Who spoke Latin natively?

Factual Questions
21

[QUOTE=Lama Pacos]
Do the languages Latin descended from have known identities? It never even ocurred to me. I’ve always imagined a big blank space between PIE and Latin, even though intellectually I know that can’t be true.
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I think this has been alluded to in the thread, but let me make it more explicit. Latin is part of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family. The Italic languages were brought to Italy not terribly long ago; the oldest inscriptions found date to something like the 7th or 8th century BCE. I’m not sure if the language they spoke, now called Proto-Italic, has been reconstructed or not; I suspect that there may not be enough surviving data from some of its daughter languages. Sometimes the Italic people are linked to the Celts, but that theory is not particularly popular anymore.

The Italic languages separated into the Sabellic, or Osco-Umbrian branch, which included, most notably, Oscan and Umbrian; and the Latino-Faliscan branch, including Latin and its closest relative Faliscan. Latin was definitely the native language of the original Romans; that’s how it became the language of the Roman Empire. Its success at spreading to far-flung regions in the Empire can be seen in the fact that its daughters are spoken not only in Italy but in Spain, France, and Romania.

[QUOTE=Askance]
I can pretty much guarantee you never read anywhere that Latin was an invented language. You may be thinking of Italian, which was more or less invented (or synthesised anyway) by Dante.
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Not really. The modern Italian language has inherited features from other dialects, but ultimately, it’s one particular regional language, Tuscan. Tuscan is not an artificial language by any means and modern Italian is quite similar to other dialects spoken in the vicinity. Dante’s role - along with Petrarch and Bocaccio, was in popularizing the Tuscan language by giving it a body of literature.

[QUOTE=John Mace]
He meant the precursors of Latin, not the Romance languages. And AFAIK, they don’t.

BTW, maybe the OP is thinking of written Classical Latin. Wasn’t that at least partially constructed and not something that people actaully spoke?
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I’ve really only heard this idea put forth by non-linguists; as far as I can tell, while there was certainly a distinction between Classical Latin and more common varieties, it was pretty much what you see in any language. There weren’t two entirely different languages spoken, and neither was particularly artificial. Latin as used by educated speakers did tend to involve a certain artifice, in that it preserved features long disappeared from the common variety. So Classical Latin speakers appear to have retained /h/ in words spelled with <h>, but we can tell that it was not present in common Latin by the fact that less educated speakers tended to drop Hs or insert them incorrectly. Likewise, when major phonetic changes were taking place in Vulgar Latin, the educated tried to maintain the Classical variety. (In fact, one of the most important discoveries in determining exactly which changes took place in late Vulgar Latin is the Appendix Probi, which is simply a long list of corrections, presumably for students, listing the Classical form and the incorrect forms they were using based on their own pronunciation.) But the artifice was in preserving an old form of a language long after everyone stopped speaking it natively, not in any wholesale invention of a language.

22

Just because we have no insciptions earlier than the 8th century doesn’t mean that’s when Latin began to be spoken - that’s when the alphabet came to Italy and therefore writing began. We can assume it was spoken for some time before that.

I’m also not aware of any evidence of migrations around 900 BCE - that is indeed when the Italian cultures began to be distinct, though.

23

Pre- and Non-Christian works in Latin–a few of them may be recognizable:

The Aeneid–Virgil
Metamorphoses–Ovid
De Oratore–Cicero
The Gallic Wars–J. Ceasar
Odes–Horace
Hisotry of Rome–Livy
De Rerum Natura–Lucretius
The Catiline Conspiracy–Sallust
Lives of the Ceasars–Suetonius
Histories/Annals–Tacitus
Plays–Terence

24

[QUOTE=Helen’s Eidolon]
Just because we have no insciptions earlier than the 8th century doesn’t mean that’s when Latin began to be spoken - that’s when the alphabet came to Italy and therefore writing began. We can assume it was spoken for some time before that.

