Latin: New Sounds, New Letters, Same Old Problems

Latin is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. It was found at first in Latium (modern Lazio) in Italy, a region which includes Rome. Particular features of Latin suggest that it arrived before about 1200BC.

The languages closest to Latin are those of the Celtic and Germanic families. The language which became the Italic, Celtic and Germanic families arrived in Europe about 2000BC with bronze technology.

Germanic turned north and Celtic+Italic turned south. The first wave started when certain words contained a K or Q sound which was later replaced by a P. Latin and some other minor Italic languages are Q-Italic, while proto-Celtic speakers moved into Spain and later over to Ireland, probably by sea; Irish and defunct languages in Spain are termed Q-Celtic.

After the Iron Age (c.1200BC) a second wave arrived in Italy and France. By then, Q/K had become P; this can be seen in the Latin word Coquina (kitchen) which in the later arrival Oscan became Popina. Latin Quinque (five) is cognate with Welsh Pump (compare with Germanic fünf).

Latin was lucky that this was what the Roman rulers spoke. More people in Italy spoke Oscan than Latin. More people in the Roman Empire (29BC to 641AD) spoke Greek than anything else.

The Latin Alphabet

We still use the Latin alphabet. However, we have added extra letters: K was a Greek letter, only found when quoting Greek. All Cs in Latin are K sounds. J was separated from I only in the High Middle Ages so Julius Caesar was actually Iulius and Caesar was pronounced Keezer. Z is known, but mostly used for Greek words borrowed. U and V are the same character, used according to however pronunciation wanted, and W was just UU or VV. V is pronounced as W until the first century AD, when it starts to become a ‘bv’ sound and eventually a V. Y is known, but mostly in foreign words and names as an ‘eye’ . Some languages later added a character for ‘th’ such as ∂ (dropped from English in the 1400s), but Latin used ‘th’ as we do.

The emperor Claudius had a hobby horse about letters and introduced three new ones: antisigma (a C backwards plus a C, merged) to denote BS and PS), digamma inversum (an F upside down) and sonus medius, an H missing the right downstroke, a sort of schwa vowel. They ceased to be used when died, but could still be seem in the second century AD, when Suetonius notes it in inscriptions, books and official registers.

New Letters Invented by the Emperor Claudius

 The Frankish king Chilperic (r. AD561-584) also introduced four additional letters to Latin during his reign, according to Gregory of Tours. These too failed to survive his reign.

The King  also wrote books of verses following the style of Sedelius, but they were not at all compounds metric/poetic rules. He also added several letters in our alphabet, namely, ω of the Greeks, æ, the, uui, he figured in the manner as follows: ω, ψ, Ζ, Δ, and sent orders in all cities of his kingdom we should teach children in this way, and that the books were written previously erased pumiced out, and rewritten again.

The ego of kings and emperors knows no bounds.

Some characteristics of Latin

There were two types of Latin running alongside each other at the same time: Classical Latin, the speech and writing of the educated upper levels of society, and Vulgar Latin, mostly spoken and seldom written down. ‘Vulgar’ comes from ‘vulgus’, meaning a crowd (cf French ‘foule’), and does not have quite the level of disgust that the name would suggest. However, it is clear that since the elite were only a few percent of the population, a lot more people spoke the Vulgar variety.

In Classical Latin, there are two numbers: singular and plural and three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Nouns follow three major groupings and two minor ones. Noun endings (‘cases’) change according to how the word is used in a sentence.

Nominative Subject

Accusative Direct Object

Genitive    Possessive

Dative      Indirect Object

Ablative  Instrumental

Words quoted in a dictionary are shown as Nominatives. When used in poetry, as in ‘O Caesar!’, this is called the Vocative and is often identical to the Nominative. There is a minor case called the Locative, used only with place names.

Adjectives follow the case, gender and number of the noun they are connected with.

The First Declension is feminine: nouns in the Nominative end in –a and this includes all females (femina, woman; puella, girl, etc.), female names (Olivia, Julia, etc.), most country names (Italia, Britannia, etc.) and most abstract words (philosophia, eloquentia, etc.) Oddly nauta (sailor), agricola (farmer) and incola (inhabitant) are feminine, although those are not particularly female activities, as well as other seemingly random words such as mensa, table. To give an idea of the declension, here is mensa:

Nom mensa

Acc mensam

Gen mensae

Dat mensae

Abl mensa

This is not that useful to a Roman as the Genitive and Dative are identical and the Nominative and Ablative seem to be so too (in fact, from poetry we can tell the –a in the Ablative was slightly longer).  The plural is odd too:

Nom mensae

Acc mensas

Gen mensarum

Dat mensis

Abl mensis

In the singular, Genitive and Dative were the same, but in the plural the Dative and Ablative are the same. To make things worse, pronunciation guides to Latin survive, and say things like ‘Don’t forget to include the –m in the Accusative; we may not say it anymore, but you have to write it’!

