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Introduction

The Open University — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 23:00:00 GMT

This course features a discussion that shows how languages develop – a spoken language is constantly undergoing change while written language is more conservative. In its second part it also looks at the evolution of Latin into the Romance languages: Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and others.

The discussions throughout this course are between Professor Geoffrey Horrocks and Dr James Clackson, both of the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge University.

This OpenLearn course provides a sample of Level 3 study in Arts and Humanities.

Learning outcomes

The Open University — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 23:00:00 GMT

After studying this course, you should be able to:

demonstrate an awareness of the general differences between spoken and written languages
demonstrate an awareness of how spoken Latin developed into the later Romance languages
demonstrate an awareness of some early Latin forms of words, as found in Plautus and archaic Latin
demonstrate an awareness of Latin’s place within the wider Indo-European tradition of languages.

1 A History of Latin

The Open University — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 23:00:00 GMT

The spoken language is the ‘living’ form of a language and all spoken languages are constantly undergoing change. Written languages tend to be more conservative, and associated by speakers with the correct or standard language.

1.1 Language change

The Open University — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 23:00:00 GMT

Some linguistic changes, particularly in the use of individual slang words, are short-lived in the spoken language, but others take hold and become general among the whole population. For example, in English the letter r is still written after vowels, but no longer pronounced by most speakers in central and southern England in words such as for, farm, car, cart, potter, and so on. This change is gradually spreading through the dialects of English, as younger speakers in the north adopt pronunciations without r.

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James Clackson

What does it mean for language to have a history? Surely Latin is Latin whether it’s Latin of Plautus or Latin of Cicero or Latin of Apuleius?

Geoffrey Horrocks

Yeah. Fair point, but all languages have histories. The problem is we tend to think of them, in literate societies at least, as fixed entities. And I think this is really to do with written language. If you think of written English for example, in a single person’s lifetime, it’s very hard to be conscious of any sense of change. But if you look at the written English of earlier periods, then it’s very obvious there has been considerable change. People have trouble reading Shakespeare. The essential thing then is to make sure we distinguish between written and spoken language. Written language tends to be relatively fixed by convention, tradition and often by state institutions, education system, and so on. But speech changes all the time and, eventually, written language will start to accommodate some of the changes that are taking place in the spoken language. You just have to listen to people talking English now to know that spoken language changes much more readily than written language. Think of grandparents and the problems they sometimes have listening to their teenage grandchildren. Over time, spoken language just changes quite radically.

But aren’t the changes we hear in speech just sloppiness or laziness? The speech of teenage children is full of grammatical mistakes, isn’t it?

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. We do tend to think of change as somehow change from the norm, and therefore change for the worse, sloppy, incorrect, and people obviously feel very strongly about that, sometimes writing letters to newspapers about the use of “hopefully” and what have you. I think it’s because we are very attached to the idea of a standard written form of language, with fixed rules that we learned at school, and these somehow represent the correct form of the language. But lots of these rules we’ve learned, the kind of thing, you know, of don’t put a preposition at the end of the sentence, or don’t split an infinitive. These aren’t real rules of English at all; they’re artificial impositions, set up really for the written language, which have then been partially imposed on spoken styles as well. But the living form of the language really doesn’t conform to these things at all, and knowing these rules of written English is partly just a matter of showing off the fact that you’ve had a ‘good education.’

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James Clackson

But the changes which take place, even so, are just fashionable changes, aren’t they? The words come into the language. One year we have a word like ‘bling’ or ‘chav’ which everyone seems to use and next year they disappear. Even now ‘bling’ is on its way out, it seems.

Geoffrey Horrocks

Well, that’s certainly true, I mean, particularly individual slang words, they do tend to be short-lived in the spoken language but that’s not the full story. Other changes take hold, can take hold, and then become quite general amongst the whole population. Most English people don’t pronounce an R sound now after vowels in words like ‘for’ and ‘farm’. There are of course still some dialects of English where that is the norm but these are now seen as somehow substandard. But if you went back over a hundred years, not pronouncing the R would be seen as a mistake, and an example of laziness and sloppiness, so things do change. The R-less variety is now absolutely the standard, it’s the way BBC announcers speak, it’s the way the royal family speaks. And that just goes to show, there’s nothing inherently good or bad about anything. Things change, full stop.

