when did latin die?
- Thread starter Aquilina
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You "experience" Anglo-Saxon, modern German, and modern Dutch as the same language? The differences are tremendous, especially in the case of Dutch, whose adjective declension has been simplified a hundredfold. Vocabulary is far from everything in a language, and even there, though you rightly point out the amount of Latinate vocabulary in modern English, you miss the fact that Dutch itself borrows far more extensively from Latin than German does.It depends on how you look at it, I think. I experience Anglo-Saxon, Middle Dutch, Modern German and Modern Dutch as representatives of the same language, for instance. Despite the fact that they are not mutually intelligible, there is a lot you recognise if you know one of these languages and then begin to study one of the others. To illustrate what I mean I've translated the first sentence of the Dutch romance of 'Karel ende Elegast' into Moder Dutch, Modern German en Modern English below. Modern English, of course, is interesting as its largely romance vocabulary sets it somewhat apart from the other Germanic languages.
Fraaie historie ende al waer mag ik u tellen; hoort naer.
Een fraaie geschienis, en helemaal waar, mag ik u vertellen; luistert nader.
Eine schöne Geschichte, und ganz wahr, kann ich Ihnen erzählen; höret andächtig zu.
A beautiful story and entirely true I may tell you; listen carefully.
Studying Latin, there is a lot I recognise from the lessons in French and Spanish that I took in secondary school. Obviously, a lot has changed, but the paradigm of Spanish 'hablar' is still strongly reminiscent of the Latin first conjugation (hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, habláis, hablan...) and I now finally understand where the French word 'quotidien' comes from.
I think the German should say:
Eine schöne Geschichte, und eine ganz wahre, kann ich Ihnen erzählen; hört andächtig zu.
The undeclined adjective ("wahr") would give it adverbial force. Of course, this awkwardness could be avoided by using what is more natural German word order:
Eine schöne und ganz wahre Geschichte...
You've really stretched the English to fit the Dutch, and the result is exceptionally awkward and bordering on ungrammatical. Along with the adoption of Romance vocabulary, English also adopted Romance word order, and we're not so free to put whatever we want at the beginning of the sentence as other Germanic speakers are, nor are we obligated to ensure the verb is placed second, nor do we have to put infinitives and participles at the end, nor can we pile lots of elements onto an attributive modifier before a noun (diese von meinem guten Freund erzählte Geschichte) etc... Using the word choice of your sentence:
"I can tell you a beautiful story, and an entirely true one (to boot/ as well/ no less); listen carefully."
If you want to invert the word order to emphasize the story, you have to grammatically restructure the sentence, unlike in other Germanic languages:
"It's a beautiful story I'm about to tell you..."
"This is a beautiful story I'm about to tell you..."
"I've got a beautiful story I can tell you..."
"There's a beautiful story I can tell you..."
Dutch itself has lost cases almost altogether, which certainly distinguishes it from German (the same has happened in the Romance languages, although there are still five cases in Romanian (though morphologically, there are only two). English has lost grammatical gender altogether; except for Romanian (afaik) (and a couple of pronouns in Spanish), the Romance languages have lost the neuter.
Even in the vocabulary department, your example doesn't do too well, though admittedly, most of the words in the Dutch are related to words in English and German, just not the ones you happened to need here.
Though the verb paradigms in the Romance languages tend to show similarities to those of Latin, the wholesale replacement of the Latin future with infinitive + habere (tenebo -> *tenere habeo) is a feature of medieval Latin, and certainly distinguishes modern Romance from Ciceronian Latin, as is the formation of the conditional (a nonexistent tense in Latin) from the imperfect of the above construction (*tenere habebam). Even more markedly distinct is the extinction of the Latin perfect in some Romance languages (if you consider the passé simple and passato remoto extinct), which, by the way, mirrors the disappearance of the Präteritum from spoken German, though somewhat more pronouncedly. In fact, the compound perfect and compound passive are both elements of Romance that aren't found in Latin (except in the passive perfect tenses, which are "doubly past" in Romance, with both a past participle and a past-tense verb).
In short, the differences between the various Germanic languages are enormous, in grammar particularly, but also in vocabulary; the differences between Romance and Latin are even greater in grammar and in vocabulary. To "experience" English, Dutch and German "as the same language" is rather strange given the differences between them, and to "experience" French, Spanish, and Latin as the same language is equally if not more strange. While I understand where you're coming from, I hope I've shown you that it isn't just by convention that we refer to these as different languages.
