# Did Latin evolve into Italian language? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 7, 2006, 4:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-latin-evolve-into-italian-language/347344 "2006-03-07T04:16:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2006, 8:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-latin-evolve-into-italian-language/347344/41 "2006-03-08T08:28:31Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > Each village would have its own vernacular, mutually intelligable with neighboring villages, but as you got farther and farther away from your home village the local language got more and more different. > . I don’t think so, actually. As far as I know/ can tell, there’s no continuum in regional languages. There are very real borders. If you go from your village to the next, yes, the dialect will be very slightly different, a little more so over the hill, even more so near the next town, etc…But eventually, you’ll run in a real “language border” and say, on the other side of the river, people will suddenly all speak a very different language. For instance, take the Oc and Oil languages in France. Occitan didnn’t become more and more similar to the Oil dialects the farther north you went. If you were living on the northern border of the Limousin region, for instance, you could travel quite a long way to the west, south or east, and people you meet would speak quite similar dialects (Auvergnat, Languedocian, etc…). But if you walked 5 miles to the north, everybody would speak a completely different Oil dialect. I don’t know how it came to be, but though they don’t follow the (current, at least) political borders (between France and Italy or France and Spain, for instance : Occitan is/was spoken in northern Italy, Catalan in southern france, etc…), there are real borders separating the various romance languages. ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2006, 1:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-latin-evolve-into-italian-language/347344/42 "2006-03-08T13:27:38Z")
> [@Northern Piper](#): > > there’s a separate Sardinian language? who knew! verily, I learn each time I log onto the SDMB. Apparently, there are a few: [http://www.ethnologue.org/show\_language.asp?code=sro](http://www.ethnologue.org/show_language.asp?code=sro) [http://www.ethnologue.org/show\_language.asp?code=sdn](http://www.ethnologue.org/show_language.asp?code=sdn) [http://www.ethnologue.org/show\_language.asp?code=src](http://www.ethnologue.org/show_language.asp?code=src) [http://www.ethnologue.org/show\_language.asp?code=sdc](http://www.ethnologue.org/show_language.asp?code=sdc) [http://www.ethnologue.org/show\_language.asp?code=cat](http://www.ethnologue.org/show_language.asp?code=cat) [http://www.ethnologue.org/show\_language.asp?code=cos](http://www.ethnologue.org/show_language.asp?code=cos) [http://www.ethnologue.org/show\_language.asp?code=lij](http://www.ethnologue.org/show_language.asp?code=lij) Yeah, I know. I’m addicted to the Ethnolouge website. ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2006, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-latin-evolve-into-italian-language/347344/43 "2006-03-08T14:29:36Z")
> [@Arnold Winkelried](#): > > Six (and a fraction) swiss cantons: Genève, Valais, Vaud, Neuchâtel, Fribourg, Jura (plus parts of Berne). Let’s not forget Luxembourg and Monaco. Let’s also not forget la Terre-Neuve, l’Île-du-Prince-Édouard, la Nouvelle-Écosse, le Nouveau-Brunswick, l’Ontario, le Manitoba, la Saskatchewan, l’Alberta, la Colombie-Britannique, le territoire du Yukon, les Territoires du Nord-Ouest, et le territoire du Nunavut. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Doobieous](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/da6949/32.png) [@Doobieous](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doobieous)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2006, 2:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-latin-evolve-into-italian-language/347344/44 "2006-03-09T02:56:02Z")
[QUOTE=Excalibre] Where in Italy is “crai” used? I’ve never heard of it in Standard Italian, and the /kr/ cluster at the beginning of the word seems unlikely for an Italian word. _Crai_ is the modern word for “tomorrow” in Sardinian, but Sardinian is not Italian. In Lucanian (Lucano) it is the word for tomorrow. > [@](#): > > Well, closer or farther from Latin is almost meaningless as you know. But Sardinian is a Romance language but not one of the Romance languages, if you will. Sardinia was quite isolated, and many of the innovations that are universal among the other Romance languages simply didn’t hit Sardinia, which seems to have followed something of its own path after the fall of the Roman Empire (though of course heavily influenced by Catalan, Spanish, and Italian at different points in history.) It evolved from the Latin of the second century AD, while the other Romance languages evolved from the Romance spoken around the time of the Empire’s collapse. That makes absolutely no sense to say it is a Romance language, but not one of the romance language. I think any linguist who’s studied the romance languages would die laughing at that. That’s like saying “Hawaiian is an Austronesian language but not one of the Austronesian languages”. ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2006, 3:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-latin-evolve-into-italian-language/347344/45 "2006-03-09T03:19:45Z")
