Italia - Mia Bellissima!!
Italy is home to a lot of ancient and modern history, romance, art, architecture, science and technolgy and Roman Catholicism. As of 2014, Italy features the most number of UNESCO world heritage sites - a lot for a relatively small land mass. And why not - Italy was the homeland to the Ancient Roman Empire that has influenced western civilization more than any other. At its height in the 2nd Century AD, the Ancient Roman Empire spanned all of Western Europe, North Africa and Asia minor - in fact, these alphabets that you are reading this in started off as an Ancient Roman invention that was necessary to write Latin - the Ancient Roman mother tongue adopted later as Lingua Franca by the Christian Church. It's strange how Religion has influence languages - knowing good Arabic for Islam and Sanskrit for Hindu/Buddhist religion nations is considered holy and the person who is well versed on those languages is considered important!
Most every person who's been formally western educated has learned the Roman Numeral System. This was however eventually replaced by the Hindu-Arabic numeral system due to the inherent limitations of the Roman Numeral system thanks in particular to one person - Fibonacci - whose work using the Hindu-Arabic numeral system - in particular the use of Zero - ensured that the Roman Numeral system was relegated to a dignified formal status and with little practical use in the real world (see the section on Pisa for additional details).
The fate of the Latin Script however, has been anything but one of eventual demise. Since the only common language of multilingual Europe during the Scientific revolution era was Latin (know that in those times, religion was hardly separate from science), all early works of science were in Latin. Case in point - Latin was the language that Issac Newton published his Principia Mathematica and changed the world forever. In short, Latin was the English of early science - since most educated scientists understood papers published in Latin. The script was adopted with minor modifications by all major European languages ensuring their survival and prosperity. Darwin's theory holds even for languages and numeral system - or perhaps - do they hold because they are living systems? Amazing huh that even languages, scripts and numeral systems are living or dead entities? More on this in the sections on Rome and more on Newton's work in the section on Cambridge.
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Most every person who's been formally western educated has learned the Roman Numeral System. This was however eventually replaced by the Hindu-Arabic numeral system due to the inherent limitations of the Roman Numeral system thanks in particular to one person - Fibonacci - whose work using the Hindu-Arabic numeral system - in particular the use of Zero - ensured that the Roman Numeral system was relegated to a dignified formal status and with little practical use in the real world (see the section on Pisa for additional details).
The fate of the Latin Script however, has been anything but one of eventual demise. Since the only common language of multilingual Europe during the Scientific revolution era was Latin (know that in those times, religion was hardly separate from science), all early works of science were in Latin. Case in point - Latin was the language that Issac Newton published his Principia Mathematica and changed the world forever. In short, Latin was the English of early science - since most educated scientists understood papers published in Latin. The script was adopted with minor modifications by all major European languages ensuring their survival and prosperity. Darwin's theory holds even for languages and numeral system - or perhaps - do they hold because they are living systems? Amazing huh that even languages, scripts and numeral systems are living or dead entities? More on this in the sections on Rome and more on Newton's work in the section on Cambridge.
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