But Latin isn't a "real" dead language. Gothic language would be an example of a truly dead language - at one point all the native speakers ceased to speak it, and they switched to other languages, leaving their native language to die. In case of Latin, it has just changed into Romance languages. Latin hasn't died, it has evolved.
Part of the reason for the polarization of opinion between those who are content to describe Latin as dead and those who are not may be the term itself; "dead" sounds so final. What if we used another term, viz "corpus language"? Could we all agree on that as a suitable term for describing Latin, Gothic, Old English et al?
That seems appropriate.
Yes, even though there are no native speakers of Latin, it still hasn't fallen out of use.
Indeed I do!
I am a native speaker of Dutch and would be considered by many linguists to be a 'near-native speaker' of English, having been exposed to the language from a very young age (as well as having received part of my schooling in the UK).I am aware that I've stretched the English syntax a bit - I did so in order to highlight some of the remaining parallels between the Dutch, German and English languages. Old English would very likely yield a closer parallel, but my active command of that language is limited.
German and Dutch are very closely related. Their variaties are part of a single dialect continuum. If you cross the German-Dutch border, you will often find that the same dialect is spoken on both sides. In view of the similarities between the two languages, children in Dutch schools only start taking German at age 13/14 (although it should be noted that taking German is not obligatory). They start taking English at age 10/11, and French at age 12/13 . I took German in secondary school and can read German newspapers with ease, although I have to admit that my wife having relatives in Austria does help.
The German I used is not as odd as you seem to think. One native speaker of German translated that Middle Dutch sentence I quoted as 'Eine schöne Geschichte und ganz wahr kann ich euch erzählen, hört nur zu' - see here. I'd say the 'hört nur zu' is a bit too free, though; it roughly means 'as you will learn if you listen to me' . The 'und ganz wahr' construction is more economical than the one you employed in your translation. Note that in both German and Dutch the case ending is lost in this type of construction, where both the determiner and the noun phrase head are dropped (in this example, 'eine' and 'Geschichte').
Now, my experience of the languages I referred to in my post is not, I would say, typical. But having lived with each of them for a long time I cannot but regard them as alternative forms of a 'West Germanic' meta-language. When I read Anglo-Saxon, Modern Dutch or Modern German it's as if I listen to variations of the same piece of music, if that makes sense.
I'm aware of the similarities between the two, which are chiefly in vocabulary - though as I noted, even there, Dutch borrows more extensively from Latin. (Cf. "conditie" and the seldom used "Kondition"). But as I said, vocab isn't everything, and despite their preservation of Germanic word order (verb-second main clauses, infinitives/ participles placed last, shifting of any element to the front) and even West Germanic word order (verb-final subordinate clauses), the case system in Dutch has gone out the window, and the adjective inflection has been extremely simplified. Grammar is as integral to a language as vocabulary, and regardless of what words Dutch and German have in common, their grammatical systems have considerable differences.Indeed I do!
I am aware that I've stretched the English syntax a bit - I did so in order to highlight some of the remaining parallels between the Dutch, German and English languages. Old English would very likely yield a closer parallel, but my active command of that language is limited.
German and Dutch are very closely related. Their variaties are part of a single dialect continuum. If you cross the German-Dutch border, you will often find that the same dialect is spoken on both sides. In view of the similarities between the two languages, children in Dutch schools only start taking German at age 13/14 (although it should be noted that taking German is not obligatory). They start taking English at age 10/11, and French at age 12/13 . I took German in secondary school and can read German newspapers with ease, although I have to admit that my wife having relatives in Austria does help.
Understanding Latin, I can read Spanish with ease - that doesn't make them the same language.
I'm still a bit incredulous as to this type of construction. Hammer suggests you have to repeat ein (as you do in English); to simply tack an adjective on the end like that "und ganz wahr" suggests an adverbial construction. In an archaic construction I could see it, just as, archaically (and in advertisements), uninflected adjectives can follow nouns (Hammer gives "O Täler weit, o Höhen!"). I could also see Eine schöne Geschichte, ganz wahr... which is also admissible in English. But the way you have it seems very odd.
