1.3 The fate of the Latin language
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’).
Audio activity 3
Now listen to the following audio conversations between James Clackson and Geoffrey Horrocks.
Download this audio clip.Audio player: Disappearance of Latin
Transcript: Disappearance of Latin
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.
Disappearance of Latin
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Download this audio clip.Audio player: Changes to Latin
Transcript: Changes to Latin
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.
Changes to Latin
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