Legacy of the Roman Empire learned classes throughout the Middle Ages; this is especially seen during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Books which had a revolutionary impact on science, such as Nicolaus Copernicus' "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" (1543), were composed in Latin. This language was not supplanted for scientific purposes until the 18th century, and for formal descriptions in zoology, as well as botany - it survived to the later 20th century. The modern international Binomial nomenclature holds to this day: the scientific name of each species is classified by a Latin or Latinized name. Today the Romance languages, which comprise all languages that descended
The House of the Rising Sun that the song is about a woman who killed her father, an alcoholic gambler who had beaten his wife. Therefore, the House of the Rising Sun may be a jailhouse, from which one would be the first person to see the sunrise (an idea supported by the lyric mentioning "a ball and chain," though that phrase has been slang for marital relationships for at least as long as the song has been in print). Because women often sang the song, another theory is that the House of the Rising Sun was where prostitutes were detained while being treated for syphilis.