The second declension comprises masculine nouns ending in –us (e.g. tribus, tribe) and –er (such as magister, master) and neuter nouns ending in –um (such as bellum, war). Endings are different from the feminine words, but follow the same pattern.

Adjectives follow the first two declensions in endings and gender. So for a man, someone might say ‘pulcher est’ (he is handsome) and for a woman ‘pulchra est’ (she is beautiful); people would use that of themselves too.

The third declension is where it all gets a bit weird, if you didn’t think it was weird already.

Third declension nouns can be either masculine or feminine and you often have to guess which. Many have a different Nominative/Vocative form to all other endings, so all are listed as two words, Nominative and Genitive (e.g. flos, floris = flower). Caesar is third declension.

Verbs take their meaning from the endings, which denote person (first, second, third) and number (singular or plural) and tense or mood. Personal pronouns do exist, but were only used for emphasis or contrast. Otherwise (as Italian and Spanish still do) they could be omitted.

In theory, in Classical Latin, words could be written in any order, because the ending would indicate the meaning. In English, John loves Jane can’t mean the same as Jane loves John because the word order determines the meaning. In Classical Latin, Julius Juliam amat means Julius loves Julia, whilst Julium Julia amat means the reverse.

In truth, few people reading a military report or a book on agriculture could abide this silly word play, so it was confined to poetry. The actual word order tended to be Nom, Dat, Acc, Abl, Verb.

There is no word for ‘the’ or ‘a/an’ in Latin (no definite or indefinite article) and no words for Yes and No; they had to use a phrase, which might be ‘sic est’ (it is so) or ‘non est’ (it is not).

The Romans were very aware of the oddities of their language, and a book De Lingua Latina (On the Latin Language) was written by a writer called Varro at the time of Augustus (29BC-14AD), trying to trace its origins and development.  A second century AD text, the Appendix of Probus (Appendix Probi) listed 227 words which were often given wrongly:

Vowel Lost	27
Vowel Changed	82
Vowel Added	2
Consonant Lost	11
Consonant Changed	42
Consonant Added	15
Word Ending Changed	29
Neologism	32

In summary, there were 111 changes to vowels (49%), 68 changes to consonants (30%), 29 grammatical changes (13%) and 32 dispreferred neologisms (14%). Essentially four-fifths of the changes were in speech and did not impact grammar or lexis. We do not know what community spoke the way Probus noted, the number of samples he took or how typical such variants were. A modern linguist would be expected to provide such metrics. But we can say that the variants in sound found acceptance in the local community or the speaker would not have been emulated and Probus would not have heard about them.

Vulgar Latin

We only get to see Vulgar Latin (VL) in chance survivals such as graffiti and in the comic phrases of lower-class characters in plays. VL used different words to Classical Latin (CL). So while CL called your head caput, capitis (whence ‘capital’), VL called it a testa, literally a pot, from which we get modern Italian testa and French tête. Likewise CL said equus (horse) but CL had caballus (nag) hence French cheval and Spanish caballo. Very often, when a modern Spanish, French or Italian word does not come from CL, it comes from VL.

Latin was at that time a living language and it does seem that many people spoke VL but wrote in CL. Some of the least VL is actually from the soldiers who wrote the Vindolanda Tablets, because they made almost no mistakes, even that pesky –m in the Accusative.

Latin had always changed. We are told by a Greek, Polybius, that in the 150s BC the Romans found an inscribed tablet about a trade treaty from 509BC, but which they were unable to read, c.350 years later.

Later Latin

From Donatus we know that the -m which ends words when they are the Direct Object of the sentence (the Accusative Case) was no longer pronounced, so that Mensa (table) was not pronounced ‘Mensam’ in the Accusative, but just ‘Mensa’. Donatus says that people should not forget to write ‘Mensam’, even if the -m is not actually spoken. Certain difficult clusters of consonants were simplified in speech, but not in writing, so for example ‘Mensa’ was actually pronounced ‘Mesa’, just as it is in Spanish today. It seems that the -us ending was weakened to an -o, so that ‘Marcus’ was actually pronounced ‘Marco’, as in modern Italian. The Emperor Constantine was therefore not ‘Constantinus’ but ‘Costantino’. In languages derived from forms of Latin, consonantal clusters are not preserved; either they are cut down, abandoned or have added vowels to make them easier to say.

