Transcription
Hello and welcome to Fire of Learning. It is remarkable to look at how much of an influence the Roman Empire had in shaping European society and beyond. One of Rome's greatest legacies is its language, Latin.
Even after the western Latin speaking half of the Roman Empire fell in 476 AD, Latin continued on for over a millennium as the language of the Roman Catholic Church, science, philosophy and medicine and related fields, the language of law and more. Apart from its own direct use, it is also importantly the parent language of a number of European languages spoken today. The most prominent of these are Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Romanian with no small influence in our own English language as well.
In this video, we are going to take a look into the history, structure, and condition of the Latin language. Why is it a dead language? How did it influence all these other languages? How do you actually pronounce the words? Well, let's get to it.
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The origins of the Latin language are rather mysterious. It no doubt predates the founding of the city of Rome itself, which according to legend occurred in April of 753 BC. Latin came to Italy with an Indo-Uropean people called the Latins who settled in Italy around the year 1 BC. However, this Latin is separated from the Latin of Julius Caesar's day by around 1,000 years and was no doubt quite different. We can get a glimpse of that by the first Latin writing scholars have found dated to the 7th century BC shown here. It looks like Greek and it kind of is. Literally, the alphabet we use in English and most European languages is for very good reason called the Roman or Latin alphabet because it came to us through Rome. However, that alphabet came from an ancient Greek alphabet which was later mimicked by the peoples of Italy such as the Atruscans, the long-forgotten middleman between Greece and Rome. From the Atruscans, the Romans learned how to write their Latin down in a way that looked like this. And that alphabet over time morphed into our own one because of Rome. So if the Roman alphabet is the alphabet of your native language, you can thank them.
Believe it or not, these alien markings are the direct ancestors of that alphabet with words we use everyday carved within. Look at this here from the Blackstone dating to around 600 BC, for example. It's written right to left like ancient Atruskin was. It hadn't changed to left to right yet. But upon examination, we can see that this word is related to the word rex, which meant king in Latin, which gives us words like regal and regulate and related words in other related languages. Fascinating. However, we unfortunately have limited information on this ancient writing. Most Roman writing still in existence comes from classical Latin.
What we call classical Latin slowly evolved from ancient Latin over centuries in the natural evolution that languages tended to follow and seems to have been standardized around the year 100 BC. The 1st century BC was the age of Marius, Cicero, Virgil, Julius, and Augustus Caesar, and many other Roman figures who wielded the Latin language like a weapon, and whose quotes you may be familiar with. Here's a quote you've probably heard. It's Julius Caesar, of course. It means "I came, I saw, I conquered." Here's an important question, though. How do you pronounce that phrase? We are tempted to say "veni vidi vici." That's usually how we hear it anyway. But in fact, Julius Caesar said, "Weni-ed."
This brings us to some confusion that is pretty common when talking about Latin that we should probably address before we go deeper. Here are the main points to pronouncing Latin like the Romans did. C is always hard, like a K sound, never an S or ch sound. Caesar is actually Kaiser. Again, in ecclesiastical Latin, this is different. If you've heard the Lord's Prayer in Latin, they'll typically say "pater noster qui es in caelis." The Romans would have pronounced caelis as kylis. The word caelum is the word for sky or heaven. We'll get to why the word changes in a second. G is always hard as well, like a G sound, never like a J. H was pronounced softly like "Marriatum." Though it is suggested that the elite paid more attention to this, while the lower classes tended to ignore the H. Mar adakum, the Adriatic Sea. J is always like a Y sound. The Romans didn't have J, though they generally had an I and a vowel in place of it. Take for example, "Ulus Julius Caesar." "Yaka ala yakta est." R is trilled. The Romans called this the literacina, the dog letter, because it sounds like a snarling dog. Roma, Rome, Rulus, Romulus. V, before a vowel, like you probably noticed, is pronounced like a W. However, V also served the purpose of a U sound around consonants. The Romans didn't differentiate between the two. That's why there are V's in place of U's on some monuments and things written in Latin. Veras, the word for truth, was u plural. The letters Y and Z were incorporated into Latin to use for Greek words which the Romans picked up. Perhaps the only civilization that the Romans respected as much as themselves was the ancient Greeks. And over time, many Greek words made their way into Latin. To this day, actually, the letter Y in French and some other romance languages, as I understand it, is called the Greek eye.