[QUOTE=Doobieous] > [@Excalibre](#): > > Where in Italy is “crai” used? I’ve never heard of it in Standard Italian, and the /kr/ cluster at the beginning of the word seems unlikely for an Italian word. _Crai_ is the modern word for “tomorrow” in Sardinian, but Sardinian is not Italian. > > In Lucanian (Lucano) it is the word for tomorrow. > > That makes absolutely no sense to say it is a Romance language, but not one of the romance language. I think any linguist who’s studied the romance languages would die laughing at that. That’s like saying “Hawaiian is an Austronesian language but not one of the Austronesian languages”. I see it plausible that an Italian dialect might borrow from Sardinian or the reverse. As for the last sentence, **Excalibre** was essaying a trope that you missed. The “Vulgar Latin” of the time of the fall of the Western Empire was sometimes called Romancia or some variant thereon, whence the modern word Romance (and the courtship story was first written in old Romance tongues, hence the transference to romantic love). What **Ex** meant by “a Romance language, but not one of the romance languages” was that Sardinian was (relatively) isolated from the cluster of other dialects that became the other Romance languages substantially earlier than the time that Romancia began breaking up into Old French, Old Italian, etc. Ergo, it’s a “Romance language” in the sense that it derived from Latin like the others did, but an outlier to the “Romance languages” which derived from end-of-Empire Romancia. ---
**Author:** ![Excalibre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/898d66/32.png) [@Excalibre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Excalibre)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2006, 4:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-latin-evolve-into-italian-language/347344/46 "2006-03-09T04:26:19Z")
> [@Doobieous](#): > > That makes absolutely no sense to say it is a Romance language, but not one of the romance language. I think any linguist who’s studied the romance languages would die laughing at that. That’s like saying “Hawaiian is an Austronesian language but not one of the Austronesian languages”. _I’ve_ studied the Romance languages. I’ve taken classes and read a number of books specifically on Romance linguistics. I’m sorry if my point wasn’t clear. Sardinian is generally classed as a Romance language due to its Latin heritage. However, it is rather atypical among the Romance languages because it didn’t actually evolve from the language called “Romance”, sometimes classed as very late Vulgar Latin. There was a language spoken after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire throughout the region called “Romance”. Romance, even before it differentiated into mutually incomprehensible regional languages, had many features characteristic of the modern Romance languages but not of Latin: the loss of some cases (now complete in all of the Romance languages except for Romanian and to some extent for traces in the pronoun systems of other Romance languages), a shift to stress accent rather than pitch accent, a reorganization of the Latin vowel system into the Proto-Western-Romance and Proto-Dalmatian vowel systems, and so forth. Many of those changes did not strike Sardinian in the same way, as the isolation of the island left it somewhat insulated from the changes that affected all the other Romance languages. The peculiar vowel system is a good example - while all Romance languages lost the phonemic vowel length characteristic of Latin, in Sardinian it took the form of a simple loss of length distinction (leaving five phonemic vowels) while in PWR, seven vowels were created (including open and close O and E, though that distinction is not phonemic in modern Spanish and Occitan, along with some regional dialects of French, and it’s rapidly losing ground in colloquial Catalan). Traces of these differing histories are clear, with words in Sardinian often having different vowels than cognates in the other Romance languages. Sorry if I confused you; I think your tone was somewhat unwarranted, as I believe I know some small amount about Romance linguistics, and my word choice was deliberate - albeit obviously confusing. My humblest apologies. ---