After Latin

When the Roman school system collapsed in the fifth century AD, local preferences and quirks took over, the Church (a big user of Latin) started changing meanings and pronunciations. Complex sentences began to disappear. The sixth century Latin writer Gregory of Tours, who was Archbishop of that city and primate of France, comments that nobody understands a speechifier, but everyone understands a plain speaker.

By 800AD, the situation had become that everyone still wrote in Latin but spoke in something quite different. The French ruler Charlemagne had documents written for his government in ‘lingua latina rustica’ (rustic Latin), while the bulk of people spoke something that was no longer Latin, but wrote it down in Latin,

The first document to appear in writing in something that was clearly no longer Latin was the Oaths of Strasbourg (843AD). These were oaths given in front of soldiers by two kings, Charles of France and his brother Louis (Ludwig) of Germany to cooperate to fight another brother (Lothar) of the bit in-between and Italy, Charles swore in German and Louis in French, so their soldiers could understand:

Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di in avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunant, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradei salva dift in o quid il mi altresi fazet, et ab Ludher nul plaid nunquam prindrai, qui, meon vol cist meon fradre Karle in damno sit.

For the love of God and for the Christian people and for our common salvation, from this day forward so long as God gives me knowledge and power, I will help this my brother Charles both with my aid and in everything as by right one ought to help one's brother, on condition that he does the same for me, and I will not hold any court with Lothar, which, of my own will, might cause my brother Charles harm.

While it seems to have the odd Latin word (nunquam) in it, this proto-French contains many different things. ‘Romance’ as it is often called looks a bit like French and Italian, but is a long way from either and just as far from CL. The vocabulary is still rather closer to Latin than to ModFr (Deus, not Dieu, di not jour, podir not pouvoir, fradre not frère, cosa not chose, etc). Some Latin words (pro, nunquam, ab) survive unchanged in writing. Grammatically, Romance at this stage did not yet requirer je as French does today – meaning was still given through a case ending.

The important thing is that this is a supposedly accurate rendition of precisely what was spoken in front of an army of ordinary West Frankish people. It has not been glossed or dressed up, and therefore shows that Latin had changed massively to the point where a CL speaker could not have understood the vast majority of it in speech, although a CL speaker might have followed it in writing. But nor does it much resemble VL, having gone much further in the abandonment of case and the overall morphology of any variety of Latin.

In conclusion, it can be argued that CL was an artificial construct, used for specific purposes, namely oratory and literature, and hence an elite, prestige social dialect, that was used as the basis for military language, as evidenced from Vindolanda and Bu Njem (in North Africa), but which did not form the everyday speech of the vast majority of Romans, that is, those outside of elite circles. The fact is that many VL words formed the basis of later Romance languages whilst CL ones did not, or were borrowed much later from classical literature as prestige forms.

Did the Roman Speak Classical Latin?

Did the Romans Speak Classical Latin?

We take it for granted that the Romans spoke Latin, by which we mean the sort of Latin many of us learnt in school or through courses like those offered by universities, staffed by classicists.

It won’t have escaped your attention that the language is not called Roman, but Latin. It was the language spoken by people who identified as Latini in Latium, modern Lazio, a single area within Italy. In other words, it was spoken before there was a Rome by other people. Rome is on the north western boundary of the Latin-speaking area; when Camillus conquered the city of Veii, a dozen miles away, the Romans took over a city which spoke Etruscan. The Latini seem to take their name from the broad plain they lived on (Latin latus, broad).

Rome always recognised an affinity with the other Latini, establishing early on ‘Latin Rights’ at Rome – commercium (trade), connubium (marriage to a Roman so that offspring became Roman) and ius migrationis (the right to settle at Rome) – with those people, seen no doubt as a source of additional citizens. The same rights were later offered to people who didn’t speak Latin, termed ‘Junian Latins’, so the rights had become detached from the language spoken.

What can we say about Latin in Italy? Like all Indo-European languages, it seems to have entered Europe during the Bronze Age and to have established itself between the Tiber, the sea, the Apennine Mountains and the Pontine Marshes. This is quite a small part of Italy, and Latin is only one of numerous languages spoken.