Your friend's translation has a few other oddities. It's probably not my place to contradict a native German speaker, but at the very least this is archaic, poetic, or otherwise unusual language:
Eine schöne Geschichte und ganz wahr kann ich euch erzählen, hört nur zu.
Es war in einer Abendstunde, dass Karl einzuschlafen begann
zu Ingelheim am Rhein. Das Land war alles sein.
Er war Kaiser und König auch. Hört hier vom Wunder und der Wahrheit,
was dem König da widerfuhr, - das wissen viele noch gut -
zu Ingelheim, wo er lag, und wähnte, am nächsten Tag
die Krone zu tragen und Hof zu halten, um seinen Ruhm zu mehren.
Usually one would say "das Land war alles seins"; "sein" is found in the Bible and other very archaic language. (It rhymes with "Rhein," which is probably the reason.)
It is a general rule that the definite article must be repeated for each noun if they do not share the same form of the article; i.e."die Krone zu tragen und den Hof zu halten." Similarly, when a preposition is contracted with the article, the preposition and the article must be repeated for each noun not sharing the same form of the article: "vom Wunder und von der Wahrheit."
My guess is that the unusual language here is poetic (as is the word order), but in that case, it isn't really a fair representation of German. (any German speakers want to chime in?)
They certainly did develop from the same language, but a separation of thousands of years (and numerous divergences in vocabulary and grammar), in my opinion, makes them anything but the same language, just as the Romance languages and Latin (arguably more similar) are not the same language.[/quote]
I think that what our discussion illustrates is that no absolute definition of what constitutes a language is possible. You are likely familiar with the statement that 'a language is a dialect with an army and a navy', ascribed to various scholars, amongst them Max Weinreich. At uni, one of our senior lecturers (a specialist in Dutch literature) openly described German and Dutch as the same language; many students rejected this notion, but their doing so was to a considerable extent a reflection of ideology: your language, after all, is part of your identity.
As regards the case system you are largely correct. Standard Dutch, like English, retains the genitive. In addition, adjectives take an ending which, while it no longer conveys the function of the sentence constituent, indicates the gender of the noun phrase head (either masculine/feminine or neuter) and different pronouns are used for subjects and objects (as in English). Interestingly, there is an artificial distinction between the third person plural pronouns 'hen' (direct object) and 'hun' (benefactive or indirect object).
Word order in Dutch and German is very similar. Other similarities include the rules governing pluralisation (-er plurals have disappeared from Standard Dutch, however) and the conjugation of verbs. Word gender is usually identical, although in Northern and Western varieties of standard Dutch speakers no longer clearly distinguish between maculine and feminine words.
The vocabulary of Dutch does, indeed, include many loans from other languages (often Romance), but germanic alternatives very often exist. The word 'conditie' that you use as an example is only common in contexts where the human body is referred to ('hij heeft een goede conditie') or the speaker wishes to describe the condition of an object of some value ('het schilderij is in goede conditie'). Often, the words 'omstandigheid', 'voorwaarde' and 'toestand' are used instead, depending on the context and meaning. Often what word one uses depends on the register; educated speech generally tends to rely more heavily on Germanic words. In English, of course, the situation is rather different as romance words and other loans have replaced much of the original vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon.
I cannot offer you a detailed discussion of the grammar of that German translation, but it appears to me that you rely a bit too much on a strict conception of German grammar. 'Hof halten' is an idiomatic expression which refers to the practice of leading and sustaining the goings-on at court. 'Den hof zu halten' to me means 'to keep the farm'. In Dutch that construction would not, in fact, work at all as the word 'hof' cannot, or can no longer, refer to a farm (archaic Dutch does use it for 'garden').
The sentence 'Hört hier vom Wunder und der Wahrheit' is, indeed, somewhat odd. The original Dutch roughly means 'hear wondrous things and truth'. I think the translator interpreted this as 'hear about the miracle and hear the truth'.
D
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Here's Churchill's first brush with Latin, as told in his autobiographical My Early Life:
...I was alone with the Form Master. He produced a thin greeny-brown covered book filled with words in different types of print.
"You have never done any Latin before, have you?" he said.
" No, sir."
"This is a Latin grammar." He opened it at a well-thumbed page. " You must learn this," he said, pointing to a number of words in a frame of lines. " I will come back in half an hour and see what you know."