Regarding vowels, there are short and long ones. Sometimes the long ones are marked with a kind of accent, a macaron, or sometimes the vowel is doubled or sometimes marked with a capital letter. And sometimes, often not marked at all, as the macarons weren't used until after Rome's fall. This can be important in some circumstances, though, like in the word liber, which means book, and liber, which means free. Diphthongs: ae is pronounced i, like eyeball. The battle of canae. Kaiser. Keep in mind, Kaiser in Latin and Kaiser in German sound very similar, not by coincidence. Au is pronounced like house. Algustous, Augustus. Aurum, gold. Because of these rules and these differences, you can hear the name Cicero, Kikaro, in classical Latin and Cicero in our own English pronunciation. None of these pronunciations are necessarily incorrect, but I do believe it's important to be aware of the differences and the fact that this guy's name in his time was Kikaro. We'll come back to Kikaro in a moment.
Let's get back to the history of Latin. Latin continued its long reign over much of the western known world as the dominant language of the Roman Empire. Though, keep in mind, in the eastern half, Greek was very commonly spoken and was in effect a second language of the Roman Empire. As the Roman Empire expanded, many different dialects emerged. These forms, which differed from the educated aristocratic classical Latin spoken in Rome, are called vulgar Latin, meaning common or vernacular Latin, not ugly Latin, although the aristocracy may have considered it as such. In foreign parts of the empire like Gaul, Hispania, and Britain, this vulgar Latin often contained elements from the local native languages like Galish and Gaul, modern France.
In the centuries following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD, when European societies became more insular and detached, these dialects were essentially left on their own to develop further. And in these more insular and detached societies, through centuries of mistakes, slangs, interactions with other languages, and intentional changes, in the early Middle Ages, around the 8th century, we see, of course, the beginning of, as I said, not only French, Italian, Spanish, etc., developed from Latin, but also a lot of other languages, regional languages in Spain, France, Italy, etc. Maybe I should say, etcetera. Some of which still exist today. Catalan in Catalonia, Spain. Sardinian in Sardinia, Italy. Sardinian, by the way, is actually the closest to Latin of these languages. And the Walloon language in France and Belgium. In case you were wondering, there were also some Latin-based languages that developed in North Africa, but they were wiped out by future conquerors, and we don't know much about them.
The imprint of Latin is all over the aforementioned languages. They share quite a bit of grammar, structure, lists of vocabulary words with not only Latin, but also with each other. And indeed, learning one romance language would make learning another much easier because they are so related. But for now, let's look at some examples to highlight this point. Firstly, the numbers in Latin: unus, duo, tres, quattuor, quinque, sex, septem, octo, novem, decem. Compare those to the equivalents of these romance languages listed here. And again, French is the only language I can confidently compare to Latin myself. Everything else I Googled. Body parts: brain, cerebrum. Heart, cor. Hand, manus. Foot, pes. Eye, oculus. Weather: rainy, pluviosus. Cloud, nubes. Sun, sol. Wind, ventus. Snow, nix. Foods: water, aqua. Milk, lac. Bread, panis. Salt, sal. Wine, vinum. We can really do this all day.
It's because of these similarities that some linguists argue that Latin isn't a dead language. Many would say that old English, for example, isn't a dead language exactly. It's just an outdated form of what evolved to be current English. Some would say the same thing about Latin. French, Spanish, Portuguese, all just evolved forms of Latin. Speaking of speaking old English, just looking at it here, you can ask, why is it so different from our current English? Well, there are a number of reasons why, but one big one is it's missing a lot of Latin. People would speak their own languages, but reading and writing was often done in Latin, unless you're Dante. From this high status and use in such fields, we have a lot of words which come directly from Latin. Quite a few other European languages, less related to Latin, were also affected in this sense, like German, Russian, Finnish, and Hungarian. It's because of this that Latin words in our language tend to sound very big and professional. Ursa major, big bear. Nebula, fog. Corpus callosum, tough body.