 Some, like Etruscan, arrived about the same time, while others, such as Oscan-Umbrian, much used in ritual literature, seem to be related languages which arose elsewhere and arrived in Italy later. Oscan-Umbrian was spoken over a wider area than Latin, although much of it was mountain and sparsely populated. Etruscan, long thought of as an isolate, a language related to no known other, is now considered by many experts to be a very extreme form of Indo-European, originating in Anatolia and related to Lemnian, a language formerly spoken on the island of Lemnos.

Latin has a different word for iron from all other languages, which suggests the term arose in Italy and hence Latin was already in Italy. (Most use variants on iron or isen (Persian and Hindi aahan, Hindi iohaa)). Ferrum may be connected to the word ferro (I carry). The significance of this is that if Latin’s word for iron is unique to Latin, it must have arisen in situ, because there would be no word for iron in a society which did not know about it. So by that token, Latin was in Italy during the early Bronze Age.

There was in imperial times an antiquarian interest in the origins and development of Latin, as can be seen in Varro’s book De Lingua Latina, ‘On the Latin Language’, published in Latin and English by Loeb. It was believed that Latin was derived from Greek, because the official story stated that the Romans were descended from Trojans. They weren’t and in any case the Trojans didn’t speak Greek. Varro explains the differences by saying that time, distance and lack of contact impacted on Aeneas’s Trojans. This is indeed how languages change, but Latin is not descended from Greek. Both are in fact members of the Aryan on Indo-European language family, but Latin is closer to Germanic and Celtic languages. However,

Although it is claimed by Livy, also in the reign of Augustus, that the earliest Romans were literate in 753BC, there is no written evidence from that time, which was in any case the same decade as the earliest Greek works by Homer, so this is probably untrue. The earliest inscriptions to be found date to around 500BC.

Old Latin

There is a marked change visible in Latin at about 75BC. The forms of Latin before that are referred to as ‘Old Latin’. Like all abstractions, it needs to be viewed with caution. We certainly find authors writing in classical Latin who were born and educated before then: Julius Caesar and Cicero immediately spring to mind. So there was no sudden change, but possibly a cementing of older changes which first become visible to us. This may arise from the very much larger number and type of sources.

There are Roman texts in Old Latin which are claimed to date back to c.500BC, but anything not on stone would probably have been destroyed when the Gauls burnt Rome in c.380BC. The Conflict of the Orders in c.360BC would have put paid to anything which survived it. But Plautus, Terence and Cato the Elder wrote in this variety.

Latin probably developed fast. Polybius, writing in c.140BC (in Greek) tell of the discovery of a column carrying the text of a trade treaty with Carthage and the names of the first consuls, dated to 509BC. Even Rome’s top antiquarians could not read the text,  which was only 370 years old. Sadly, this no longer exists. Nor can we know if the column said what it was purported to say. This may have happened, but for political reasons, since Rome had just burnt Carthage to the ground, the experts purported not to understand it in the way that tour guides in extremist countries usher tourists away from controversy. Shakespeare’s first folio plays are from as far back as that, so if not even experts could understand it, Latin must have changed at a considerable pace.

But it should be noted that when the Romans banned the cult of Bacchus in 186BC, the senates consultum of which survives, Latin still looked very different to that of the later classical period. There may have been a lag between speech and writing, so that many words continued to be spelt in older ways, so that there could be no legal dispute. For example the ablative case still has a D at the end, which does not exist in classical Latin, but this may have been a silent letter by then. English and French are fully of textual anachronisms of this sort.

The biggest differences seem to be in the vowels used in words, suggesting that Latin underwent a Great Vowel Shift, not unlike the one English went through around AD1450. One thing that had happened around that time in the Roman world is the very large increase in the number and type of people speaking Latin, with all sorts of backgrounds. The social war ended with citizenship extended to cities all over Italy, many of whom spoke related languages such as Oscan, whose pronunciation may have influenced Latin.

Something I have always pointed out is that, after Julius Caesar, there is no major Roman writer actually from Rome until Boethius in the early sixth century. From Cicero onwards, nearly all Latin authors were provincials.

Several well-known authors of the Golden and Silver ages were actually from what had hitherto been Cisalpine Gaul. The trend may have started with Virgil. Certainly Tacitus and Pliny the Younger were both Gauls; Tacitus tells of a story of himself pronouncing on matters to followers in the arena between events and someone coming up to him and asking ‘Are you Tacitus or Pliny?’ suggesting that both had a marked Gaulish accent.