Behold me then on a gloomy evening, with an aching heart, seated in front of the First Declension.
Mensa - a table
Mensa - O table
Mensam - a table
Mensae - of a table
Mensae - to or for a table
Mensa - by, with or from a table
What on earth did it mean? Where was the sense in it? It seemed absolute rigmarole to me. However, there was one thing I could always do: I could learn by heart. And I thereupon proceeded, as far as my private sorrows would allow, to memorize the acrostic-looking task which had been set me.
In due course the Master returned.
"Have you learnt it?" he asked.
"I think I can say it, sir," I replied; and I gabbled it off.
He seemed so satisfied with this that I was emboldened to ask a question.
"What does it mean, sir?"
"It means what it says. Mensa, a table. Mensa is a noun of the First Declension. There are five declensions. You have learnt the singular of the First Declension."
"But," I repeated," what does it mean?"
"Mensa means a table," he answered.
"Then why does mensa also mean O table," I enquired, "and what does O table mean?"
"Mensa, O table, is the vocative case," he replied.
"But why O table?" I persisted in genuine curiosity.
"O table – you would use that in addressing a table, in invoking a table." And then seeing he was not carrying me with him, "You would use it in speaking to a table."
"But I never do," I blurted out in honest amazement.
"If you are impertinent, you will be punished, and punished, let me tell you, very severely," was his conclusive rejoinder.
Such was my first introduction to the classics, from which, I have been told, many of our cleverest men have derived so much solace and profit.
...I was alone with the Form Master. He produced a thin greeny-brown covered book filled with words in different types of print.
"You have never done any Latin before, have you?" he said.
" No, sir."
"This is a Latin grammar." He opened it at a well-thumbed page. " You must learn this," he said, pointing to a number of words in a frame of lines. " I will come back in half an hour and see what you know."
Behold me then on a gloomy evening, with an aching heart, seated in front of the First Declension.
Mensa - a table
Mensa - O table
Mensam - a table
Mensae - of a table
Mensae - to or for a table
Mensa - by, with or from a table
What on earth did it mean? Where was the sense in it? It seemed absolute rigmarole to me. However, there was one thing I could always do: I could learn by heart. And I thereupon proceeded, as far as my private sorrows would allow, to memorize the acrostic-looking task which had been set me.
In due course the Master returned.
"Have you learnt it?" he asked.
"I think I can say it, sir," I replied; and I gabbled it off.
He seemed so satisfied with this that I was emboldened to ask a question.
"What does it mean, sir?"
"It means what it says. Mensa, a table. Mensa is a noun of the First Declension. There are five declensions. You have learnt the singular of the First Declension."
"But," I repeated," what does it mean?"
"Mensa means a table," he answered.
"Then why does mensa also mean O table," I enquired, "and what does O table mean?"
"Mensa, O table, is the vocative case," he replied.
"But why O table?" I persisted in genuine curiosity.
"O table – you would use that in addressing a table, in invoking a table." And then seeing he was not carrying me with him, "You would use it in speaking to a table."
"But I never do," I blurted out in honest amazement.
"If you are impertinent, you will be punished, and punished, let me tell you, very severely," was his conclusive rejoinder.
Such was my first introduction to the classics, from which, I have been told, many of our cleverest men have derived so much solace and profit.
2: Funny
From what I remember reading, Latin is considered to have ceased being the natural language of the people around the 6th-8th centuries, depending on regions.
Hi,
I think this is the opposite of what happened.
The Roman conquest of the Iberian peninsula is ridiculously late. It would seem to me that the "vulgarization of Latin" theory that is told is exactly the opposite of what happened. Latin died out (classical and vulgar) because it never was the autochthonous language to begin with, it was never the language spoken by the majority of the people – it just influenced the multiple variations already in place of older Romance languages.
Nothing explains the profound syntactic differences between Latin and the Romance languages. Especially to claim that people who are very disconnected from each other in terms of communication and cultural practices (like Portugal and Southern Italy) are all going to effect these profound syntactic changes **at the same time** spontaneously.
See more here:
the syntax of the Romance languages in many fundamental ways does not match Latin AT ALL, BUT it is very similar across all Romance languages. Obviously, this blows a hole the size of a crater in the theory that says that Romance languages are DERIVED from Latin. They cannot be, simply cannot be.
http://alessandrareflections.wordpress.com/2013/11/30/major-myth-debunked-the-romance-languages-do-not-come-from-latin/
Hi,
I think this is the opposite of what happened.
