My wife claims that Vulgar Latin and Medieval Spanish are few and that, as a speaker of Modern Spanish, she can work her way though very old documents. “El Cid” is considered the border between Vulgar Latin and Medieval Spanish, and it’s from about 1200. She can read it, but “it reads like a legal document.”
She can also converse, slowly, with Romanians, and Romanian sounds like Latin to this old altar boy, but Dr Drake has a point. Especially since it’s unlikely many people normally spoke in formal Latin, but in some dialect with many of the same influences as their modern forms.
Aye, the Portuguese one would be quite close as well. French no, due to their taste for chomping on letters (written French is understandable to speakers of other Romance languages; spoken, not so much). The Spanish speaker would have the same (relatively minor) problem getting himself understood as we do when speaking with Italians: it’s “time to pull out the more Latin parts of the vocabulary.”
> My wife claims that Vulgar Latin and Medieval Spanish are few and that, as a
> speaker of Modern Spanish, she can work her way though very old
> documents. “El Cid” is considered the border between Vulgar Latin and
> Medieval Spanish, and it’s from about 1200. She can read it, but “it reads like a
> legal document.”
This is sort of cheating. The question was which modern Romance language is most like classical Latin. I take classical Latin to mean the Latin of the first century B.C. I take a modern language to be one of the twenty-first century A.D. The difference between (just to round things off) approximately 82 B.C. and 2009 A.D. is 2200 years. The difference between (just to round things off) approximately 1209 A.D. and 2009 A.D. is 900 years. So it’s not surprising that your wife can almost read Medieval Spanish.
They certainly can read the English of 1209 (which is thirteeth-century English, incidentally) better than they can read the language spoken by the Angles and Saxons in 82 B.C. (well, they could if there were any manuscripts from that period). My point was that you have to be fair in your comparisons. You can’t compare the ability of the speakers of one language to read manuscripts from 1209 with the ability of the speakers of another language to read manuscripts from 82 B.C. and say that this proves anything about the relative rate of change of the languages.
Italian’s pretty close. They say Romanian is pretty up there, but I don’t speak any Romanian, nor do I know anything about it shame, although I believe there is an area in Switzerland? (correct me if I’m wrong on this one) that still speaks a dialect VERY similar to Latin.
Part of the problem was mentioned up-thread as well: there was/is a lot of political muscle behind what dialect ended up becoming the standard language for the entire nation. Every country has their minority languages; the one from Paris is now called French, the ones from other places in France are in danger of dying out.
Back in Roman times there was a (somewhat) stable multi-national empire-wide governing body, so the primary language of the time was relatively stable with respect to place - but like all languages not so much with respect to time. Once that stable government disappeared, the changes that previously worked their way through the entire empire became merely local.
There was a Latin proverb: “Beati Hispani quibus vivere bibere est” - Happy are the Spanish for whom to live is to drink - because the locals pronounced “vivere” and “bibere” extremely close. I’m not a student of Spanish, but I think it’s still relatively true these days.
SWMBO had occasion to visit Italy a couple of times while in college, as an exchange student. One one occasion, they went to Venice with a group that included a guy who was a Latin scholar. They spent a couple of days wandering around Venice and some of the smaller towns on the coast, and the Latin guy was able to communicate with the Italian speakers without too much difficulty. Seems the language hadn’t drifted all that much in the area.
Of course, the area that comes the closest would be Vatican City, where Latin is the language spoken.
Ecclesiastical Latin (what the Pope speaks) is a very different dialect from Classical Latin (what Caesar and Cicero spoke), though. I wouldn’t be surprised if some other modern language or dialect turned out to be more easily mutually intelligible with Classical Latin than Ecclesiastical Latin is.
I’ve wondered about that. Does the present pope speak Italian? If not (or in case he didn’t), how does the Vatican accomodate that? An interpreter?
Language isn’t the easiest thing for us old farts to learn.
The pope speaks 10 languages, including Italian. He’s been in Rome for 27 years. If by some chance, a pope was elected who didn’t speak Italian, it would probably be handled by interpreters and translators.
His lack of difficulty simply cannot be due to the similarities between Venetian dialect and Latin. The dialects of the Veneto have lost more of the final terminations than Italian, and have an awful lot of fricatives compared to Latin.
As a general rule, you should be suspicious when people tell you that a given variety is closer to some ancestral language than any other. The closeness of languages to their ancestors is a subject of much urban legend. Every variety contains some aspects that it’s kept that all other varieties have lost, but looking at a single aspect doesn’t tell you which variety is closest to the ancestral language.