# Transcript

James Clackson

So, Latin language was changing, but what happened to it then? Why did it disappear? Why does no one speak Latin?

Geoffrey Horrocks

Mm. Well, Latin is of course the paradigm example of a dead language in some sense. But it is only dead in some sense. Spoken Latin, for sure, over time, changed so much that it eventually did indeed become something different, certainly different from the written classical Latin of writers like Cicero or Virgil. So, in Italy, the kind of Latin that was spoken there evolved into what are now regional dialects of Italian and also standard modern Italian. The Latin spoken in France and Spain, similarly, became French and Spanish. So in some real sense, Latin has never ceased to be spoken, it’s just evolved into something different and we know that languages change over time. Why don’t we call this Latin as opposed to French, Spanish and Italian? That’s really not so much a linguistic issue as a kind of political and cultural issue. For as long as there’s a Roman Empire, the Roman Empire can have its language but once the Roman empire has collapsed in the West and individual societies start to evolve as states in their own right, then the regional varieties of Latin start to be thought of as the languages of those states, then it’s reasonable that they should have names for their own varieties. But in some real sense, Latin is still a spoken language. Obviously, the changes have been pretty massive. The sounds for example, have changed quite radically in all of these varieties of modern Latin if we want to think of it in those terms. The classical Latin word for ‘hot’ was ‘calidus’, we know in spoken Latin of the empire that this changed to ‘caldus’ and then to ‘caldo’ and it survives in modern Italian virtually unchanged; ‘caldo’. In French, the changes were a bit more dramatic and the same word evolved into ‘chaud’ which is virtually unrecognisable from the sound alone although the kind of changes there are regular changes involved in the transition from Latin to French. It’s just that they’re much more dramatic there than they are in the case of Italian.

JC

So, I guess it’s not just the words themselves which changed in sound like this but also the endings of words. And even how the words are put together, the syntax, because Italian and French speakers, they don’t use case endings for nominative and accusative, you don’t have to learn these in Italian or French, and they don’t put the verb at the end of the sentence as you normally do in Latin.

GH

No, no, no, change can take place right across the board, it’s not just a matter of words. Structure at all levels can be affected and you’re absolutely right, there are radical changes in the whole way sentences are constructed in languages like French and Italian. You don’t have case endings because speakers now use word order to show whether a word is the subject or the object of a verb, they don’t use the ending, the word order tells you what’s what, so subjects normally come before the verb, objects placed after the verb. Similarly, in French and Italian, you can indicate possession through the use of a preposition such as ‘de’ (French) or ‘de’ (Italian) and that means you don’t actually need a genitive case and so on.

JC

Right.

GH

These are all things that are sort of there in classical Latin but certain options have been removed and certain other options that, the potential at least of those options, has now been exploited.