Did Latin evolve into Italian language?

Factual Questions
21

Latin itself dates certainly from the 6th century BCE, to which the oldest known Latin incriptions have been dated. At that point, it was the tongue of the people of Latium (now Lazio), the Italian region situated around Rome on the west coast of Italy. This early Latin was difficult reading to even the scholars of Classical Latin times, a comment made by several of them, with such things as a dative ending in -d.

At that time, four other related languages (with Latin, the Italic family of Indo-European) were spoken in other areas of Italy and Istria/Slovenia:
[ul][li]Faliscan, spoken only in Falerii (modern Civita Castellana) in northeast Lazio[/li][li]Umbrian, spoken in Umbria and the longest survivor other than Latin of the Italic tongues, lasting down to the first century BCE[/li][li]Oscan, covering all the peninsula south of Umbrian and Latin except the “heel”[/li][li]Venetian, spoken in a region equivalent to the Italian provinces of Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia, the Istrian peninsula, and the western half of Slovenia.[/ul][/li]
By 100 BC Latin had expanded to eliminate all the above (except lingering rural enclaves of Umbrian), and thereafter spread with the Roman Empire across much of the Mediterranean littoral and western Europe.

The process by which Latin transformed itself into the Romance languages was a slow and nearly imperceptible one, more akin to the changes in English between Chaucer’s time and the present, where it takes seeing “chuse” in the U.S. Constitution or hearing “obey” and “tea” rhymed in Alexander Pope to remind us how things have changed in just a short time.

22

Well, almost. Wholesale vocabulary changes might make that somewhat difficult. Italian and the other Romance languages evolved from Vulgar Latin; the Wikipedia article on VL has been vetted by better experts here than I and said to be more or less correct.

Many basic Latin words and roots were lost in Vulgar Latin, to be replaced by words that were related in context. For instance, Ital. fuoco comes from Latin focus meaning hearth, or the focus of the home as it were. The classical Latin word for fire, ignis was lost. So the Latin word for the place that held the fire became the Italian word for fire itself. And there were many other switches of this kind.

I would guess, though that if Caesar could be transported to modern day Italy or Spain he would find the languages there tantalizingly familiar in their rhythm and in some of the grammar of verbs, perhaps as much as an English speaker would among Frisians.

23

As has been pointed out, “Italian”, “French”, and “Spanish” are actually fairly recent creations. These languages are political languages, because they are the official language of a unified state. And more and more people grow up speaking the official dialect as their native tongue. However, before modern mass media and political unification there were no borders where people stopped speaking Italian and started speaking French, or stopped speaking French and started speaking Spanish. 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.

Even today the local “Italian” dialect spoken in Sicily isn’t going to be mutually intelligible with the “Italian” spoken in Milan. Even today some people in northeastern spain and southwestern France speak Catalan rather than Spanish or French.

Of course, islands have clearly defined borders, so it’s a lot easier to define a language/dialect spoken on an island compared to a language spoken in a region that grades into other regions.

24

There’s little languages or dialects in most of the Romance world. Spain has five official languages - Castilian, Catalan, Galician, Valencian, and Basque, and all but the last are Romance languages. Further, Aragonese and Asturian both have official recognition within their respective autonomous communities (the basic unit of Spain’s political organization.) The rest of the Romance world is the same - there’s TONS of languages spoken in tiny areas.

25

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.

As for the notion that Italian would be closer to Latin than are the other modern romance languages, it does occur to me that many of the modern romance languages are heavily influenced by non-Latin languages. French, for instance, bears the mark of the Gaulic languages previously spoke in the region, and I seem to recall that Spanish has significant Moorish influences. Could Italy, perhaps, have been relatively shielded against such outside influences, compared to her sisters?

26

I thought modern Italian came from Florentine dialect, mainly because that’s what Dante wrote in.