The Roman conquest of the Iberian peninsula is ridiculously late. It would seem to me that the "vulgarization of Latin" theory that is told is exactly the opposite of what happened. Latin died out (classical and vulgar) because it never was the autochthonous language to begin with, it was never the language spoken by the majority of the people – it just influenced the multiple variations already in place of older Romance languages.
Nothing explains the profound syntactic differences between Latin and the Romance languages. Especially to claim that people who are very disconnected from each other in terms of communication and cultural practices (like Portugal and Southern Italy) are all going to effect these profound syntactic changes **at the same time** spontaneously.
See more here:
the syntax of the Romance languages in many fundamental ways does not match Latin AT ALL, BUT it is very similar across all Romance languages. Obviously, this blows a hole the size of a crater in the theory that says that Romance languages are DERIVED from Latin. They cannot be, simply cannot be.
http://alessandrareflections.wordpress.com/2013/11/30/major-myth-debunked-the-romance-languages-do-not-come-from-latin/
You actually think so?
You think it's much more likely that these languages-despite their incredible similarity to Latin- simply popped out of nowhere? Of course the countries had a different language BEFORE the romans invaded them, but they didn't keep it. Just like North Italy today talks Italian, not German, because Austria lost it to the Italians.
There is a small village, all right, where they talk more German, and in the past they wore blue aprons, to show they didn't want to be part of Italy. It's a funny dialect though, quite hard to understand.
In England it was similar. even though English is not a romance language, it got mixed up and now you got TWO words for just about anything. One that is close to Latin and the other is close to German
libertas - liberty/freedom - Freiheit
and if you look at the other romance languages you'll find this:
libertas - libertad - libertà - liberté
If you study a few you'll realize that there is actually a pattern.
Words, that in Latin end in -as will end in -ad in Spanish, their Italian ending is -à, their French is -é
even the conjugations are related
Latin Fench Latin French
ego sum je suis nos sumus nous sommes
tu es tu es vos estis vous etes
ea est elle est eae sunt ells sont
Look at the irregular verbs in Italian and -sure enough- they are the same as in Latin.
ex: Latin Italian
to open, opened aperire, aperta aprire, aperta (although you'd think it's "aprito")
to laugh, laughed ridere, risa ridere, risa
(I used the feminine form of the participle, in case you wonder why there is always the -a at the end. It just fits better with Italian)
Even the syntax doesn't change that much.
Latin: Te amo. Italian: Ti amo.
When it DOES change it is usually due to the fact that the Italian langage uses a "the" (il/la/l'), "a" (un/una) and praepositions which make the declension of nouns unnecessary.
Marcus Elenae florem dat.
Marcus dà un fiore a Elena.
So if you take all this into account I think it's safe to say that Latin kind of "evolved " to form the romance languages.
It seems very unlikely that the languages resemble each other so much without being derived from Latin.
It's true that grammar and syntax of Romance languages are utterly different from Latin, but I'd also find it hard to believe that such a resemblance in vocabulary and part of the conjugation be possible if they didn't come from Latin.
Now even admitting there would have been another language common to all the Latin/Romance area, which would have been very influenced by Latin with regards to vocabulary and conjugation but not for the rest, how could such a widely spoken language have left no trace whatsoever, not an inscription, nothing, while we do have traces of both Latin and various regional languages spoken in the same areas and that survived along with Latin here and there for some time, even influencing the regional Latin, before they got overcome by it? We would have traces of those regional languages, and no trace of a common one spoken over such a wide area?
Now even admitting there would have been another language common to all the Latin/Romance area, which would have been very influenced by Latin with regards to vocabulary and conjugation but not for the rest, how could such a widely spoken language have left no trace whatsoever, not an inscription, nothing, while we do have traces of both Latin and various regional languages spoken in the same areas and that survived along with Latin here and there for some time, even influencing the regional Latin, before they got overcome by it? We would have traces of those regional languages, and no trace of a common one spoken over such a wide area?
In my experience, those who reject evidence and evidence based, empirical, approaches tend not so much to be the kind persuaded by reason. Conspiracy theories and pseuda historia are a matter of belief, often national feeling, and not logic. Waste not your words.
