Did wealthy people/people high up in governments/priests/priestesses speak in a different way than your average everyday greek family that had to work and go to school?
So I was thinking of the Chinese situation where you have a number of highly divergent dialects (or languages I have no dog in that fight) using the same writing system.
I was curious if during the period where the Romance languages were perceived as Latin dialects whether you started to have highly divergent pronunciation of the same written words leading to a similar situation, or whether the pronunciation of written Latin texts stayed roughly similar across regions.
The languages diverged today, but as I understand they were somewhat closer to latin.
Of course there were standards (Classic, Ecclestial) which scribes knew.
But do we have any accounts of how much could common folks understand each others romance dialects, between these romanized regions?
I'm referring to both modern academic consensus (e.g., "After the 5th century, local Iberian dialects had diverged into the early Castilian & Catalan languages") and records by medieval contemporaries (e.g., a monk in France referring to the langues d'oil by name instead of vulgar Latin).
As I understand it, Modern Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese etc. have future tenses derived from the infinitive + "to have", such as (ES) comerΓ© "I will eat" from comer "to eat" + he "I have". There's also evidence that they were treated somewhat paraphrastically for centuries, and modern Portuguese still shows some signs of that. These future tenses don't derive from the Latin future tense forms.
So my question is, do we know what the Vulgar Latin dialects used in the intervening period? Did they coexist, with the older future forms fading out over time? Or were the older forms lost first, and the dialects didn't have a clear future form for a while?
If that's the case, do we know what speakers did? Old English and Modern Japanese, as well as a whole bunch of other languages, use the "present" form for the future, with context indicating what time is meant. Did the romance dialects use a similar strategy?
Thank you in advance, and sorry if the question has been explored in this subreddit before.
Bovis est plus (magis) fortis quam caballus. (Slangy Latin of classical period.)
Illu bove e plu forte ca illu cavallu. (Vulgar Latin of Italy, reconstructed)
II bove e piu forte che il cavallo. (Modern Italian.)
Illu boe es mais forte ke illu caballu. (Vulgar Latin of Spain, reconstructed.)
El buey es mas fuerte que el caballo. (Modern Spanish)
Illi bos est plus fortis ka illi caballus. (Vulgar Latin of Gaul, reconstructed.)
Li bues est plus forz que li chevalz. (12th-century French.)
Le boeuf est plus fort que le cheval. (Modern French.)
Bovis ille est magis tabs de quantum caballus ille. (Vulgar Latin of Dacia, reconstructed.)
Boul este mai tare de cat calul. (Modern Romanian.)
The Romans conquered Britannia at one point in history. Britain, except for Scotland was under Roman rule from 84 AD - 410 AD, 326 years. While a Vulgar Latin dialect existed, it died out 300 years after the Romans left. Why did British Latin die out while many other languages were able to survive?
While it was said that invasions destroyed the language, I don't see that happening for other countries. France for example was invaded by the Franks who established a kingdom there and adopted the local dialect of the region they settled on. Even Romania, which had been under Roman rule from 106 AD - 275 AD, only 169 years spoke a Romance language.
With such a long period of Roman rule, why didn't the people in Britain speak a Romance language? Why didn't the Anglo-Saxons adopt the culture of the Romans as the Franks did?
I heard about Scots and the creole languages (but I heard Scots was debated) recently and just want to check, does accents have something to do with it as well?
Patre nostro , qui es en celos
Santificato siat nome tu
Veniat renios tu
Siat facta volontate tua
Como en celo et en terra
Pane nostro quotidiano da nos oge
et remette nos debitas nostros
et no nos enducas en tentazione mais libera nos de malo
Amen
HelloSo I know that Latin possessives could be either pre- or post-nominal. What about Vulgar Latin? I know that there are different varieties on VL, but in the texts that we have, what was the position of the possessive? I am assuming that the collapse of the case system led to changes in syntax, as per usual. Also, are there corpora for Vulgar Latin?
If someone who spoke hispania vulgar Latin from 400AD and someone who spoke the form of Spanish spoken in 1400 AD met up in 900 AD in the same town in modern day Spain, who would understand more of what was being said by the people in 900? Could the person from 450 understand the person from 1450 and vice versa?
Also, was there already a distinct identity, would they have seen themselfes as Gothic?, or as something else...perhaps more latinite
I read on Wikipedia that Isidore's use of Latin in his Etymologiae was influenced by the developing Romance in his region. Can anybody give examples of what this Vulgar/Romance influence looks like?
Hello all, I have been studying Latin for some time, and I am interested in its relation with other Romance languages. I am manly interested in historical linguistics, because if you know how the language developed it is quite possible to convert words from Latin into Vulgar Latin, If anyone knows of any good books or other resources on this subject please let me know, it would be of use to me. As a bonus if somebody has experience doing this sort of thing, maybe we can have a chat? If you tutor I am happy to pay a reasonable amount for some lessons in this subject. thank you for reading all!