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1.2 Notions of language change in Ancient Rome

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The Roman elite had ideas very similar to ours about the written form of their language. They also thought that it was the correct form of language, and they would poke fun at people who spoke in a way that they considered incorrect.

Example: Catullus (c. 84-c. 54 BCE), Roman Poet, Poem 84

Chommoda dicebat, si quando commode uellet

Dicere, et insidias Arrius hinsidias,

Et tum mirifice sperabat se esse locutum

Cum quantum poterat dixerat hinsidias.

‘Arrius used to say hadvantages, when he meant to say advantages, and hambushes when he wanted to say ambushes. He would think that he had spoken splendidly, when he had said hambushes as loud as he could.’

Arrius spoke a variety of Latin which had lost h- at the beginning of words, and he overcompensates by adding h- to words which never had it. Overcompensation of this type in linguistics is called hypercorrection.

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James Clackson

So if it’s the form of speech that changes not the written form of language, then how do we know about any changes that take place in a language like Latin where we don’t have the spoken form? We only have the written form of Latin, we don’t have tape recordings from the ancient world or…

Geoffrey Horrocks

No, no, no, that’s quite right. In fact, there are ways of dealing with that. We know the Roman elite had really rather similar ideas to us about the written form of their language. They obviously thought it was the correct form of Latin, in the same way that we tend to think of written English as somehow representing the correct form of English. And they also believed that people who didn’t speak in that kind of way, the correct form, did so because they were lazy or stupid or foreign or whatever. But this is also the basis for finding out about deviations from this norm because the very same people, the roman elite sometimes poke fun at those who they think speak in a way that’s substandard or incorrect or lazy or whatever. There’s a very nice example in Catullus; it’s Poem 84, about a man called Arrius who doesn’t pronounce the H sound in the right words and adds an H sound to words which never had it or shouldn’t have it.

OK.

So it’s a kind of hyper correction. This chap doesn’t normally use H but he’s trying to sort of show off or integrate himself into a higher level of society by using H, but he hasn’t got a clue, really, where it should be and he makes mistakes and therefore sounds ridiculous to those who do know where the H, as it were, should be. But it’s not just things like that. There are lots of inscriptions, other documents written by people who didn’t have much education and therefore didn’t actually know how to write Latin correctly. And sometimes spelling mistakes, forms of words and so on, the shapes of sentences, even, can show quite a lot of what’s happening in the ordinary spoken language as opposed to the conventionalised high style written language. So it’s not a complete problem, we don’t get absolute access but there are ways of finding out.

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1.3 The fate of the Latin language

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Spoken Latin, not the written Latin of literary works, was the variety which evolved into the Romance languages: Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and other languages. Whether two different linguistic varieties are deemed to be the same language or not is not wholly a linguistic issue, but relies upon political and cultural factors as well.

Latin vocabulary survives in these languages, although sometimes the sounds have changed quite radically. Latin calidus ‘hot’ becomes Italian caldo but French chaud. Latin frigidus ‘cold’ becomes Italian freddo and French froid. Latin habere ‘to have’ becomes Italian avere and French avoir. Latin pater ‘father’ becomes Italian padre and French père. In spoken Latin the words used were often slightly different from the written forms given. For example, the word for ‘father’ in Italian and French actually derives from the Latin accusative patrem, which became the form used in late spoken Latin. The Romance languages generally show a preference for analytic structures where Latin has synthetic structures. This means that where Latin will lump together a number of different elements into a single word, such as amabo ‘I will love’ which combines the notion of first person, future and ‘love’, there is a tendency in Romance languages to separate these out, as in French je vais aimer ‘I will love’, which uses three words.

The grammar also changed: the Romance languages have lost most of the Latin case endings.

The beginnings of the changes in spoken Latin can be seen in some ancient texts:

Petronius Arbiter (d. 66 CE), Roman Novelist. His Satyricon features representations of the speech of freed slaves.

Example: Chapter 46 dixi quia mustela comedit ‘I said that the weasel ate it’.

Note use of quia for indirect statement (cf. French j’ai dit que), and word for ‘eat’ comedere not edere (cf. Spanish comer ‘to eat’).

Suetonius (c. 70-130 CE), Roman Historian and biographer. His Life of Agustus 76.2 cites Augustus’ use of manducare ‘to eat’ (cf. French manger ‘to eat’).

