How did the Latin language die?
Latin didn’t die, it still has millions of speakers today. We just call it French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Sardinian, Romanian, Fruilian, Provencal, etc. Latin evolved into the languages of Western Europe as different regional dialects arose within it and followed their own paths. About 800, a guy named Alcuin noticed what was happening and “formalized” the written language that we now know as “Latin”, but the only thing he wanted to do was to create a standard written language for cross-cultural communication. Spoken, living, Latin had already evolved into something completely different and is still very much alive today. That written language died out as the printing press made mass-market books in the local languages more profitable than moldy old Latin volumes that were only purchased by “eggheads”. The last major Latin scientific work to be published in England, for example, was in the 1600s–Newton’s Principia (ironically, this is arguably the most important scientific work