I recently started taking a summer class in Latin, and I thought maybe I could do some self-studying on the side. I saw that Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata seems pretty good, but I'm not sure if it teaches Classical or Vulgar Latin? The course I am taking teaches vulgar. If it's not, could anyone point me to the right direction to finding more resources with vulgar? Thanks so much!
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cretin
I have a hard time believing this, but if true, it would be hilarious.
I am actually looking for words derived from *'ker- "head, horn" that mean people.
Or even Classical Latin?
I just think,that non-Roman substrates in some Romance languages definitely can mean,that long time ago there were Pidgins,Creole languages based on Latin.
I'm not a linguist, not a student of linguistics, so I want to ask to you something that's been bugging my mind really hard since my high school years, that is when I've studied Latin.
The grammar of Romance languages appears to be pretty similar with each others, yet different from Latin. I'm thinking about the loss of declensions, of the original synthetic passive conjugation, of the tenses and moods constructed with the perfect root of the verb (perfect, pluperfect, future perfect), of infinitives using gerund or gerundive, of the synthetic formation of comparative and superlative adjectives and of adverbs from adjectives (-e).
There are also a lot of phonetic changes that all the romance languages have undergone: loss of syllable quantity, 7 vowel system and diphthongization, changes in pronounce of "c", "g", "ti-", "di-" etc (I believe it's palatalization?)
We could go on all day really, so my question is Do linguists believe that the Romans were already speaking Vulgar prior to their conquests (even of Italy) or do they believe that this transitioning from "correct" Latin into Vulgar has happened later in all the regions of the Empire that spoke Latin?
My guess is the first. It means that the language of Cicero and Caesar was already "dead" during their own times, but I don't think it's implausible: they were the very educated elite, and it seems that in that environment ars oratoria was really a major factor of political success. There's also the fact that all these people would study Greek and to speak Vulgar would feel like diminishing of their own linguistic prowess so they needed classical Latin to really express themselves at their full potential.
The second hypothesis seems to me to be highly unlikely, yet it's the one I have sometimes read on the internet regarding many of the phenomena I've mentioned: a theory of irradiation of phonetic and grammatical changes generating from France. I struggle to understand how you would get a supposed linguistic change coming from France influence the distant and more crowded cities of Italy.
But I'm asking you because sadly for me I don't have the tools to really know how much of a factor irradiation could be. Like, is it something that is documented to have played a role in some known language? And to a similar extend as for French and Romance languages?
So we can reconstruct colloquial Latin (Vulgar Latin) based on current Romance languages. Can we do the same for North Indian languages?
The thing is that Sanskrit seems like Classical Latin and would not reflect the everyday language spoken just before North Indian languages started differentiating. It seems like Sanskrit was a "perfect" language that no one really spoke by the time the religious texts were created.
If you have any sources or books I could look into, I would appreciate it, thank you.
Hey there folks!
Welcome to the new subreddit for learning about and using Vulgar Latin. As you may know, Vulgar Latin was the language that developed from Classical Latin and later developed into the many romance languages of today. Due to the belief that it was a corruption of pure Latin, Vulgar Latin was seldom written down and for that reason, it is very hard to say for sure exactly how it worked. This clearly creates a problem for those who seek to use it or study it today. To partly resolve this issue, I have decided to deem Nativlang.com's guide for Vulgar Latin the "official" guide for this subreddit. It does a pretty good job of explaining the basics, and if everyone uses it as a starting point, I think we could do something really cool with this reconstructed language.
Obviously, anything that is reconstructed will be semi-arbitrary given that there is no true corpus of Vulgar Latin texts, so to unite the subreddit, here are the rules.
- All grammar and vocabulary from the Nativlang link must be taken as correct.
- Any new vocabulary must be drawn from two or more romance languages, or classical Latin and a romance language.
- If it is understood and seems feasible, it is good enough for this sub.
Leave any questions in the comments.
Fablemos latinu vulgare!
Let's say I'm a lower middle-class Roman merchant in Venice in the Kingdom of the Ostrogoths circa 500s AD, and I have a son who in proper register is named Liberius. I'm telling my wife Priscilla how he gave me my book earlier I planned to sell. Would I say (edit: I tried my best with the reconstruction to sound realistic lol):
>*Liberio da' libru me
or would I continue to call him "Liberius" in any speech?
To a modern mind, and many seem to agree with me, the -us declension sounds cool and refined, almost firmly planted. What happened?
Did it have something to do with the rise of Italian as a standardized literary language during the Middle Ages?
Bonus 1:What was this process like for other Romance languages?
Bonus 2: Why did this process occur in Romance languages, but not in Greek? Or did it?
Hello! all, I have been studying Latin for some time, and I am interested in its relation with other Romance languages. I am manly interested in historical linguistics, because if you know how the language developed it is quite possible to convert words from Latin into a Romance language, which I think is awesome to do, and it really helps to remember vocabulary. If anyone knows of any good books or other resources on this subject please let me know, it would be of use to me. As a bonus if somebody has experience doing this sort of thing, maybe we can have a chat? If you tutor I am happy to pay a reasonable amount for some lessons in this subject. thank you for reading all!
