through know educate
take hold with of
Latin proportionate scholar
claim international spoken
require For about a thousand years—from about the fifth century
1 the fifteenth—Latin was the second
language of educated people all over Europe and all 2
works were written in Latin. For, before the invention of the
printing press, reading and writing were skills 3
only to scholars. Most of the scholars were priests and
clergymen, and Latin was the language of the church. Latin was a subject
4 in schools and in colleges, and all
5 people had some familiarity 6 it. The number of people who
study Latin has not grown smaller, but 7 it has become very much smaller. As ordinary people all over the world began
to be able to read and write their own languages, and as scientific work of the
sixteenth and later centuries came more and more to be written in living
languages, a knowledge of Latin was not so essential. Thus, although Latin might
once have been 8 as the most suitable
of possible international languages (at least for Europeans), this time has
definitely passed. The earliest attempts to invent a simplified
language for 9 use came in the
seventeenth century, but it was not until the late nineteenth century that any
sizable group of people did actually attempt to speak and write an artificial
language. Esperanto, Which was published in 1887, was the first language really
to 10 . At one time or another, as many
as eight million people have learned Esperanto. It has been taught in a great
many schools and colleges in Europe, and the study of Esperanto was even made
compulsory in some high schools in Germany.