I'm working up some 'treasure' for some PC magi, which will consist of a cache of very old books — a thousand years old, in fact. So my question, for those of you who are familiar with Latin, is: would the Latin of those old Roman-era books be likely to strike medieval magi as archaic? Difficult to read like we find Middle English? Or would it seem very much like the Latin with which they're familiar?
When I was initially doing up the stats, I imposed a negative modifier to the quality of the books: -2 for each level below 6 of a reader's Latin score. Reading one of these books qualifies the reader for a specialization in 'archaic' for his Latin score, thus solving the problem unless his Latin was a 4. I'd like advice on whether this is a good idea, realistic, paradigm, wise, etc.
Latin as a living language had dialects, slang that fell in and out of usage, differences in class usage, diversity and change, everything that a modern living language does.
Latin as an academic language is/was codified and petrified.
When Alcuin, the advisor to Charlemagne, set up schools through the Empire, they taught a Latin that. it seems from some papers I've read, he had modified to make it more straigforward. Basically he went through it and did what Webster did to American English, changing sentences and gramatical rules to make it a more useful language.
Yep, that's part of the "acedemic codification". Charlemagne was 8th century, well after the fall of the Roman Empire and after latin had already begun the long process of losing its "living language" status.