will the Latins understand Latin?

[Pacifica]

Oh, that's unfair! You should have forgotten Latin while deciphering the Song of Roland.

But to be honest it resembles modern French more than Latin, so the former did most of the help - though Latin did a bit too and the fact of being accustomed to playing with languages in general...

 

[Matthaeus]

No, I'm not familiar with Old French at all actually. It was just guess work helped by modern French and Latin.

I see, haha.

 

[Iacobus]

Salve Pacis Puella,

When you said, "On the other hand I can testify that if you know French, Latin and a bit of Spanish you can decipher Italian without having ever learnt it.", you are preaching to the choir with me. When I was eighteen and in the process of upgrading my driver's license in Utah, a young woman brought her grandmother in to get an identification card. The officials at the Driver’s License Bureau said that they could not process the grandmother’s birth certificate because it was in Italian. I looked over at the birth certificate and started translating the birth certificate. (I was in my second year of High School Spanish when this event occurred.) The bureaucrats at the were slightly disgruntled by my translation. They, however, processed the identification card for the grandmother.

Vale,
Iacobus

 

[AndrewEarthrise]

I speak Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian, and Latin is apart from what can be understood in terms of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary.
I believe one of the problems, is that Latin is a synthetic language. The classical Latin that is read and used is intentionally challenging, as in the times of the Roman Republic, the use of oratory was greatly valued in the public sphere. In fact, it is called "classical" because it is the "classy" Latin, the Latin that people aspired to utilize.

What has happened with French, Portuguese, Italian, etc., is a long evolution from a this type of speech, and with the end of the Western Roman Empire in the late 5th century, there was no reason to continue this tradition. The common speech was already quite changed from what it had been centuries before, but the fall of Roman civilization expedited this.

The genitive case in vulgar Latin changed into the construction of "de + word" and the dative to "ad + word". The accusative case was the last one to die, leaving the nominative, vocative, and ablative to merge; Latin Carrus (Abl. Carro) = Carriage, Spanish Carro = Carriage/Car.

Without the institutions to keep Latin from mutating, the language simplified itself, and merged with that of the local populace in many parts of the Empire, and those different types of vulgar latin give us what we today have as the "Romance Languages".

 

[Pacifica]

The accusative case was the last one to die, leaving the nominative, vocative, and ablative to merge; Latin Carrus (Abl. Carro) = Carriage, Spanish Carro = Carriage/Car.

Actually, it is generally agreed that the accusative (which had at some point merged with the ablative to form sort of a single last oblique case) was the last one to survive. Most words in the Romance languages are old accusatives, though I think some come from nominatives as well.

So the evolution was more like:

- Accusative and ablative fused (and this new unique oblique case was used with "de" and "ad" to replace the genitive and dative which were dying)

- Accusative and nominative fused (most often in favour of the accusative form)

 

[AndrewEarthrise]

Actually, it is generally agreed that the accusative (which had at some point merged with the ablative to form sort of a single last oblique case) was the last one to survive. Most words in the Romance languages are old accusatives, though I think some come from nominatives as well.

So the evolution was more like:

- Accusative and ablative fused (and this new unique oblique case was used with "de" and "ad" to replace the genitive and dative which were dying)

- Accusative and nominative fused (most often in favour of the accusative form)

Well maybe, with the exception of Romanian, the oblique case has ended for all the Romance languages. It's just the ablative/nominative/vocative merger that is left.

 

[Pacifica]

Well, I guess we can say that the unique word form of the Romance languages is ultimately a merge of accusative/ablative/nominative/vocative, but the last case into which all the rest fused was the accusative. So what you say isn't accurate.

I'll try to explain more clearly what most probably happened chronologically:

- The vocative case was the first of all to die (since already by classical times it differred from the nominative in only one declension, and even there it was often replaced by the nominative in vulgar speech).

- The accusative and the ablative got fused, while the genitive and dative died out and were progressively replaced with de and ad with the now unique accusative/ablative oblique case.

- So at this point we end up with a two-case language: with a nominative case and one oblique case (resulting from the earlier merge of acc. and abl.).

- Then the last step was that these two cases fused to yield (mostly) caseless languages, and it was usually the oblique form (basically accusative) that was kept.

 

[AndrewEarthrise]

Gratias Puella, I have been most recently looking at the ways that Latin (especially vulgar) has changed into it's modern counterparts. To be honest, I could not find all that much about the merging of the cases, but what I did find was from the wikipedia article of Vulgar Latin; I had interpreted it that the accusative took place of the ablative, and that the ablative and the nominative had merged, but you are quite right.

I ask, do you have any links to any sites that contain a more detailed explanation of what happened with the mergers and the development of the simplifications? I am interested especially in the grammatical evolution of the languages that I have cognized.

 

[Pacifica]

There's a short paragraph about the confusion of cases here at the bottom of the page. That's the only site I can remember now. Maybe some of the other stuff written there could interest you too.

 

[AndrewEarthrise]

Bene, mvltas gratias tibi ago Puella! I thank you much; One can never satisfy their hunger for knowledge!

 

[Serenus]

Well, I guess we can say that the unique word form of the Romance languages is ultimately a merge of accusative/ablative/nominative/vocative, but the last case into which all the rest fused was the accusative. So what you say isn't accurate.

I'll try to explain more clearly what most probably happened chronologically:

- The vocative case was the first of all to die (since already by classical times it differred from the nominative in only one declension, and even there it was often replaced by the nominative in vulgar speech).

- The accusative and the ablative got fused, while the genitive and dative died out and were progressively replaced with de and ad with the now unique accusative/ablative oblique case.

- So at this point we end up with a two-case language: with a nominative case and one oblique case (resulting from the earlier merge of acc. and abl.).

- Then the last step was that these two cases fused to yield (mostly) caseless languages, and it was usually the oblique form (basically accusative) that was kept.

Your account is correct for Old Occitan and Old French, but by the way, the Romanian oblique comes from a merger of the dative and genitive, not from the merger of the accusative and ablative. The vocative remains distinct in Romanian too.

 

[Pacifica]

Yeah, Romanian is kind of apart from other Romance languages. I knew about its dat./gen. but I didn't know it still had a vocative.

 

[Callaina]

- Then the last step was that these two cases fused to yield (mostly) caseless languages, and it was usually the oblique form (basically accusative) that was kept.

At first I read "careless languages". LOL...

I wonder why it was the accusative that was kept? This seems somehow counterintuitive, since I tend to think of the nominative as being the most "basic" form...

 

[Pacifica]

At first I read "careless languages". LOL...

Lol.

I wonder why it was the accusative that was kept? This seems somehow counterintuitive, since I tend to think of the nominative as being the most "basic" form...

I'm not sure, but maybe because on the whole oblique cases are used more often, and also the nominative is, especially in the third declension (which is huge), more different from the rest, so the "more common" form was kept.

 

[Imperfacundus]

I'll provide the reverse perspective, OP.
At one point I knew Latin very well (better than now), but didn't speak any romance languages yet.

Could've handed me four pages of Catullus and no problem- but a single paragraph of French, Spanish, or Italian? God, no...
Felt like reading German, knowing only English.

 

[AndrewEarthrise]

Could've handed me four pages of Catullus and no problem- but a single paragraph of French, Spanish, or Italian? God, no...
Felt like reading German, knowing only English.

Exactly the same way for me when learning Latin; I had fluency of the Romance languages, but when I attempted reading the first line of say, De bello hispanco, it was all Greek to me.