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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.

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.

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.

Right.

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.

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James Clackson

So these are all pretty radical changes then, Geoff?

Geoffrey Horrocks

Mm. Sure.

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?

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.

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

Absolutely. Absolutely.

….halfway towards Italian.

Yes.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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?

Mm. Mm. Mm.

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1.4 Early Latin: Plautus

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Plautus (fl. c. 205-184 BCE), Roman Playwright. Latin text of his plays has been modernised in spelling.

Example: nominative plural viri, in Plautus’s day written virei.

Some features of Syntax are different:

Example: Prohibitions. In Plautus it is possible to say ‘Do not do!’ in the following ways: ne + perfect subjunctive: ne feceris (Epidicus 148); ne + present subjunctive: ne facias (Curculio 539); ne + a special verb form which dies out in later Latin: ne faxis (Mostellaria 1115).

In the works of Cicero (106-43 BCE), the most frequent common way to say ‘do not do’ is noli facere.

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James Clackson

I know that Plautus is the first Latin author we have a lot of material from and he was certainly earlier than Virgil I think, they were a couple of hundred years BC or around then.

Geoffrey Horrocks

Yeah.

Plautus’ Latin is fairly like Virgil’s Latin, isn’t it? It’s quite straightforward. Doesn’t look as different from French to classical Latin.

Mm. Mm. Well, I mean, clearly the timescale is somewhat shorter but there’s actually a more important reason why Plautus looks relatively straightforward and that’s that the spelling system has been altered from how Plautus himself must have written the texts to the standardised spelling system that was current in Cicero’s day and we know that because we have inscriptions from the period when Plautus was writing these plays and the spelling system there is obviously the current spelling system of the period and it’s really rather different. So, we can be certain that Plautus would’ve spelt quite a lot of words differently and probably pronounced them differently as well. For example, we learn second declension nominative plurals had an ending with a long I. So ‘domini’ from ‘dominus’, masters. Now in Plautus’s day, those very same nominative plurals weren’t written with a long I but were written with a diphthong EI and were probably pronounced in a slightly different way, more like ‘ey’ than ‘ee’. It’s not just things like sounds and spellings though, I mean, Plautus uses quite a few constructions which are actually different from what classical Latin would normally use. I mean, a good example of that would be a prohibition telling somebody not to do something. In Cicero’s Latin, there are quite restricted options there and there’s much more variety available in Plautus’s Latin for doing that, things which were obviously fine in that period but which in Cicero’s period were ruled out as disappeared, perhaps, but certainly ruled out as somehow no longer acceptable.

Mm. Okay. So, the Latin of Plautus was actually more different than classical Latin appears to us.

Yeah.

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1.5 Early Latin: Latin before Plautus

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Fragments of archaic Latin law are preserved as the Law of the XII Tables. Early inscriptions survive from the 6^th Century BCE. Writing was introduced into Southern Italy by Greek colonists in the early 8^th Century BCE, Polybius (c. 200-c. 118 BCE), Greek Historian of Rome. Histories 3.22.3 ‘the Ancient Roman language differs so much from the modern that it can only be partially made out, and that after much application, by the most intelligent men.’ (Translation by W.R. Paton)

Some Early Latin forms:

aurum ‘gold’ from earlier ausom
iurat ‘he swears’ from earlier iouesat (CIL I² 4).¹º
Genitive singular of second declension was – osio; CIL I² 2832a (= Lapis Satricanus) popliosio ualesiosio = Publii Valerii.

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James Clackson

What about Latin before Plautus then, do we know anything about that?

Geoffrey Horrocks

Well, unfortunately, the amount of material available is quite small but we do have some scraps of Latin from two hundred or so years before Plautus in inscriptions and in old laws and prayers which were memorised by generations of Roman school children, sort of traditional lore if you like. These very old inscriptions look very different from classical Latin. Greek and Roman historians, people like Dio Cassius, Livy, explicitly state that the earliest Roman inscriptions, treaties between Roman Carthage from the fifth century BC for example, which have survived in their day as documents, couldn’t actually be interpreted by most well-educated Romans because the language was just so different.

Gosh. Do we have any sense of how those differences were…?