Indeed, a load of wishful and magical thinking (or should I say poppycock?) by a person who studied Catalan philology at the university of UOC, had only two semesters of Latin, two semesters of the history of Catalan, and can be considered an authority on the subject just as much as students in gymnasiums are here. I don't see them writing notorius books though.
I am normally rather fond of magical thinkingbut not in this case. Romance, however we define it, or reconstruct its history, is obviously derived from Latin
Latin in something reasonably close to her Classical form survived in Church use for many centuries after her vulgar form had degenerated, which meant that people in western Europe heard it and to an extent interacted with it on at least a weekly basis, and those whose mother tongues were of Latin origin would have probably had some risidual understanding of it reinforced by their constant exposure to it in that context.
That said, however, it is still quite a mystery how Vulgar Latin devolved along such similar lines across the far flung remains of a fallen empire with a fast degenerating infrastructure. I have always thought that the total dissappearance of the mediopassive in all regions without exception were very difficult to explain on any model.
but not in this case. Romance, however we define it, or reconstruct its history, is obviously derived from LatinLatin in something reasonably close to her Classical form survived in Church use for many centuries after her vulgar form had degenerated, which meant that people in western Europe heard it and to an extent interacted with it on at least a weekly basis, and those whose mother tongues were of Latin origin would have probably had some risidual understanding of it reinforced by their constant exposure to it in that context.
That said, however, it is still quite a mystery how Vulgar Latin devolved along such similar lines across the far flung remains of a fallen empire with a fast degenerating infrastructure. I have always thought that the total dissappearance of the mediopassive in all regions without exception were very difficult to explain on any model.
From the little I know, the same question can be asked about where is all the written proof that Latin was changing into all the major Romance languages from the 4th to the 8th century? There is none. Isn't all we have just Latin? Your theory goes like this: in the 4th century, there was Latin; in the 8th, there was old Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French. So we should have plenty of written records, century by century, of this exact transformation. There aren't.
In my lay opinion, this more ancient Romance language had already morphed into dozens of its variations all through the Western European region in the first centuries of the first millennium. Because of geographic isolation, you would already have various geographic variations of this much older Romance Mother tongue, variations like we have today: Portuguese, Spanish, Italian. Except that at that time (the first centuries), there were many more variations; each little region was always developing their own language that was based on this older Mother Romance language (side by side with other languages, like Basque). The political and cultural divisions were much, much smaller than today. These multiple cultures and languages suffered unification into the major languages we know today much later. And it doesn't mean that this older Mother Romance language at some point in its past doesn't join its roots with an even older Western European mother language (including something Latinish). If I remember correctly, what we call the Latin language originated (coalesced into what we call old Latin) in a relatively small part of Italy. And obviously Europe was full of other peoples already speaking their own local languages. Then the Romans come and they impose Latin from above.
See
http://www.orbilat.com/Languages/Latin_Vulgar/Vulgar_Latin.html
If "vulgar Latin" was spoken by millions of people for the 4 or 5 centuries in question (4th to the 8th), it would seem that even though classical Latin was the official written language, that there would still be many people who for various reasons would record endless examples of vulgar Latin from the 4th to the 8th century, showing us how vulgar Latin magically transformed itself into all the major Romance languages we know of today. This doesn't exist as far as I know.
Then, adopting vocabulary from another language is a process that is not so complicated, but changing several of the most fundamental syntactic mechanisms across populations that had very little contact with each other, no mass school system enforcing these changes - it simply doesn't add up.
See also:
http://www.arkeotavira.com/Mapas/Iberia/Populi.htm
The theory that the Romans come and simply wipe out all these languages and cultures in a few centuries seems very questionable.
There may be no written evidence of an increasingly vulgarised Latin gradually loosing its morphology and being therefore forced to change its syntax, but there is no written record of this supposed alternative Romance Mother Tongue either. Colloquial dialects tend not to be written when literacy is very limited and closely bound to a formal litterary dialect, or if they are written will appear only as comic dialogue. In any case the idea of a parallel language being so very much like Latin at the level of its most basic vocabulary is very difficult to credit. Linguistic borrowing rarely extends to the most simple and basic of everyday words, and would never involve the vast majority of such words.