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Grammar of spoken Latin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Old Chemist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5178 days ago 227 posts - 285 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 9 of 11 02 October 2010 at 5:35pm | IP Logged |
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Spoken Latin must have varied significantly from area to area, as spoken English does, not only in America and the United Kingdom, but in all the countries that were formerly associated with them, as proctectorates, colonies, etc. I think even if it were possible to reconstruct a grammar, it would have significant differences for each region. I knew an Italian speaker who thought people in the South of Italy just spoke badly, he didn't seem to accept the idea that regional languages and dialects can differ significantly from a "standard" language. Edited by Old Chemist on 02 October 2010 at 5:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5452 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 10 of 11 02 October 2010 at 11:00pm | IP Logged |
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We'll never be able to be sure how Latin was spoken in the street, but we're not completely in the dark either. One important source is Latin's descendants, the Romance languages. Let's do a thought experiment:
French, Spanish and Italian all combine ad with ille (au, al, al) before a masculine noun. So a prepositional phrase with a determinative probably went preposition+determinative+the rest. Latin hodie, Spanish hoy and Italian oggi - "this day" = today - all suggest that the determinative preceded the noun as a general rule. French aujourd'hui ("at the day here") does too but note that the determinative is in the contraction "au". Adjectives tend to follow nouns in the Romance languages, with certain exceptions that are pretty common across French, Spanish and Italian. Latin? French, Spanish and Italian all place the direct and indirect objects before the verb. So this aspect of the SOV order ascribed to Latin seems pretty solid. Named direct objects follow the verb in French, Spanish and Italian. Your Latin textbook says that homo canem mordet and canem homo mordet both mean "The man bites the dog." But Romance word order suggests that using SVO word order - homo mordet canem - rather than emphasizing the endings would have been the way to make clear who bit whom if there was any doubt. French, Spanish and Italian substitute prepositional phrases for the dative (ad+noun) and the genitive (de+noun). Spoken Latin probably used these prepositions, at least for emphasis, in the same way. French, Spanish and Italian nouns are derived from the ablative, not the nominative, genitive, accusative or dative. This suggests it was the most common form. We see this in Old French, where there was a nominative case based on the Latin nominative and an everything else case based on the ablative. In Latin textbooks, the only excitement about the ablative is with the ablative absolute. But the Romance languages suggest that the Romans were itching for a clearer way to express things than the case endings, they turned to prepositional phrases to solve the problem (except with the pronouns) and if they weren't sure which form to use they defaulted to the ablative. The above is speculative, based on fading memories of seminars on Old French and on Romance linguistics. It is a thought experiment. Don't use the above to try to settle bar bets about how Cicero would have said it! By using early Romance language texts, late Latin texts and our knowledge of what the Romance languages became, we can however make educated guesses about certain elements of the later variants of spoken Latin, even if we don't know enough to do a full reconstruction. If you want to speak Latin the way modern Latin speakers do there are resources for that, some mentioned above. But if you're looking to get a sense of what real spoken Latin might have been like 1300 or 1400 years ago, there are ways of doing so even if they are, as I say, rather speculative. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6708 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 11 03 October 2010 at 12:40pm | IP Logged |
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"aujourd'hui": on the day of this-day, so there are actually two determinatives at play here. But even the word "hui" < "hoc die" illustrate your point. Thanks for a very interesting analysis.
Let me add that there was a separate Nominative form as late as in Old French, but in almost all cases the 'oblique' form (roughly everything but the Nominative) won, and the nominative died out. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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