**Author:** ![Excalibre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/898d66/32.png) [@Excalibre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Excalibre)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2006, 4:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-latin-evolve-into-italian-language/347344/47 "2006-03-09T04:34:18Z")
> [@Polycarp](#): > > I see it plausible that an Italian dialect might borrow from Sardinian or the reverse. It may be - there are certain regional similarities between Sardinian and nearby Italian dialects that are probably due to contact between them. Or perhaps _cras_ may have been retained separately in both dialects; I don’t know much about the innumerable _dialetti_ - it simply was not a word I’m familiar with from Tuscan. > [@Excalibre](#): > > Romance, even before it differentiated into mutually incomprehensible regional languages, had many features characteristic of the modern Romance languages but not of Latin: the loss of some cases (now complete in all of the Romance languages except for Romanian and to some extent for traces in the pronoun systems of other Romance languages), a shift to stress accent rather than pitch accent, a reorganization of the Latin vowel system into the Proto-Western-Romance and Proto-Dalmatian vowel systems, and so forth. I forgot a couple biggies: palatalization of /k/ and /g/ before front vowels - hence the soft C and soft G in most Romance languages but _not_ in Sardinian - compare Italian _cento_ and Sardinian _kentu_. Another interesting feature is the development of definite articles from Latin demonstratives. While most other Romance languages have definite articles descending from _ille_, Sardinian’s come from _ipse_, giving the rather odd-looking (by Romance standards) _su, sa, sos, ses_ (though those are similar to those in Balearic dialects of Catalan, which may reflect either similar origins or a borrowing from Balearic dialects, as Catalunya was in control over Sardinia for quite some time.) ---
**Author:** ![JillGat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/9fc29f/32.png) [@JillGat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JillGat)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2006, 5:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-latin-evolve-into-italian-language/347344/48 "2006-03-09T05:04:23Z")
**Chronos** > [@](#): > > I would say that Old English (by which I presume you mean Anglo-Saxon) is a lot further from Modern English than is Latin from modern Italian. I have some knowledge of Latin (four years of high school and one of college, though I haven’t much used it in a decade), and that’s enough to get me at least the rudiments of modern Italian. By contrast, I’m quite fluent in modern English, but I can nonetheless make out almost nothing of, say, Beowulf. A more apt comparison, it seems to me, would be Middle English (Chaucer’s era, say), which is intelligible (with difficulty) to one fluent in Modern English. But which Modern English? I’m American and it took me almost a year before I started fully understanding the English spoken in rural northern Jamaica, “A fi oonu de pickney dem?” And movies made in Ireland sometimes show subtitles when they are shown in the US. I even found that people in Kentucky had a hard time understanding me, being from the West. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2006, 5:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-latin-evolve-into-italian-language/347344/49 "2006-03-09T05:50:10Z")
> [@JillGat](#): > > **Chronos** > > But which Modern English? I’m American and it took me almost a year before I started fully understanding the English spoken in rural northern Jamaica, “A fi oonu de pickney dem?” And movies made in Ireland sometimes show subtitles when they are shown in the US. I even found that people in Kentucky had a hard time understanding me, being from the West. Doesn’t matter. Any version of Moden English that you can come up will differ from Old English more than Italian differs from Latin. The example you gave is not different from Standard American Enlgish because it remains closer to Old Enlgish. It differs because it is a Creole and has drifted even further from Old English than Standard American English has. ---
**Author:** ![matt\_mcl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ab992/32.png) [@matt\_mcl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/matt_mcl)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2006, 9:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-latin-evolve-into-italian-language/347344/50 "2006-03-09T09:05:33Z")
[QUOTE=Polycarp] [li]Catalan, the language of Catalonia and Aragon, as well as the Balearic Islands, Andorra, and enclaves on Corsica and Sardinia and near the French-Spanish border[/list][/li][/QUOTE] Nitpick: although Catalan is spoken in some comarcas of Aragon that border Catalonia, it’s not really accurate to call it “the language of… Aragon.” Indeed, there’s a Castilian dialect/language unique to Aragon. You could say “the language of… Valencia” instead, although there would be many a Valencian who would insist that she speaks _valencià_, not Catalan. ---