27

Substitute “Florentine language” for “Florentine dialect”, and add in a couple other authors (Petrarch and Boccaccio if memory serves, though I know virtually nothing of Italian literature). You’re exactly right - the choice of one of the languages spoken on the Italian peninsula to become the “Italian” language was really sort of arbitrary. It just happened that one dialect developed greater prestige due to the writers who used it. But it wasn’t until pretty recently that the prestige dialect became the native language of most Italians. According to things I’ve read, at least, most Italians didn’t speak “Italian” until the 1950s at least.

28

Wonderful history overviews! Thanks to everyone! Now, I’m curious to find out if Ceasar’s expression was in fact a quote by Menander.

Also interesting note regarding different dialects existing in Northern Italy vs Southern Italy… to some degree that is true… I remember some southern italians complaining of “snobby” northern italians complaining that they couldn’t comprehend the s.italian… the s. italian said, in so many “wonderful” ways that the n. italian was simply being a snob and used his dialect as an excuse to make the s. italian seem incompetent. Who knows? I know I could always understand both regions so not sure what was going on, but clearly there is a prevalent perception by the n. italians that s. italians are sub-standard… good grief! I love em all! Bella Italia!

29

Southern Italy is poorer than Northern Italy, and one of the ways that they tell each other apart is by dialect. So it’s not surprising that Northern Italians look down on Southern Italian dialect. Many people who speak Standard American English look down on those who speak African-American Vernacular English or other dialects.

30

Plus the fact that different Italian dialetti can be very different. Not only are there class issues, but there are real difficulties in understanding one another. Of course, nowadays most dialects have become more similar to one another (or rather, they’ve been replaced by dialects of Florentine with some features of the former language spoken in the region.)

It’s definitely true that people’s opinions of different languages and dialects are heavily influenced by class issues.

31

The Romance languages nearly all derived from an interface of Latin with Germanic tongues, an “analytical” structure where meaning comes from syntax and auxiliary words such as auxiliary verbs and prepositions rather than from word endings being superimposed on Latin’s “synthetic” structure and within that a basic usage derived from Latin but with Germanic vocabulary and occasional stylistic variants. Italian was probably the least impacted but still displays some Lombardian characteristics; Romanian (where Slavic rather than Germanic influences were heavy) probably the most impacted. Frankish influenced French, Visigothic Spanish and Portuguese, etc.

The Romance languages as usually defined:
[ol][li]Italian, a group of dialects spoken on the Italian peninsula with a “standard language” derived from the Florentine dialect[/li][li]“Castellano,” the “Spanish” of Spain and Latin America, with even broader regional variations than English[/li][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[/li][li]Portuguese, the language of Portugal and Brazil[/li][li]Gallego, spoken in northwestern Spain and resembling a Spanish-Portuguese cross[/li][li]Sard or Sardinian, spoken on Sardinia and clearly distinct from Italian[/li][li]French, the national language of France, spoken in the northern 2/3 of France, four Swiss cantons, Quebec, southeast Belgium, and a wide array of former French colonies[/li][li]Occitan, also called Languedoc and Provencal, spoken in southern France[/li][li]Savoyard, AKA Franco-Provencal, spoken in Savoy, France, and Valle d’Aosta, Italy and some nearby areas[/li][li]Rhaetian, comprising three main dialects: Romansh, spoken in the Swiss canton of Graubunden; Ladin, in some mountain communities in Austria and nearby Italy; and Friulian, spoken in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy[/li][li]Dalmatian, now extinct, formerly spoken in Croatian coastal islands[/li][li]Istrian, likewise now extinct, spoken on the Istrian peninsula[/li][li]Romanian, spoken in most of Romania and Moldova (Moldavian, the language of northeast Romania and Moldova, is sometimes considered a separate language, which is more a political than a linguistic point)[/li][li]Aromanian, spoken in the mountains of northern Greece[/li]Megleno-Romanian, nearly extinct, in an enclave on the Greco-Macedonian border[/ol]

32

You seem to be putting rather a lot of emphasis on Germanic influence on the Romance languages. While there’s substantial Germanic vocabulary in the Romance languages - much of it dating back to classical times, in fact - that’s a pretty minor feature of the languages all in all. If you are suggesting that Germanic made a larger influence in causing the development of far more analytic verb morphology in the Romance languages, I’m gonna have to ask for a cite.