Yeah. To some extent, I mean, because the material is limited our knowledge is limited but we can piece quite a bit together. There were lots of changes, for example, in the way in which sounds were pronounced, quite as radical as between the sound of, say, Latin ‘calidus’ and French ‘chaud’ which we mentioned earlier. A good example would be Latin words which have an R between two vowels. Quite a lot of those earlier on, we know from the spellings of these inscriptions and so on, had an S sound there not an R sound. So the word for ‘gold’ was originally not ‘aurum’ but ‘ausom’. And the word for ‘he or she swears’ wasn’t ‘iurat’ but ‘iouesat’. These are actually forms we’ve got on documents. And it’s not just sounds, again, of course, there were changes in grammar too. And, we know that there were some very different endings, for example, for cases, for case endings in noun declensions. A nice example of that is from a very early inscription, probably from the end of the sixth century, called the Lapis Satricanus, it’s from the town of Satricum, south of Rome, and some friends of a chap called Publius Valerius have dedicated something to the guy. What you would expect is friends of Publius Valerius, ‘Publii Valerii’ but what you actually have on the document is ‘Popliosio Ualesiosio’. In other words, early Latin had a genitive ending ‘-osio’ quite distinct from the familiar I ending of the second declension.

That sounds bizarre.

Bizarre.

Yeah.

Quite extraordinary. And that’s the only example of it’s but it’s there on the stone so it’s real.

Mm.

It’s real. But disappeared.

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1.6 The Indo-European language family

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Latin belongs to a big family of languages, called the Indo-European family. Other members of the family include Greek, Sanskrit, Russian and English. Some words can be reconstructed from the parent language ‘Proto-Indo-european’, for example: *seks ‘six’, *septm ‘seven’. These words are written with an asterisk before them, to show that they are reconstructed words, and not actually attested in any written form.

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Ancient Latin

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Transcript: Ancient Latin

James Clackson

Mm. So Latin, about 600BC then looked very different from classical Latin but that presumably comes from something else? Can we go further and further back in time and find…

Geoffrey Horrocks

Sure. Absolutely. I mean, there is some point, I suppose, at which you have to say Latin is distinctively itself but if you go back far enough, of course, we don’t have direct evidence for Latin before the middle of the first millennium BC because that’s when writing was first introduced in Italy but we do know that Latin belongs to a very large language family, conventionally called the Indo-European family and other members of this family include not just ancient languages like Greek and Sanskrit but also modern ones like English and Russian. All of these languages ultimately derive from this common source and that’s why lots of words, let’s think of an example, words meaning six and seven, all begin with an S sound or at least some kind of sibilant in virtually all of these languages like English, Latin, Sanskrit, and Russian. They all derive from, ultimately, the same words in a single language and they’ve descended over time from that source. We don’t know when this hypothetical Indo-European language was actually spoken or even where it was spoken, but must have been at least five thousand years ago.

Gosh. So we can, we can go that far back in the history of Latin and all the way to the present day then?

Well, in partial terms, that’s absolutely right. I mean, the amount of hard information is often quite small but we have methods for reconstructing the past when we have a certain amount of information, gaps can be filled and that’s certainly how we can go beyond the written documents of Latin into pre-history and, of course, for the later period we do have a more or less continuous written record to show us the way Latin is developing over time.

OK. Thanks very much. That’s very interesting.

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Conclusion

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This free course provided an introduction to studying the arts and humanities. It took you through a series of exercises designed to develop your approach to study and learning at a distance and helped to improve your confidence as an independent learner.

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Acknowledgements

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Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources:

Course image: POP in Flickr made available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Licence.

James Clackson

Trevor Fear

Geoffrey Horrocks

Naoko Yamagata

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

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RSS feed for Continuing classical Latin

Introduction

Learning outcomes

1 A History of Latin

1.1 Language change

Audio activity 1

Transcript: History of language

Transcript: Changes in language

1.2 Notions of language change in Ancient Rome

Audio activity 2

Transcript: Changes in form of speech

1.3 The fate of the Latin language

Audio activity 3

Transcript: Disappearance of Latin

Transcript: Changes to Latin

1.4 Early Latin: Plautus

Audio activity 4

Transcript: Plautus’ Latin

1.5 Early Latin: Latin before Plautus

Audio activity 5

Transcript: Before Plautus’ Latin

1.6 The Indo-European language family

Audio activity 6

Transcript: Ancient Latin

Conclusion

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