Why and how did Italian arise when the land now known as Italy already had Latin?
I asked a friend, and he said it’s because Latin’s so difficult, but I find Russian to be far more difficult than Latin. I mean, compared to Italian, Latin is difficult; but compared to Russian, Latin is easy, so the “Latin was so complex an easier language had to replace it” seems not to be true, otherwise an easier language would have replaced Russian.
WRS
Why did Shakespearean English arise when that Island already had Chaucerian English? Why do not English speakers, today, sound like the characters in a play by Shakespeare?
Language constantly shifts. Just from the period between the time of Julius Caesar and the time of Constantine Latin changed in several key areas of pronunciation (which is why Classical Latin–purported to have been spoken by Cicero (KEE ker oh)–sounds different than “Church Latin” (where Cicero is pronounced CHI cher oh). By the fifth century, when Rome “fell,” many of the -us endings were already being pronounced as if they had been spelled with a final -o, although the change in spelling to match the pronunciation took several hundred more years to be formally adopted.
The reality is the Italian is Latin–as it was spoken after a thousand years, or so, of local changes in speech patterns as modified by the speech patterns of dozens of outsiders invading the peninsula. Similarly, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian are Latin as it eventually developed in areas separated fro the Italian peninsula.
“Rose to replace” is the wrong term. “Latin evolved into Italian[sup]*[/sup],” is more to the point.
Latin itself evolved, over centuries, apparently from some ancient Italic dialect now forgotten, from a proto-Italic form of “Centum Indo-European,” which evolved through intermediates from something else “proto-Indo-European” (whether or not there really was one “PIE” language), which may evolved from whatever my pallid ancestors were speaking, thousands of years ago, in the land now ruled by Uzbeks. Languages do that.
*And French, Sicilian, Catalan, Provençal, Romansch, Rumanian, Portuguese, and Spanish, to name the major dialects.
Since you’re looking for a factual answer and not an opinion, I’m moving this from IMHO to General Questions.
French, Spanish, Italian, etc., are basically Latin with an accent, multiplied by a couple of millenia.
No. There are significant vocabulary and grammatical differences, too.
Two thousand years will do that to you…
French has considerable Germanic influences. Indeed, the name of the language in French, “français”, comes from an Old High German word, “Franko” – it is the name of the Germanic group who successfully invaded Gaul during the Middle Ages.
It sure will. Which is why I corrected your factually inaccurate post. Comprende?
Actually given what language is, and what he originally said (emphasis mine):
You’re being a little harsh on him. In modern English it’s perfectly acceptable to speak in a flowery manner like this as long it’s not factually incorrect to a reasonable person. Now no reasonable person (Homer Simpson aside) is every going to reasonable think that French, Spanish, Italian, etc. are truly the same language; they’ll understand (especially with the context of the rest of the answers as the “multiplied by” reference) that these are all descendants of Latin with variations due to locality and the passage of two millenia.
After all, I’m stupid as a rock, and understood it perfectly. 
Given the question in the OP, I think you’re wrong. I don’t mean to imply that the OP is “unreasonable”, but there are several common subjects* with so much misinformation out there that it does’t serve the purpose of this forum to be sloppy.
*linguistics is only one: ethnicity and evolution are two others that immediately come to mind.
Modern Greek is regarded as the same language as Classical and New Testament times, and in fact in the katharevousa form could be understood by them (albeit Socrates or Paul would probably think you have a weird accent). However, both vocabulary and syntax, and various phonemes, have changed in the 2,000-2,400 years since their time.
Save those who have studied it at the college level, nobody on this board would be able to understand a word of Old English, even though “it’s the same language,” and any randomly chosen post will have more words derived from Latin and the Romance languages than from Old English and the Germanic languages.
Likewise, the evolution of Latin into the Romance languages was a gradual thing. Buying bread and olive oil at the time of Caesar or Cicero, one would not have used the formal language of their writings, but a vulgar Latin of which we have only samples (e.g., caballus rather than equus for "horse.) By the time of Jerome, vulgar Latin was sufficiently the standard that his translation of the Bible was called the Vulgate, because, like modern English translations, it was rendered into the language of the people of the time. A few centuries later than that, with the breakup of the Western Roman Empire, the regional dialects of Latin had imported varying amounts of Germanic-invader vocabulary and moved to the point of bare mutual intelligibility. We date French from the Treaty of Verdun in 842 A.D., the first written use of Old French in formal usage. Italian becomes a language with its own standard with the writings of Petrarch and Dante in the early years of the second millennium. Spanish is not standardized until nearly the time of Columbus, and to a very real extent is still not in a standard form, owing to dialects of near-separate-language-level differentiation. Portuguese has a similar history. Rhaetian still has no standard form, being dialects spoken in parts of Switzerland, Austria, Italy, and Slovenia. Romanian went an entirely separate route, being heavily influenced by its Slavic (and to a lesser extent by its Magyar) neighbors.
