# Transcript

James Clackson

So these are all pretty radical changes then, Geoff?

Geoffrey Horrocks

Mm. Sure.

JC

The loss of the case system; everything like that. Do we have any idea of when it all happened? Can we date these to some time in Latin when these changes started taking place?

GH

Sure. I mean, we’ve got documents that partly reflect them so we have some sense of the chronology. Obviously, a major change like the loss of the case system took place over centuries, it couldn’t possibly happen overnight and the changes didn’t affect all speakers of Latin at the same time. It’s absolutely normal for changes to begin in one section of society and to spread quite slowly across the population. One interesting source for our knowledge of the chronology of change in this sort of area is the roman novel called the Satyricon written by Petronius, he was one of Nero’s court and committed suicide in 66 AD when the emperor turned against him. In one surviving portion of the novel, Petronius describes a dinner party given by a freedman, a freed slave called Trimalchio, the whole thing is called the Cena Trimalchionis and it’s the Dinner of Trimalchio, and records the speech, the conversation of Trimalchio and his friends who are also ex-slaves. Now, of course, you have to take Petronius’ description with a pinch of salt, he’s a member of the Roman elite after all and he may well be trying to ridicule these speakers and, after all, the whole thing is fiction anyway. But it had to be recognisable to the audience that the readership of the novel as what it purports to be and therefore it must be reasonably like the kind of speech these freedmen came up with and certainly some of the things that are put in the mouths of the freedmen were well on the way towards the kinds of things you find in languages like French and Italian, already, I mean, that’s really quite surprising.

JC

Really? That’s first century AD, already have people…

GH

Absolutely. Absolutely.

JC

….halfway towards Italian.

GH

Yes.

JC

Is there an example you can give of that, a simple…

GH

Okay. Well, let me just have a think. One example would be a simple statement which I just happen to remember from one of these conversations. It translates as ‘I said the weasel ate it’. And clearly blaming the weasel was the equivalent to blaming the cat nowadays if something disappears from the fridge or whatever. Now, to say that kind of thing after a verb like ‘say’ or ‘said’, in classical Latin, you would have to use a particular kind of construction: the accusative and infinitive construction. Literally, it would translate ‘I said the weasel to have eaten it’. That’s the normal classical Latin way. But what the ex-slave in Petronius’s novel says is quite different. What he says is ‘Dixi quia mustela comedit’. He doesn’t use an accusative and infinitive, he uses a word for ‘that’, a word that translates in English as ‘that’, namely ‘quia’, in classical Latin that would normally translate as ‘because’, but in this kind of Latin it already must means ‘that’ and indicates that this is the content of what was said. So the way of saying, ‘I said that’ blah blah blah, with a word for ‘that’ is exactly the construction you’d find in Italian or French. ‘J’ai dit que la bellette la mange´’ or whatever, where ‘que’ is the French word for ‘that’ just like ‘quia’ is the popular Latin word for ‘that’ in the Satyricon.

JC

Right. And there’s another word, the word for ‘weasel’ I understood, mustela. But then the word for ‘eat’ in that sentence. What was that word?

GH

Yeah. That was ‘comedit’ which is a longer form than the normal classical Latin word for ’eat’, it’s a compound of that form that, the classical word is ‘edo’. ‘Comedo’ survives in Spanish ‘comer’ as the infinitive ‘comedere’ becoming Spanish ‘comer’ and that’s the normal word for ‘eat’ now. And it’s not at all unusual for very short words of Latin like ‘edo’ ‘eat’, ‘eo’ ‘go’ to be replaced by longer forms in French, Spanish and Italian, and that process already seems to be taking place here. Another word for ‘eat’ which is very common in these descendants of Latin is ‘manducare’ or ‘manducari’ from classical Latin which means ‘to chew’ literally, and that’s the source of French ‘manger’. It’s quite interesting though, that this isn’t just a matter of sociology, it’s not just that ignorant people use these words. There’s a very nice story in Suetonius, Life of Augustus, where Suetonius is describing Augustus’s very frugal habits when it comes to eating and, as part of the narrative, he includes short quotations from Augustus’s letters where Augustus describes what he ate on specific occasions. And on one occasion Augustus the emperor uses ‘comedere’ and on the next occasion, he uses ‘manducare’. So these were obviously ordinary words in colloquial conversational style regardless of the level of society. You wouldn’t use them in formal written styles but they were okay for talking.

JC

Mm. Mm. So it’s not just ex-slaves then?

GH

No. No. Not necessarily. I mean, some of it surely is but not all of it.

JC

Okay, so Latin didn’t really die then, it actually changed into French and Italian and Spanish, these other languages. So what happened, Latin itself, did it come from something else earlier?

GH

Mm. Mm. Mm.