Vulgar Latin

There was nothing vulgar about Vulgar Latin; it was the normal speech of ordinary people. The term comes from Latin vulgus ‘crowd’ (cf French ‘foule’). The highly rhetorical Latin of classical authors was never likely to be the common speech in the streets. In consequence, we don’t get much of it in the classical texts.

A number of works existed to correct unacceptable Latin. One of these is the Appendix Probi, the Appendix of Probus. This lists over 200 words and short phrases often given wrongly, together with the correct Latin of the day. Many of them correct the mistaken omission of  terminal M in words like numqua(m) and passi(m), indicating they were no longer spoken as they had once been said nasally (as in French words like ‘bon’) and with denial changes the terminal M had been lost. We can see the terminal M in the accusative case being lost too.

Vulgar Latin was sometimes used in classical texts to represent the speech of low, often slave, characters in works of Plautus, Terence and Petronius. It can also be found in graffiti, curses (defixiones) and other informal writings.

Many soldiers were not of Italian ancestry and in some cases made significant mistakes, such as those noted at Bu Njem in north Africa. By contrast, the Latin of the Vindolanda Tablets found near Hadrian’s Wall contains very few non-classical ‘mistakes’, and it seem probable that the authors were not Latin speakers. When people speak a languages they often make mistakes, but if the soldiers’ Latin was minimal and limited to military matters, they would be less prone to make mistakes.

St Patrick’s Latin is odd, but he was only semi-educated, having been abducted to Ireland at sixteen, before he had completed his quadrivium. One of his authentic documents in an open letter to the soldiers of the king of Strathclyde, whose Latin would have been even worse. Gregory of Tours (fl. C. AD580 )comments at the opening of his Histories that no one understands a rhetorician, but everyone understands a plain speaker. In AD722, St Boniface could hardly understand the Latin of Pope Gregory II. In AD813, the Council of Tours ordered priests to preach in the rustica lingua Romana, because nobody in the laity could understand formal Latin.

Could Slaves Speak Latin?

It would depend on the origin and function of the slave. All slaves were of non-citizen origin, mainly foreigners. Those who were body servants or teachers, those who ran a senator’s business for him in a city, or had close or frequent contact with urban Romans, would have spoken Latin and some would have needed to be able to write. However, those who were kept as field hands on latifundia farms needed to know no Latin and it would have been in the interest of a master that they shouldn’t; if they ever escaped, they would have no idea where they were and would not have been able to enlist help if they spoke no Latin or Greek. As long as there was an overseer who spoke their language and some Latin, no more would have been needed.

Other Languages of the Empire

The eastern half of the Empire spoke Greek widely in Greece, Asia Minor and Egypt. Coptic was spoken in Egypt, Syriac in Syria, where it became a major language for Christian literature. The language spoken across the southern Asiatic provinces was Aramaic (still spoken in rural Jordan) and this would have been the language that Jesus spoke. Hebrew was by them a ‘temple language’ only. Latin was not much spoken outside the courts and the army. When Justinian (a Latin speaker from the Danubian provinces) compiled his great Roman Law collection, the Codex (the laws) and the Institutes (jurisprudence) were in Latin, but his new laws (the novels) were in Greek. Since areas such as Armenia and Crimea were within the Empire, there were plenty of other languages spoken, while Arabic was within the ambit of the east.

In the west, the spread of Latin was patchy. There are relatively few Latin texts on Sardinia, which continued to speak Punic. Septimius Severus was a Punic speaker, and the Historia Augusta tells how his sisters spoke Latin so little that they returned home to Africa. Basque clearly survived; Gaulish seems to be patchy.

Despite the special pleading for Britain, Brythonic gives little evidence of survival to the end of its imperial phase. There are lots of Latin words in Old Welsh, lots of non-religious Latin words in Old English, but very few Welsh words in English. This suggests that Welsh is a revival of rural isolated speech (not only from Wales but from the Scottish Borders, Strathclyde, Yorkshire and the Peaks and of course Cornwall) rather than a universal tongue continuing from antiquity. As there now seem to have been significant numbers of Germanic speakers in Roman Britain, so old English may predate the end of Roman Britain.

Conclusion

Since the east, which was much more populated than the west, spoke little Latin, the African lands spoke little enough, and many other languages survived from pre-Roman times, the impact of Latin outside the towns seems limited. Even in Italy, Latin was a minority language for much of its history, while a lot of the population, slaves, spoke Latin only in certain contexts and most of the population spoke Vulgar Latin, while Classical Latin was spoken only from about 75BC to about 200AD, so the impact of Classical Latin is a matter for debate.