There’s some folks who think so. But the evidence is not terribly strong, really. Certainly any language’s literary form is not going to be identical to the form spoken by the populace, and you can see that quite clearly if you look at older books in English. Nowadays we tend much more heavily towards a vernacular literature, but to my knowledge this is a fairly recent happening in most of the world. So it’s not clear just how much Vulgar Latin and Classical Latin differed - whether it was a fairly small degree of register or whether they were (as some claim) mutually incomprehensible.
I tend towards thinking Classical Latin probably preserved some archaisms (the retention of initial “h” in some words being one of them - this sound disappeared except as a learned [and often applied mistakenly] form by the Classical period) but on the whole, I doubt it was all that different from spoken Latin. Latin, like I said earlier, is not nearly as difficult a language as some, in terms of the complexity of its grammar. And there’s no evidence that children find it hard to learn languages that adults deem more difficult - Russian, with its excessive number of inflections is not learned at a slower pace than English or Chinese, which have few to no inflections at all.
Still, I think that Vulgar Latin probably shifted a lot by the end of the Roman period, though I doubt it can be fully demonstrated on the basis of the limited number of texts in the Vulgar. But I personally don’t doubt that during most of Rome’s history, the literary forms were perfectly intelligible with the common forms.
A lot of the grammar began to fall away due to sound changes that occured. Final m and t were particularly prone (i’ve read that they became increasingly silent and hard to distinguish), as was final d (I’m using Spanish as the resulting changes):
CAPUT > Ccabo
IPSUM > eso
AD > a
M also became N in many monosyllabic words:
CUM > con
final S was lost in the eastern varieties, suich as Italian (as far as causing the loss of it with posessives, which is why Italian uses -e and -i, where Spanish uses -as and -os (I hope I got that right ;)):
PRESSUS > presso
FORIS > fuori
In many cases, the sound changes caused collapses among things like the declensions and also the cases as well. These changes often preciptated the need to use prepositions rather than case endings.
Spanish has had so many of the verb declensions fall apart that even now, many of the -er and -ir verb endings are the same (although other sound changes prevented the collapse of -ir and -er from fully occuring), while the only verb forms that remain distinct from the two are the -ar verbs.
There certainly was a time where Classical and Vulgar Latin were close enough that the populace could understand Classical Latin relatively well. But, as a literary language, Classical Latin was frozen, while the vernacular continued to change.
Here’s a good timeline from www.orbilat.com (which describes many of the Romance Languages, with history, and grammar, and gives some good comparative linguistics)
Preliterary period (till 240 BC). In this period Latin was spoken by small groups of people living along the lower Tiber River. The Etruscan variant of the Western Greek alphabet was adopted in the 7th century BC. The language is known from some inscriptions.
**Old period (240-100 BC). ** With the increase of Roman political power Latin language spread throughout Italy.
Authors: the comedian writers Plautus and Terentius.
**Classical period (100-14 BC). ** Roman power encompassed all the Mediterranean bassin. The language became standardized in grammar and vocabulary. Sometimes it is called the Golden Latin. During this period there were at least three types of Latin in use:
Classical written Latin,
Classical oratorical Latin,
and the ordinary colloquial Latin used by the average speaker of the language.
Authors: the prosaic writers Caesar, Cicero and Sallustius, the poets Catullus, Vergil, Horatius and Ovidius.
**Postclassical period (14 BC - 200 AD). ** In this period the ordinary colloquial Latin became the predominant language in most of western and southern Europe and the central and western Mediterranean coastal regions of Africa. The written language, sometimes called the Silver Latin, admits some syntactical deviations as compared with the severe rules of Classical Latin.
Authors: Tacitus.
**Late period (200-600 AD). ** Spoken Latin continued to change, and it diverged more and more from the Classical norms in grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary, becoming finally a different language, technically known as Proto-Romance or Vulgar Latin. It gradually evolved into the modern Romance languages and dialects. The written language, for its part, remained much more conservative in trying to preserve and sustain the Classical grammar and vocabulary. Thus it gradually became a practically dead language.
Authors: St. Jerome and St. Augustine wrote good literary Late Latin.
**Medieval period (600-1300). ** Latin was used as an official written language in all West-European countries. Its vocabulary absorbed a lot of words from the local languages in order to meet the changed intellectual and social conditions.
Authors: mediaeval chroniclers and theologians as the Venerable Bede, Alcuin, Saxo Grammaticus, John of Salisbury, St. Thomas Aquinas, Pierre de Abellard etc. etc.
Renaissance period (1300-1600). The humanists tried to revive the grammar and the vocabulary of the Classical Latin language.
Authors: Thomas More, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Giordano Bruno, Tomaso Campanella, Nicolaus Copernicus, some works of Dante Alighieri, Petrarca, Boccaccio.
**New period (1600-1900). In this period Latin was gradually replaced in literature and administration by the ** modern national languages. It was used as an international diplomatic language till the 18th century and as a teaching language in the European universities till the late 19th century. A lot of scientists and philosophers continued publishing their works in Latn.
Authors: Hugo Grotius, Benedict de Spinoza, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Isac Newton, Carolus Linnaeus, Mikhail Lomonosov, Immanuel Kant, Leonard Euler etc.
**Contemporary period (since 1900). ** Latin remained the official language of the Catholic church, though it was replaced in lithurgy by the modern spoken languages. Together with Greek, it is the main source for creating scientific terms.