Much of the Latin in English, however, comes from an indirect source, Norman French. Prior to the year 1066, English was a very Germanic language. Roman British Latin did not sit well with the later invaders from Germany, the Anglo-Saxons, and largely disappeared. English in the early Middle Ages was more related to Saxon, German, and the Norse languages thanks to the Vikings. There was some Latin because of the aforementioned reasons and because the ancient Germans had picked up some from the Romans, but the big crossover came with the Normans, a mixed French and Norse people who invaded England in the year 1066. They spoke a dialect of early French, and from there we get lists of words and restructuring of the grammar and such things which come indirectly from Latin. Is English a romance language? Then you can make a case for it, I suppose, but it's really more like a close cousin that hangs out more with German and Dutch.
There are some parts of Latin, however, which are a little more unusual and were probably forgotten for that reason. One of the most striking features for beginner learners is there isn't a word for the or a. And word order isn't really important. Some languages like Russian, I believe, can be a little like this, but Latin is an unusually highly inflected language. Inflection basically means words are modified to display their meaning in a sentence. We have this a little bit in English, like in the form of verb conjugation. I see. You see. He sees. Adding the s at the end there to show the third person is inflection. But Latin goes much farther. Let's take a simple sentence to display this. Puella puum videt. The girl sees the boy. Puella means girl. Videt means sees, from the infinitive. And puum means boy. We can flip this around though, however we want. Videt puum puella. We read this as "sees the boy the girl," but it's grammatically correct in Latin and still means "the girl sees the boy." Now, if we want to change the meaning and say "the boy sees the girl," it would be puella videt puum. As you can see, the endings have changed on the nouns. And it is because nouns like this change depending on their position in the sentence that word order isn't very important. Meaning is derived from the word endings, not the word order. Obviously, that's kind of a foreign concept to a language like English where word order is very important. I suppose I should mention though that in normal circumstances, the Romans did have a preference of subject, object, verb, word order, but again, not necessary. It's fun to learn about, but when you had to memorize all the endings in high school, I have to admit it got old sometimes trying to put sentences together.
This is all pretty cool for a dead language. Is Latin really a dead language? What is a dead language? Well, there's a big difference between a dead language and an extinct language. An extinct language is a language like Etruscan. Etruscan was virtually lost for centuries and is only really familiar today to scholars. No one speaks it or uses it to communicate, and it doesn't really have any linguistic descendants. A dead language, however, is simply a language which has no native speakers and isn't used in daily life. A common misconception is that a dead language is one that you can't speak anymore and therefore Latin is only written. That's not true. People could verbally communicate with Latin if they wanted to. The Pope, for example, does. Another misconception is that Latin is frozen in time and not changing. And this is why it's a dead language. This is also not true. Latin is and has kept up with the times. Take the words "ordinatum," which means computer, or "telefonum," cell phone. Latin is all over the place indirectly and directly. It is still used by the Catholic Church, still used in science, still used by scholars, still used in law. It's a language still in use, but it's not a language in regular daily use like English or Russian or Japanese. It's kept alive because it's Latin and it's important to the cultures whose ancestors once used it. So, yes, it is a dead language, but in more ways than one, it lives on.
I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, I'd invite you to come check out some other cool content we have here on Fire of Learning, like the history of Rome video that this video is tied to. Coming up in the future, we have the history of Rome, part two. It will be titled "The Fall of the Roman Empire," and then at a future date, "The History of Rome, Part 3," because 476 wasn't the end of the Roman Empire. I invite you to subscribe to not miss out on future videos like this as well. To help with the costs of production, Fire of Learning does take donations on Patreon, the link to which you can find in the description. You can support the channel with as little as a $1 contribution. Special thanks once again to our Patreon supporters listed here. We are also on Instagram and Facebook, so come check us out there, too. Gracias tibi ago for watching.