One of the most frustrating questions that has arisen from the daily pointless exasperation of my mind is based on the latin language. Where and (if possible to answer) when did this language arise?
It is my understanding that vulgar latin (as in the local dialect) is considered what is now modern Italian. So why do we call people of Spanish-speaking South American descent (or locality) Latino’s ?
I’m assuming here that you’re not referring to the latin spoken by the ancient Romans???
You understand incorrectly; vulgate Latin is dead, as dead as classical Latin. Modern Italian is merely one of the dialects that arose in Italy after the decline of Latin. Languages arising in other Roman possessions are French, Romanian, and Spanish.
All of the American former colonies of Romance-language-speaking nations are considered “Latin America,” and their citizens are “Latin Americans,” or “Latinos.”
Never use an apostrophe to create a plural noun.
Latin is an Italic language (the only surviving one, actually. Other Italic languages were Oscan, Umbran, Faliscan) in the Latino-Faliscan subgroup. We don’t know exactly when it was first spoken, but are pretty sure that it was first spoken near the Tiber river in Italy in the 10th century BCE. The first evidence of Latin as a written language can be found in the 8th century BCE.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, the former parts of the empire found themselves out of communication with each other, and the dialects of Latin they spoke tended to get further and further apart until they became seperate languages in their own right. These languages, like Italian, French, Spanish, Catalan, Portugese, and Romanian, became known as “Romance” languages, because they were all based on Latin, the language of ancient Rome. Also, the people of Spain, Portugal, Italy, and France, later were labeled with the term “Latins”, to refer to them as a group.
Historians and analysts wanted some way to distinguish Central and South America, mainly colonized by Spain, from the US and Canada, mainly colonized by England. So, the US and Canada became known as Anglo-America, and Central and South America either as Hispanic-America or Latin America.
To the best of my knowledge, Ancient Latin derived from an Indo-European Language, which as Capt. Amazing states spread into several ones. the 6 new languages that came from latin are spanish, portuguese, roumanian, italian, french, and English (although english can also be classified under Germanic/Anglo saxon).
So i hope that answers your question
~Methos
Wasn’t Tuscan (the language of the Etruscans) the direct ancestor of Latin? And aren’t all of the modern “romance” languages considered to be Italic?
According to this site
http://indoeuro.bizland.com/tree/ital/rom.html
there are 17 Romance languages, three extinct, but it can be debated to what extent some of them are languages or dialects. The 17 languages are:
Sardinian, Popular Latin, Old French, French, Occitan, Spanish, Asturian, Galician, Catalan, Italian, Portugese, Corsican, Rhetoromance, Dalmatian, Romanian, Istromanan, and Aromanian.
I wouldn’t consider English a Romance language at all. It’s adopted some Romance words, especially from French, but things like grammar, congugation, and sentence structure are Germanic, not Romance.
Etruscan, from what we know of it, seems to be a non-Indo-European language, and not the ancestor of any modern language. The Romance languages probably should be considered Italic languages. I seperated them (and the website seperates them) to show that they’re distinct from the original Italic languages, of which Latin is the only survivor.