I think liturgical is probably important, not just that the language hung around, but that is was central to Western Christianity. Rome was the center of that, but people throughout what’s now Italy had no special claim to ‘own’ the Church’s language and therefore it be natural to call their everyday evolution of the language ‘Latin’, when French, Spanish etc weren’t. In general ‘Roman-ness’ in the sense of being descendants of that empire wasn’t perceived to particularly reside in Italy, even though that was a much later affectation of the Italian fascists.
As far as Latin just continuing to exist and evolve as a mainly written language, that’s also true of Classical/Literary Chinese. It’s a quite different language than Modern Chinese, but persisted as a common written language in China and the ‘Sino-sphere’ alongside Modern Chinese. For example a lot of Korean official documents even in the 19th century were written in Classical Chinese rather than Korean (a structurally unrelated language though it has a lot of Chinese words) and not Modern Chinese either, though it existed. But ‘Chinese-ness’ belonged to China in a way Roman (Empire)-ness did not specifically belong to Italy, so no confusion to call both the Modern and Classical written languages ‘Chinese’ even when both were used.
Imagine a thousand years from now, when the languages spoken in Australia, the US, Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, etc., are all mutually unintelligible. Which one should be called “English”? The one spoken in England? What if the regional dialects in England have all diverged by then, and there isn’t a single language spoken in England, but several? I could see calling the languages “American”, “Australian”, “British”, “Canadian”, etc. and leaving “English” for the history books.
Yes, there’s no question that there were different regional dialects of Latin, even fairly early in Roman history.
Suetonius says that the Emperor Vespasian in the 1st century AD pronounced some words with a ‘Sabine accent’ - and the Sabines were from central Italy, close to Rome! The Emperor Hadrian, whose family was from Spain (though of Roman origin) is said to have had a ‘Spanish accent’.
But the Latin spoken in Rome itself had great prestige, and was regarded as the gold standard of Latin, like ‘the King’s English’ in England up to 20th century. It was educated, upper-class, ‘proper’ Latin.
It’s a mistake to think that Latin was ever ‘frozen’ in medieval or early modern times. It was certainly not only used in the Church. It was used by accountants, bankers, lawyers, historians, scientists, philosophers, and was known by all well-educated people.
Isaac Newton wrote his Principia, with his laws of motion, etc. in Latin, so that it could be read throughout Europe. University lectures in a number of European countries were mostly given in Latin, even into the early 19th century. In the 18th century, all Scottish legal advocates had to present a dissertation in Latin and verbally defend it in Latin, before qualifying. Etc.
And Latin vocabulary and usage continued to evolve. Think of all the medieval terminology of Earls, Knights, vassals, homage, liege lord, yeoman, villein, lands held in feu, knight’s duty, tithes, etc. All the documents and contracts relating to these were in Latin, and terminology had to be evolved for many things that didn’t exist in Roman times.
Medieval Latin is a whole subject in itself, and there are still some regional technical terms whose meaning is not clear to historians today.
Also, people who wrote or spoke Latin as a second language often didn’t know it very well, so they used words, grammar, and pronunciation from their own language. So there was a ‘Frenchified’ Latin, a ‘Germanic’ Latin, an ‘Anglicised’ Latin, etc. - and Church Latin, which is essentially ‘Italianized’ Latin. It was like people today who speak English as second language writing with different degrees of proficiency, and using wrong words or weird phrases.
Regarding a contrasting situation, how different are classical Greek (the Greek of Aristotle), Koine Greek (a lingua franca of the Roman Empire, and also “Biblical Greek”), and Modern Greek? Are they as different as Classical Latin and Italian? With what facility can a modern Greek read classical Greek in the original?
It would be Classical Latin - the Latin of the 1st century BC to 1st century AD, because that was when the majority of the great works of Latin literature were written.
That’s why if you ask someone who studied Latin at school (or even a Latin professor!) to translate some random Latin inscription or text from another period that you found somewhere, he may not be able to do it. Or he may have to think about it carefully for a while.
You could be understood - to some extent - at any period, except that different countries had, and sometimes still have, different pronunciations of Latin.
OK, this leads to the obvious next question, namely, which of today’s modern Romance languages is most like Latin - either classical or vulgar?
The obvious answer should be Italian, but maybe there’s a more geographically isolated group that hasn’t been so affected by the rest of the world. Maybe Sardinian or Tuscan or something like that?
Given the strong social stratification and large size of Rome itself, I doubt there was *one *“City of Rome” accent (compare London, or New York, or my own city of Cape Town) . I’m certain the “patrician” accent would be different enough from the “pleb” accent to be noticeable.
Do we have any attestations to there being different accents just within Rome?
Note that there are quite a few Romance language dialects around still. Not just the major ones. And many, many more before the drive for national identity and mass media started stomping out the lesser ones.
For example, there’s Occitan in S. France and nearby regions. To the north there’s still some Norman and a whole lot of stuff in-between. (There’s even a little bit of Breton around, a Celtic language.)
Italy has been far, far more diverse than France. There’s even still a remnant of Greek speaking folk on the east coast. There had been a lot of Latin-related dialects going back thousands of years. The current language map only tells part of the story.
The notion of an Italian language goes hand-in-hand with the notion of an Italian nation. Which is quite recent. After the complete breakup of the Western Roman Empire, Rome was just one city on the peninsula. Historically and religiously notable but not The City of before. So its local dialect was just one of many around. It didn’t dominate the Italian language development of later centuries.
It was Tuscan, to the NW, that played the biggest role in the foundation of Italian.
The new nation of Italy wasn’t seen as a restoration of the Roman Empire and therefore not Latin. (Well, outside the 1920s-40s.)
On the other hand, documents from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies were in Italian, not Neapolitan or Sicilian, so the prestige of Italian, as a written language anyway, clearly predates the formation of the nation-state.
Yes. As far as I know the best example is in the Satyricon of Petronius (1st century AD). There is a long chapter (both funny and moving) about a fancy dinner with an ex-slave, Trimalchio, who has become extremely wealthy. Trimalchio and other ex-slaves speak in a noticeably different dialect from the upper-class narrator and his friends.
Yes, the scholars existed. I said that in my post so obviously I knew that.
The point you’re missing is that the overwhelming majority of people are not classical language scholars. They weren’t then and they aren’t now. None of them had every actually seen a copy of a classical text. So they had no way that the language they were speaking had become distinct from the language that was in those classical texts. They thought they were talking the same Latin that people had been speaking seven hundred years ago.
When Charlemagne’s scholars began collecting classical texts and making copies, a lot more people encountered actual classical Latin. And they discovered it was not the same language they were speaking.
If none of them had ever seen a copy of a classical text, where did Charlemagne find them?
I think you’re underestimating the degree to which medieval people read Vergil, Caesar, etc. No one (to my knowledge) had attempted to produce a grammar or lexicon of the spoken Romance languages, but that doesn’t mean they were ignorant of the fact that they existed in a state of high diglossia.