How Latin became Italian

Latin Learning Latin
1

After 10 years playing with Latin (with some modest progress), I’ve added Italian to my language learning. I’d be interested in finding a book in English on how Latin became Italian. The one I’ve found Charles Grandgent’s From Latin to Italian can’t be printed out as a free PDF, at least I haven’t found a way (though it was first published in 1920). I wonder if anyone knows of any other book on the subject.

2

Salve,

I don’t know of any books on the development of Latin into Italian (although I am very certain there are countless), but you might enjoy Italian is easy if you know latin and use these charts by Raymond V. Schoder (available as a PDF online). I doubt it’s sufficient to learn Italian by itself, and should definitely be used alongside a normal Italian textbook, but it seems quite fun.

3

Thanks for interesting link. I printed out the PDF (wish it was easier to read). In reverse, I saw an article on Antigone from an Italian classics student saying that knowing Italian does not make learning Latin easy. Perhaps easier, but not easy.
Though I’m just beginning with Italian, I can already see that it is simpler than Latin. Some would say a dumbing down, which might be true of all the Romance languages.

4

This video on youtube serves as a decent introduction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izNkyCkhmCo

Chapter 8 in Horrock’s The Blackwell History of the Latin Language should also serve as a good starting point.

5

Thanks Barry for the links. At first I was wondering how “puer” became “ragazzo”. The answer is that it didn’t. An app for Italian etymology says ragazzo came from the medieval Latin “ragatius”. The question then is where did ragatius come from. The app says ultimately the word is probably from Arabic or Greek. I have an early edition of the Oxford Medieval Latin Dictionary (the final edition being extremely expensive). The word ragatius isn’t listed. I’m sure there are good Italian Etymological Dictionaries out there but they’re probably monolingual.

6

It’s more like the Ecclesiastical Latin pronunciation morphed into Italian, retaining many of the characteristics of the former.

7

Yes, there are a number of words out there like that which come through vocabulary that entered the language in Late Antiquity. In French we have cheval, horse, which of course is not from equus but from cavallus (hence also English cavalry…).