Latin language
A language originally spoken in Latium in ancient Italy that became the common tongue of the Roman Empire. It is the ancestor of the Romance languages and survives today in scientific names and legal terms.
The dot over a lowercase i and j has a name: the tittle, from Latin titulus, "heading." In 11th-century Europe, dense Gothic script made letters into rows of identical strokes, so scribes marked i and j to tell them apart. It later shrank to today's small dot.
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AM stands for Ante Meridiem ("before noon" in Latin) and PM for Post Meridiem ("after noon"). Since 12:00 noon is noon itself—neither before nor after—the expressions "12 AM" and "12 PM" are inherently contradictory.
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