I’m also not aware of any evidence of migrations around 900 BCE - that is indeed when the Italian cultures began to be distinct, though.
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I’m not an archaeologist; I don’t know the exact history of Italic presence in Italy. But they obviously weren’t the peninsula’s original inhabitants. When exactly they arrived, I don’t know.

25

I’m currently reading a book on pre-Roman Italy, and he asserts that the material culture is not significantly changed between 1200 and 900, and even at 900 there’s no evidence of a migration. I doubt we can know too much about their migration and who was there before that.

26

[QUOTE=Derleth]
I don’t know how you got taught that it was artificial, but it certainly is not. It was a living language and Italian is its lineal descendant.

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He may have been referring to the notion that the classical Latin of Ovid and Cicero, and presumably also that of the early Church fathers, was a literary language that was significantly different from the tongue spoken in the streets of Rome and elsewhere in the empire.

27

[QUOTE=Polycarp]
John, any background on the ~900 BCE migrations? It’s something I had never run into, and would be interested in learning more about.
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I’m going from memory, so I don’t have a cite. I thought it was generally accepted that “Latin” speakers brought the language to the area around that time, not that it evolved from proto-Latin spkoen in the area by natives. At any rate, the real question was if there is a name for this proto-Latin, wherever it came from, and I don’t think there is.

28

[QUOTE=John Mace]
I’m going from memory, so I don’t have a cite. I thought it was generally accepted that “Latin” speakers brought the language to the area around that time, not that it evolved from proto-Latin spkoen in the area by natives. At any rate, the real question was if there is a name for this proto-Latin, wherever it came from, and I don’t think there is.
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“Old Latin”, “Latino-Faliscan”, or “Proto-Italic”, depending when we’re talking about.

And no one still takes seriously any of the theories that the Indo-Europeans were the original inhabitants of Europe. At some point, they migrated into the peninsula. I guess the debate is about when it happened.

29

Again, although there are some theories, as far as I’m aware, there’s no proof that either the Villanovan (Iron Age) culture or the Terremare culture (Bronze age) were due to mass immigration or invasion. This is the impression that T. J. Cornell’s The Beginnings of Rome gives me, but if anyone has more concrete information, I’d be interested.

30

And ‘Old Latin’, or archaic Latin, was NOT proto-Latin. It’s pre-classical Latin, such as many inscriptions and, arguably, Plautus.

31

[QUOTE=Helen’s Eidolon]
And ‘Old Latin’, or archaic Latin, was NOT proto-Latin. It’s pre-classical Latin, such as many inscriptions and, arguably, Plautus.
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I’m not sure what distinction you’re trying to make here.

32

The question was what intermediate between Latin and Indo-European was brought to the Italian peninsula and by whom, yes? It’s established that ‘Old Latin’ was and early phase of Latin, not pre-Latin, written well after any migration happened, even if it was in 900, which I really don’t think it was.

33

[QUOTE=Spectre of Pithecanthropus]
He may have been referring to the notion that the classical Latin of Ovid and Cicero, and presumably also that of the early Church fathers, was a literary language that was significantly different from the tongue spoken in the streets of Rome and elsewhere in the empire.
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And RP is significantly different from the English spoken on the streets of London, San Francisco, and Mumbai. I think that is a fair comparison for someone trying to get a handle on the degree of difference between Ovid’s literary Latin and the Vulgate spoken in Rome and Gaul the Pillars of Hercules. Of course, once the regional vulgates started fragmenting into different languages due to lack of travel the comparison breaks down and Latin turns into the mummified language I mentioned in my first post in this thread.

