Hey, I have a couple of questions for those who have studied the history of Latin. When did Latin --as a living, native language-- stop, and when did Italian began? Was there a time when these two languages were so confused that the result was a language all its own? And how did people (during or after that period) decide which was which?
Book recommendations are welcomed.
Vale!
There’s always been a difference as to how latin was spoken and written in Italy - for example, an -m ending a word wasn’t pronounced even in classical times.
My theory is that Italian (proto-Italian if you like) must have been the colloquial tongue and co-existed with latin for a period of several hundred years, in which everyone spoke this vulgar Latin/Italian mixture and the few learned wrote latin.
There wouldn’t be any distinct date when latin stopped being talked. Maybe when people started writing what they spoke instead of writing a highly stylized version of it?
Latin had a phenomenon similar to many contemporary languages where there was a big difference between the colloquial spoken language and the formal written language. If you look at modern Finnish or modern Greek you see the same kind of thing. In addition, because the Roman empire was large and communication slow, there were many local dialects.
In the early middle ages there was a lot of political and social turmoil and literacy went down dramatically. As a result, the formal language was forgotten by the common people, who continued to speak their local dialect of “Latin”. Eventually, the local dialects diverged enough to be called Old French, Old Italian, etc.
The time when local dialects became mutually incomprehensible is dated at about the 8th century AD.
What do you mean by “Italian?”
Keep in mind, classical/standard Italian is an artificial, litterary language, just as Spanish and French, among others.
This makes sense. Then it was the educated “conservative” class the ones who started to distinguish between the local dialect and Latin. You see, I’d thought this was left in the hands of the common people, hence I wondered how they were able to say “this is Latin and that is Italian (or proto-Italian)”.
Now, you say that literacy went down dramatically, that means the collapse of the Latin language happened quickly, but how quickly? Is there any evidence that suggests the early Middle Ages were able to produce new words that just barely managed to be included as Latin words? And here I don’t mean compound words, i.e., those that are formed from by joining two already known words, but real new words.
Vale!
Could you elaborate on this? I don’t know what you mean exactly.
Problem is, in the case of Italian, I’m not sure we have any texts like the Oaths of Strasbourg in 800, that are recognizably Old French and no longer any form of Vulgar Latin. It would be hard for me to call anything “Italian” where all the "c"s were still pronounced hard, and that was the case when all those Civil Servants escaped to Sardinia to avoid the barbarians, in the 5th Century. Sardinian is still that way.
“Italian” is not a natural evolution from Vulgar Latin, but an artificial, litterary language invented by Dante, based upon the Florentine dialect of the Tuscan language, strongly influenced by borrowings from Sicilian and Provençal poetry. There were dozens of different common tongues in Italy besides Latin, none of which before the 17th century or so were called “Italian.”
So again, of what do you speak, where, and when?
Well this is news to me. I didn’t know that!
So again, of what do you speak, where, and when?
I’m speaking of whatever new language evolved naturally from Latin. You can disregard my use of the word “Italian,” if you wish. Where? Wherever Latin was spoken and then transformed itself into something different.
I think not only is what Lucus said true, but it held true all across the regions that now speak Romance languages. There were countless “languages” (or dialects) which had all over time come down from vernacular Latin. Some would say that practically each village had its own dialect. While adjacent villages could understand each other fairly easily, the farther apart two villages were, the less in common their dialect/language had. The standardization of these languages into “Italian,” “French,” “Spanish,” “Portuguese,” etc. came later and was much more influenced by politics rather than the natural evolution of language.