No, I definitely agree with you about Latin being a relatively easy language. Along with Australian aboriginal language, the language of the tribesmen of the Kalahari is extremely difficult to learn because of the tongue clicks. Even Arabic can take years and years to learn properly since the pronunciation is so unfamiliar to westerners, and I believe French has different words to represent the same tense and case of a verb for writing and speaking, so you have to re-conjugate if you’re reading the book aloud. I don’t know much about the teaching methods of Latin teachers, so I can’t comment on that.
You know, I just thought of something. Is it not so strange to modify or break the “laws” of one’s language. Personally, I believe that people should know the difference between “who” and “whom”, “about” and “around”, “aggravate” and “irritate”, etc, but obeying the (ridiculous) rule that you can’t end a sentence with a preposition. How might you say, “that is something I will not put up with” without ending on a preposition. Some laws were just made to be broken.
A friend of mine went to Germany to better learn the language. Unfortunately, the people who were trying help tended to baby talk him and those who didn’t care tended to ignore the niceities of proper grammar - using the dative in ways that boggled his mind!!
… I’m not so sure about this. There would presumably be a standard “national language” like Parisian French under the Bourbons, or Mandarin Chinese. But the local dialects might shift rather radically. As they did in French, Chinese, Italian, English, Russian–seemingly, whether politically unified or not. This is already happening in the US. There’s a Pennsylvania vowel shift, Oklahomans don’t talk like Arkansans, etc. And political union is less important in keeping the dialects together than standardized education & heavy multi-directional migration.
I don’t think it’s fair to compare the modern US to the Roman Monarchy/Republic/Empire/Shambles. In modern times, we have TV, radio, and telephones, such that it’s trivial and common for folks in rural Arkansas to hear folks in Los Angeles talking. But in Roman times, the only time you’d hear someone from that far away would be a rare traveller who’s probably been on the road for weeks. It’s much easier for language to drift in the latter case than in the forward.
And to put a twist on the OP’s question: I can easily accept that modern Italian is about as close to Latin as, say, modern Greek is to ancient Greek. But why, then, and when, did the name of the language change? If you asked a Roman 2000 years ago what language he was speaking, he’d have told you Latin (well, Latinam). If you asked a Roman the same question today, he’d say Italian (or Italiana, or whatever). When did this change occur?
Even California is gaining different accents. There’s the two related but different (at least to some people) Southern California and Northern California accents. The southwest even has the “Chicano” accent, which is influenced by Mexican Spanish.
I am. Regional accents are getting less pronounced, not more pronounced. TV, travel, and (since we’re talking 2,000 years in the future) teleportation will work against regionalization of accents, much less against dialects.
Probably the same time the folks in Spain started speaking Spanish and the folks in France, French.
You beat me to this point. But I can still ask: hasn’t the erosion of dialects from modern technology already been happening in places like Britain, which has a long history of distinctive dialects? And Italy too, for that matter?
The phenomenon might be harder to observe in the United States, where the dialects weren’t that different to begin with, and also where so little time (relatively speaking) passed between the country’s initial settlement and the arrival of trains and radios.
If modern communications were melding dialects into fewer, then why is there the northern cities chain shift emerging, and why am I seeing California developing an accent of its own (or as I’ve said, at least two)?
Did anyone even visit that pbs site that I’d posted? From what i’ve heard many linguists say:
Exposure to mass media is not homogenizing American language or making us all talk the same.
Although some localized dialects are dying out–for example in Appalachia and on the islands off the Carolinas-that is due to population movement, not the media.
Regional dialects, accents and pronunciations of American English remain vigorous. Some are growing more distinctive, not less.
Changes in pronunciation that linguists do consider revolutionary are occurring in cities around the Great Lakes where, for example, the vowel in busses can sound like bosses, and block sounds more like black.
Media exposure can spread new vocabulary and give people in different regions an understanding of the “standard American” that broadcasters use, but it does not make listeners speak that way themselves.
So, what proof do those of you who say mass media is homogenizing how Americans speak have? I’d really like to see it.
I believe Romanian still has a vestigial case system.
This is most interesting. I’m assuming that the third and fourth noun declensions at one time were a part of the described grammar of the language, like the six “genders” of Swahili. That is, native speakers didn’t have to struggle to learn them, but rather they just came naturally as part of learning to talk. For them to have become ‘too difficult’ would imply that, at some point, they ceased being part of the descriptive grammar and became part of the normative grammar. How would this have come about? By the increasing use of de and and increasing reliance on word order?
Is this just your opinion or also the opinion of linguists who study such things? It’s contrary Doobieous’s cite, which I watched a while back (I don’t remember if it involved any rigorous studies) and to what I’ve read elsewhere. The Northern cities vowel shift (mentioned earlier) is an often cited example, but I don’t know if it’s just an odd exception. It certainly makes more sense to me that there would be a shift toward a more standard way of speaking, but there seems to be evidence that this is not the case.
No idea, but I wonder if sound change might have been a part of it. Spanish, at least, doesn’t like to use /i/ or /u/ in the last syllable of a word - all such words entered the language more or less recently, often by borrowing from Latin when it was still used for most serious intellectual pursuits. Those sounds changed to /e/ and /o/, normally, which would have ended up greatly distorting the system of inflectional endings in Latin. I’m not sure what comparable sound changes occured, and when, in the other Romance languages, but if this was during the Late Vulgar/Romance stage, it would have done a good job simplifying the noun inflection system, because what inflections still remained distinct would likely have seemed confusing and unsystematic.
Naturally this is not precisely known. This problem rears its head in the de Vulgari Eloquentia, a technical treatise in Latin by Dante on the history and uses of the Italian language. It is easier to assess when the vernacular first appears in literature than when contemporaries first self-consciously admitted to speaking it.
