in classical Greek." Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 9, no. 3 (2011): 55–69.
Tieken, Herman. 2010. "Blaming the Brahmins: Texts lost and found in Tamil literary history." Studies in History 26, no. 2: 227–43.
Watt, Jonathan M. 2003. "Classical language instruction: A window to cultural diversity." International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities, and Nations 3: 115–24.
Whitney, William Dwight. 1971. Sanskrit Grammar: Including Both the Classical Language, and the Older Dialects, of Veda and Brahmana. 12th issue of the 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.