But there was not a point when somebody said, “We’re going to stop speaking Latin and start speaking [insert modern Romance language here].” Rather, the common speech moved slowly from Hic haec hoc to L’etat, c’est moi, O sole mio, and Me gusta las chicas.
Obviously, Latin evolved into the modern Romance languages, but the way it evolved is often odd.
A couple of oft-cited examples? The Spanish word for horse is “caballo,” which comes from the Latin word “caballus.” However, “caballus” was not the Latin word for horse. Equus was the standard Latin word for Horse. “Caballus” was a Latin slang word meaning (essentially) a flea-bitten old nag.
Similarly, “Tete,” the French word for head comes from Latin. But not from the formal Latin word for “head” (that would be “caput”). “Tete” comes from the Latin word “testa”- literally, “pot,” but sometimes used by the Romans as a slang word for the head (sort of like “noodle” or “bean” or “noggin”).
So, the Latin that evolved into Spanish and/or French was not necessarily classical Latin- often, it was a crude, vulagr sort of Latin, such as you might expect to find in the boondocks of the fringes of the Roman empire.
A lot of regional dialects, referred to as ‘accents’, have significant vocabulary and grammatical differences. I don’t think the term can be confined to dialects that have only slight differences in methods of pronunciation anymore.
Of course, the languages under discussion have diverged to the point where even referring to them as ‘dialects’ is misleading… but I think Cadfael’s point is that the difference is only one of time and degree, not qualitatively different from, say, the situation with Arkansas american english and los angeles american english. (I think we could find some vocabulary and grammatical differences between those two ‘accents’.)
And the reason Latin stayed around, as a dead language, was we had all these big important works written in that language, right?
Right. And the literate people needed a lingua franca to communicate with the other literate people and discuss said works.
Plus there was a certain multinational organization, that concerned about possible centrifugal trends in its various local branches if the language of formal activities was allowed to diverge further, decided to “freeze” said activities into a late form of Latin. You may have heard about it in the news lately…
The most of my education years were in R.C parochial schools .[class of 37]
Never have I heard Cicero pronounced in the fashion you describe.
‘Sis-er-oh’ yes !, ‘chi-cher-oh’-never!
And,in my day ,Caeser was See-zer,not as if spelled with a Kai!
If anything—'Chi cher-oh’sounds like more Italian as in ‘Cinecita’ being pronounced ‘chi nay chita’.
Obviously there must have been may changes in the the years since my school days-------but 'Kik-er-oh that other way-----------?
Honestly?
Ora pro nobis!
EZ
That’s what it’s supposed to be in authentic “Classical” (the scholars’) – as upposed to “Vulgar” (the people’s) – Latin of the period. There was originally one single letter that later became “C” and “G”, and in the “C” form it was the “hard” c. Thus among the Germans “Caesar” cognated to “Kaiser”, because that WAS what it sounded like to them. But among the people it evolved in the direction of softening the “c” into “s” or soft “ch”, and by the time the “Church” Latin was fixed, it was a “cleaned up” version of late Vulgar Latin.
A heavy Italian accent has taken over Church Latin since the realm of Latin-users has narrowed down to the Vatican itself.
What I’ve always read is that this Italianism is the origin of the “ch”-sounding Latin “c”. Originally, or so I’ve heard, Latin was generally pronounced by the populace in whatever manner they liked. The “ch” arose when the Church decided to standardize Latin pronunciation, and did so by just imposing straight-up Italian pronunciation (along with concessions for letter combinations that don’t appear in Italian.)
Then I conclude that just how latin was spoken and pronounced when Caesar published his"Omnia Gallia"is a matter of opionion-and that no one knows how The same caesar might have utteresd his “Et tu”.
Maybe he had a lisp—but even Brututh ithn’t telling.
So-----what’s proper depends upon which pundit is speaking at any given moment.
So much opinion based on so little knowledge!
The mind boggeleth!
EZ