33

what was the relationship between Latin and Etruscan?

34

Each of them (excluding Romanian and its allies) has substantial Germanic-derived vocabulary and at least some Germanic-derived idiom; that was my major point – and of course that varies in degree and impact between the various languages. The synthetic-to-analytic shift appears to be largely independent, though I’d suspect that Germanic language style was at least a small contributing factor.

About the same as between Swedish and Finnish, actually. Two languages, from entirely separate groups, with no known relationship, spoken by neighboring peoples and probably with some borrowings in either direction, but with absolutely no connection other than proximity and some borrowed vocabulary.

Etruscan is not at all well known, but there is no evidence to prove its connection to any other language, living or dead – though there are a number of hypotheses out there. It’s another language isolate, much like Basque.

35

Interestingly, though, the more we learn about Etruscan culture, the more it seems to have influenced Roman culture. But yes, the language is largely unknown and is assumed to be not Indo-European in origin.

36

Here is an elaboration of my earlier post. The citation is from a textbook off the shelf of Mrs. S; while the book is available for purchase through Amazon and elsewhere, the full text is not online. The writer is the Romanist Prof. Rebecca Posner and the quote is from “The Romance Languages”, CUP 1996, pp 96-97:

“On lexical and syntactic grounds, I regard standard Italian as the prime candidate for the status of Romance archetype, as a language which has most in common with each of the others. In some ways it is so close to Latin that it has even, as we have seen, been mistaken for a colloquial variety of the Latin literary language. It has been carefully nurtured throughout its history as an ‘illustrious’ language modelled on Classical Latin, so much so that some doubt that it can really be called a ‘natural language’. The term ‘standard Italian’ has even been described as a ‘somewhat fictitious label… aiming to circumscribe a hopelessly vague concept’, for the grammar book version is comparatively seldom heard, unsullied, in uneducated speech in Italy.”

Prof. Posner goes on to state that Italian is the ‘modern geographical surrogate for a historical Popular Latin’ and that it represents the “inner core” of Romanceness.

pace, I’m glad you’re enjoying this thread. Linguistics can be fascinating once you fall into it.

One of the reasons I jumped at the chance to marry Mrs. S is that she informed me of something I should have realized during decades of amateur philology but never happened to think about: The name of the senior Roman god ‘Jupiter’ and the name of the senior Greek god ‘Zeos’ (Zeus in the Latinized version) are really the same word, derived from the same Indo-European root. The Greeks added the male ending ‘-s’ and the Romans piously added the Latin word for father: ‘pater’. Any other differences between the two names are minor pronunciation issues.

After that, I just had to marry her. :slight_smile:

37

Yes I realize the Italian pronunciation of “grazie” … but in my three-year living experience in Italy (with locals, both rural and in various cities) Italians seemed to prefer “GRAH-tsi”

38

This has been a fascinating thread. I have only one thing to add. I love to point out this fact to people. I’m glad you met your wife before you met me :slight_smile:

39

There was certainly some influence with regard to the vocabulary, but it’s incorrect to say that the Germanic languages imposed an analytical structure on the Romance languages, or at least they couldn’t have done so by virtue of their own analytical structure. That’s because they didn’t have one. Germanic languages of the time were every bit as synthetic as Latin, with similarly complex systems of case endings and other inflections so that word order was relatively untrammeled. On the other hand, it is true that just by virtue of their being different they could have contributed to the simplification of Romance morphology.

40

Six (and a fraction) swiss cantons: Genève, Valais, Vaud, Neuchâtel, Fribourg, Jura (plus parts of Berne). Let’s not forget Luxembourg and Monaco.