34

[QUOTE=Helen’s Eidolon]
The question was what intermediate between Latin and Indo-European was brought to the Italian peninsula and by whom, yes? It’s established that ‘Old Latin’ was and early phase of Latin, not pre-Latin, written well after any migration happened, even if it was in 900, which I really don’t think it was.
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You’re sort of inventing boundaries here that don’t necessarily exist. As I said, the language brought when the first Indo-Europeans migrated to Italy is called Proto-Italic, and it gave birth to Latin and its various relatives (which died out gradually as Latin took prominence.) “Old Latin” is just a name for a particular era in the development of Latin. It’s later than Latino-Faliscan - that is, the name isn’t used to describe the common ancestor of Latin and Faliscan. Whether it counts as the same language as Classical Latin or not is just a matter of how things are categorized. It’s probably the best definition of “Proto-Latin” - that is, it’s the earliest language that can unambiguously be called “Latin”, just as “Proto-Italic” is the original language of the Italic people, or “Proto-Indo-European” the language of the original Indo-Europeans.

35

I thought your answer was misleading given what was asked. I think it would be silly to describe archaic Latin as proto-Latin - it’s easily read by Latin readers with understanding of simple phonological changes. Old English, for example, is not proto-English, and is much further from modern English than archaic Latin is from Classical Latin.

Don’t forget also that Proto-Italic and even Latino-Faliscan are linguistic constructs. We actually HAVE archaic Latin.

36

[QUOTE=Helen’s Eidolon]
I thought your answer was misleading given what was asked. I think it would be silly to describe archaic Latin as proto-Latin - it’s easily read by Latin readers with understanding of simple phonological changes. Old English, for example, is not proto-English, and is much further from modern English than archaic Latin is from Classical Latin.

Don’t forget also that Proto-Italic and even Latino-Faliscan are linguistic constructs. We actually HAVE archaic Latin.
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Wouldn’t the point be that “proto-” languages are ones that inguists have reconstructed, based on the evidence of languages known from speech and/or writing? So if we had no Old English texts, then proto-English would be reconstructed, based on the evidence of English, other Germanic languages, and Norman French (the latter to subtract the Norman French influence from Middle English).

37

[QUOTE=Giles]
Wouldn’t the point be that “proto-” languages are ones that inguists have reconstructed, based on the evidence of languages known from speech and/or writing? So if we had no Old English texts, then proto-English would be reconstructed, based on the evidence of English, other Germanic languages, and Norman French (the latter to subtract the Norman French influence from Middle English).
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Not necessarily. Usually proto-languages are reconstructed, but in some cases we do have clear examples of a language and it’s still referred to as a proto-language. It generally refers to the progenitor of a group of languages. So Proto-Germanic is the (reconstructed) last common ancestor of the Germanic languages; Latin could, thus, be termed “Proto-Romance”.

At any rate, John was just asking about the origins of Latin, and I summed up as best I could where it came from. It’s part of a whole group of languages with very clear similarities between them. He wasn’t using “Proto-Latin” in the technical sense usually assigned to “Proto-”, since in that sense it has to be the parent language of a whole group of languages. I was just basically listing the nodes on Latin’s family tree.

38

[QUOTE=Excalibre]
At any rate, John was just asking about the origins of Latin, and I summed up as best I could where it came from. It’s part of a whole group of languages with very clear similarities between them. He wasn’t using “Proto-Latin” in the technical sense..
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That’s right. Sorry if I caused any confusion. But as you said, these various labels are pretty arbitrary anyway, and only make sense in whatever context they are used.

39

[QUOTE=Excalibre]
I’m not an archaeologist; I don’t know the exact history of Italic presence in Italy. But they obviously weren’t the peninsula’s original inhabitants. When exactly they arrived, I don’t know.
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Oh, by the way, I found a cite about this. T. J. Cornell says: “Nothing in the archaeological record of the Italian Bronze and Iron ages proves, or even suggests, that any major invasions took place between c. 1800 and c. 800 BCE.”

40

[QUOTE=Helen’s Eidolon]
Oh, by the way, I found a cite about this. T. J. Cornell says: “Nothing in the archaeological record of the Italian Bronze and Iron ages proves, or even suggests, that any major invasions took place between c. 1800 and c. 800 BCE.”
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The Indo-European language family simply is not native to Italy. All them folks speaking Indo-European languages are later arrivals.