**Author:** ![Excalibre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/898d66/32.png) [@Excalibre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Excalibre)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2006, 4:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-latin-evolve-into-italian-language/347344/51 "2006-03-09T16:35:28Z")
> [@matt\_mcl](#): > > Nitpick: although Catalan is spoken in some comarcas of Aragon that border Catalonia, it’s not really accurate to call it “the language of… Aragon.” Indeed, there’s a Castilian dialect/language unique to Aragon. But Catalan has a pretty long history in Aragon, and during the height of Aragonese power, it was Catalan, and not Aragonese, that traveled with them to Sardinia. > [@](#): > > You could say “the language of… Valencia” instead, although there would be many a Valencian who would insist that she speaks _valencià_, not Catalan. They are wrong. Actually, they’re not - they’re engaging in a quite rational political game in order to gain EU money for second-language maintenance. I’ve been told that the EU constitution was translated into both Catalan and Valencian. And the two translations were identical. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2006, 4:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-latin-evolve-into-italian-language/347344/52 "2006-03-09T16:56:45Z")
> [@Excalibre](#): > > They are wrong. Actually, they’re not - they’re engaging in a quite rational political game in order to gain EU money for second-language maintenance. I’ve been told that the EU constitution was translated into both Catalan and Valencian. And the two translations were identical. Reminds me of some signs you see in Canada. The law requires that certain signs be posted in both languages, but often the words are identical in English and French and both “versions” are written anyway. I guess it saves one side from saying “but you only posted the English version” and the other side saying “but you only posted the French version”. ---
**Author:** ![matt\_mcl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ab992/32.png) [@matt\_mcl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/matt_mcl)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2006, 10:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-latin-evolve-into-italian-language/347344/53 "2006-03-11T10:45:09Z")
> [@Excalibre](#): > > But Catalan has a pretty long history in Aragon, and during the height of Aragonese power, it was Catalan, and not Aragonese, that traveled with them to Sardinia. I know, but the point is it makes about as much sense to call Catalan “the language of Aragon” as it does to call French “the language of Michigan.” ---
**Author:** ![Tamerlane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tamerlane/32/7602_2.png) [@Tamerlane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tamerlane)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2006, 1:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-latin-evolve-into-italian-language/347344/54 "2006-03-11T13:37:30Z")
> [@matt\_mcl](#): > > I know, but the point is it makes about as much sense to call Catalan “the language of Aragon” as it does to call French “the language of Michigan.” Well it does and doesn’t. Of the geographic region of Aragon, you’re quite correct it largely does not. Of the complicated, sprawling historical entity that was called ( in shorthand ) the kingdom of Aragon, it largely does. - Tamerlane ---
**Author:** ![matt\_mcl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ab992/32.png) [@matt\_mcl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/matt_mcl)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2006, 9:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-latin-evolve-into-italian-language/347344/55 "2006-03-14T09:42:29Z")
> [@Tamerlane](#): > > Well it does and doesn’t. Of the geographic region of Aragon, you’re quite correct it largely does not. Of the complicated, sprawling historical entity that was called ( in shorthand ) the kingdom of Aragon, it largely does. Well, that’s so, but the kingdom would probably more accurately be called Aragon-Catalonia, anyway. Calling it “Aragon” makes it sound like it was being ruled out of Zaragoza or something when the most important part of the kingdom was what’s now Catalonia. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-latin-evolve-into-italian-language/347344.md?page=2)