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Latinisation is the practice of rendering a non-Latin name (or word) in a Latin style. It is commonly found with historical personal names, with toponyms, and in the standard binomial nomenclature of the life sciences. It goes further than romanisation, which is the transliteration of a word to the Latin alphabet from another script (e.g. Cyrillic).
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This was often done in the classical era for much the same reason as English-speaking cultures produce English versions of some foreign names. In the case of personal names in the post-Roman era this may be done to emulate Latin authors, or to present a more impressive image.
In a scientific context, the main purpose of Latinisation may be to produce a name which is internationally consistent.
Latinisation may be carried out by:
Personal names
Humanist names, assumed by Renaissance humanists, were very largely Latinised names, though in some cases (e.g. Melanchthon) they invoked Ancient Greek. Latinisation in humanist names may consist of translation from vernacular European languages, sometimes involving a playful element of punning. Such names could be a cover for humble social origins.
Scientific names
Latinisation is a common practice for scientific names. For example, Livistona, the name of a genus of palm trees, is a Latinisation of "Livingstone."
Place names
In English, place names often appear in Latinised form. This is a result of many early text books mentioning the places being written in Latin. Because of this, the English language often uses Latinised forms of foreign place names instead of anglicised forms or the original names.
Examples of Latinised names for countries or regions are:
Historical background
During the age of the Roman Empire, translation of names into Latin (in the West) or Greek (in the East) was common. Additionally, Latinised versions of Greek substantives, particularly proper nouns, could easily be declined by Latin speakers with minimal modification of the original word.
During the medieval period, following the collapse of the Empire in Western Europe, the main bastion of scholarship was the Roman Catholic Church, for which Latin was the primary written language. In the early medieval period, most European scholars were priests and most educated people spoke Latin, and as a result, Latin became firmly established as the scholarly language for the West.
Though during modern times Europe has largely abandoned Latin as a scholarly language, a variety of fields still use Latin terminology as the norm. By tradition, it is still common in some fields to name new discoveries in Latin. And because Western science became dominant during the 18th and 19th centuries, the use of Latin names in many scholarly fields has gained worldwide acceptance, at least when European languages are being used for communication.