8.1 Who Spoke Latin, and When — Epoché
What you will be able to do Name the six layers of Latin in order, and date each of them to within a century or two. Look at an unfamiliar Latin text and say which layer it probably belongs to. Say which three layers this course teaches, and why those three. Say what the difference is between Latin dying and Latin becoming French. Read sentences like Quot annos natus es? [22] — What's your age? — without looking anything up. Prerequisites : lesson 5.8 — the last of the reading, and the only text in it written after the Romans. You have now read Latin from six different centuries without being told so. This lesson lines them up. The question behind it is one that every learner asks in the first week and gets a bad answer to: is Latin a dead language? The honest answer needs the layers, because Latin did two different things — it stopped being anybody's mother tongue, and it went on being written for another fifteen hundred years — and the word dead covers the first and not the second. A look at the original Six lines, one from each layer, five of them from texts you have already read in this course. Read them in order and watch the language change. Layer Latin English Old Latin — before about 100 BC enos Lases iuvate Help us, Lares Classical Latin — about 100 BC to AD 100 Annos undeviginti natus exercitum privato consilio et privata impensa comparavi. At the age of nineteen, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army. Spoken Latin of the same period — the first century AD talia te fallant utinam medacia, copo: tu vedes acuam et bibes ipse merum. Innkeeper, I hope lies like these catch you out: you sell water and drink the wine neat yourself. Later spoken Latin — the third century Tu ubi vadis? Ad domum festino. Where are you off to? I am hurrying home. Late and Christian Latin — the fourth and fifth centuries In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Neo-Latin — from about 1400 to the present Classis V : Pentandria Class 5: five stamens Now the same six with a note on each. Old Latin, before about 100 BC. enos Lases iuvate — Carmen Arvale, the hymn of the Arval Brethren. Barely readable. The pronoun, the divine name and the verb ending are all forms that classical Latin no longer had. It was already archaic when the priests who chanted it wrote it down, and they did not understand it either. Classical Latin, about 100 BC to AD 100. Annos undeviginti natus exercitum privato consilio et privata impensa comparavi. — Res Gestae Divi Augusti 1, read in 5.2. The Latin of the schoolroom and of this course. Every construction in it is in volume 2 of this phase. Spoken Latin of the same period, the first century AD. talia te fallant utinam medacia, copo: tu vedes acuam et bibes ipse merum. — Pompeii, CIL IV 636, read in 5.4. Written within a few years of the Res Gestae, by somebody who spelled what he heard. Four of its words are already on the road to Italian. Later spoken Latin, the third century. Tu ubi vadis? Ad domum festino. — Colloquia Monacensia 7, read in 5.7. The preposition in the second sentence is not needed — classical Latin would use the bare accusative — and its appearance is the case system beginning to give way. Late and Christian Latin, the fourth and fifth centuries. In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram. — Vulgate, Genesis 1:1, read in 5.5. Small vocabulary, short clauses, word order following the Hebrew. This is the Latin that the medieval west learned from, and it is why medieval Latin is easier than classical. Neo-Latin, from about 1400 to the present. Classis V : Pentandria — Linnaeus, Species Plantarum, 1753, read in 5.8. Written by a Swede for an international readership, sixteen hundred years after the last native speaker. Still in use: every species named this year gets a Latin name. The point of putting them together is the gap between the second and the third. Those two lines were written within a lifetime of each other, a few hundred miles apart, and they look like different languages. One is the language of the schools and the other is the language of the street, and it was the street one that survived — as Italian. Terms Ten terms that appear in any discussion of the history of Latin. Several of them are labels invented long after the thing they name, and the notes say which. Term Meaning Notes lingua Latina la the Latin language Note Named from Latium, the plain south-east of Rome. It was one of several languages of central Italy and it won because Rome did. sermo urbanus la the speech of the city Note What educated Romans spoke. It is close to, but not the same as, the written classical language. sermo vulgaris la common speech Note Note: vulgar in the old sense of of the crowd , with no suggestion of coarseness. The ancestor of the Romance languages. Latinitas aurea la the golden age Note A label invented by later scholars for the Latin of Cicero, Caesar, Virgil and Horace. It is a judgement of taste presented as a period. Latinitas argentea la the silver age Note The next generation — Seneca, Tacitus, Juvenal — and the label is a demotion. Modern scholarship uses both terms with visible discomfort. Vulgata la the common version Note Jerome's Bible, from the same root as vulgaris : the version in general circulation. Latinitas media la medieval Latin Note A thousand years of it, written by people who learned it from books. Spelling, vocabulary and syntax all drift, and it is far easier for a beginner than the classical language. Latinitas nova la Neo-Latin Note From the Renaissance onwards: Erasmus, Newton, Linnaeus, Gauss. More Latin was written in this period than in antiquity. linguae Romanicae la the Romance languages Note The descendants of the spoken language, not of the written one. There are about twenty of them and they are what Latin actually became. lingua franca la a bridge language Note What Latin was in Europe until the eighteenth century: nobody's mother tongue and ev