So in Ecclesiastical Latin, (also known as Church Latin) was technically an evolution of Classical Latin with changes in pronounciation, vocabulary, etc. It was a continuation of it after the fall of rome. Did the fall of rome have anything to do with the creation of Church Latin with any differences?
My understanding is that Ecclesiastical Latin was never seen as a different language than Classical Latin by its speakers. They were unaware of the evolution of the language and thought they were using the same language as Romans had been using centuries earlier. So it wasn’t a language that was created at any particular point.
No. Pronunciations change over time, and there’s evidence for some of these changes (ae & oe falling together with e, for example) before the fall of Rome.
I’m not sure this is true. Complaints about a poor level of Latin by many users, including clerics, were widespread among medieval and early modern scholars. Renaissance humanists made it one of their goals to purify Latin and weed out medieval styles that had crept into the language. So there seems to have been an awareness that the language had been gradually decaying.
I think it was more due to the natural evolution of language over time. It happens in all languages where the population speaking it spreads to other areas of the world. Look at Spanish and English as prime examples of this natural phenomenon.
That’s what I was thinking as well- there was already vulgar Latin and classical Latin during the Empire and those sorts of changes just continued over time.
Now we’ve got Spanish, French, Occitan, Catalan, Romanian, etc… and our own mutated version of classical Latin.
Languages change; look at the differences in written modern English over just 400 years. If anything, classical Latin has stayed remarkably static I’d say.
That’s because classical Latin is an ideal that, over subsequent centuries, people aspired to. It’s not in practical everyday use - if it were, it would have evolved as well. It is a language that is used only in very niche applications, and in those applications it is feasible to uphold the ambition of staying true to what ancient grammarians considered proper. That is exactly what the adjective “classical”, in relation to a language, means: A particular variety of that language that has the highest prestige amongst all the other varieties. For Latin, that “classical” status happens to be held by the usage of, roughly, the first centuries BC and AD.
I recall reading something that even by the time of Julius Caesar at the beginning of the empire, the “classic” latin of oratory and literature had diverged significantly from the street language (vulgar?).
I suppose that the one thing that might help stabilize a language is a common source text. For example, how stable has Arabic been over the centuries, given that the Quran is such a central part of Islamic culture and frequently referenced? Whereas Chaucer’s English is barely intelligible, and even Shakespeare is a little awkward nowadays.
Now we have, on the one hand, Voltaire, and on the other hand Vulgar French. Plus ça change…
It has been out of fashion for a couple of centuries, but there was a phase when 3/4 of all European books were published in Classical (neo-)Latin. That is kind of a practical everyday use, for a certain segment of the population. Cf. Literary/Classical Chinese (versus all the mutually non-intelligible varieties of Chinese).
There is Classical and standard Arabic, but I am not completely positive a random dude from Marrakesh and a random dude from Baghdad would be able to understand each other easily…
Actually I’d point to the Catholic Church as the prime stabilizing factor. They’ve used classical Latin as the language of the Church, both in the liturgy, and for recordkeeping for the last two thousand years.
Having it in somewhat continuous use by the same institution for that period of time is going to retard change as well as provide a sort of reference for speakers. By that, I mean that you might get some drift in pronunciation in say… Polish clerics, but one goes to Rome, and learns how it is supposed to be pronounced, and that acts as a sort of correcting influence onhow the guys back in Krakow pronounce their Latin.
Commonly spoken languages don’t really have that sort of braking effect on change nor that sort of reference effect coming from anywhere over time - everyone just sort of communicates, and stuff sticks or not based on how people like it and the prevailing vocabulary, pronunciation, etc…
Any language that lasts that long is going to evolve. Though the Fall of Rome certainly had an impact on how it evolved, because a language used for ceremonial and scholarly purposes is going to be very different than a language used for everyday purposes.
And probably some of the changes were a result of “purifications” meant to undo “changes” that weren’t actually changes. Lots of luck figuring out which ones, though.
I think it’s Ecclesiastical Latin that is used as the language of the Catholic Church
The Ecclesiastical Latin used by today’s Catholic Church is a modernised form of Classical Latin. It has to be, because many church documents dealing with current issues, such as encyclicals, are published in Latin, so must be able to talk about modern concepts. So while the grammar of today’s Ecclesiastical Latin is still pretty classical, the vocabulary has been enriched with numerous neologisms.
Here’s a photo of an ATM in Vatican City with Latin instructions on the screen:
What the heck does this even say? This is some weird-ass Latin. “Inserito scidulam” (“insert the card”) is clear enough. vocabulary - ATM in Vatican City: "Inserito scidulam quaeso ut faciundam cognoscas rationem" - Latin Language Stack Exchange has a good explanation of it for the curious.
The syntax is probably very similar, and the portion of the vocabulary that exists in both, but the pronunciations are almost certainly very different, and we even have pretty good guesses as to how, in many cases. For instance, in Ecclesiastical Latin, “c” is often pronounced similarly to “ch” in English, but in Classical Latin, it was probably pronounced the same as “k”.
Well, when I watched the movie Billy Elliot i had to turn on subtitles, and they were speaking English. I watched the Rockerfeller tree lighting a few days ago, and I could tell the Latino singer had a distinctive accent (from whereever his family was from) because he dropped the last letter of each word - “Felee Navida…”. I recall comments about the Narcos show on Netflix, where someone mentioned “why do some of those Columbians sound like Mexicans?”
Accents can change a lot over time. It took what, a century for Australian to diverge from real English?
Well before 476, in fact.
The Appendix Probi, believed to have been written around 300 - 350 shows that, even by then, the evolution toward early Romance was well under way. Consonant cluster simplification, among other developments, was very much in evidence, based on what old Probus* felt needed to be corrected. For example, it surprised me to learn that people were already pronouncing mensa (“table”) as mesa. All people in the Empilre? I assume not. However, although the Appendix doesn’t mention it as far as I know, I would be willing to bet that the people who did use the mesa pronunciation were , similarly, already pronouncing pensum (“weight”) as peso. I can’t help wondering if it was in Hispania where these pronunciations were being used.
If you want to skip the Wiki article and go straight to the Appendix itself, go here.
*OK, it probably wasn’t really Probus, as the Wiki article explains.