By Shneur Agronin, Staff Writer
Have you ever wondered where Spanish came from? What about French? Portuguese? You don’t need to be a history or linguistics major (if YU offered one) to know that those languages descend from Latin, the primary language of the Roman Empire. But Latin is a language, of course, and not a living creature capable of procreation. So, let’s ask the question more precisely: How did Latin evolve into the romance languages spoken today by about a seventh of humanity? In this article, you’ll see how Latin, while itself a dead language, lives on vicariously through several captivatingly beautiful tongues spoken the world over.
If you’re anything unlike me, you don’t spend your free time slogging through Wikipedia pages detailing Latin grammar. Let me tell you something – it’s hard. Really, really hard. If you read my article from several months ago, you’d know that I take a particular interest in languages which feature exceptionally complex grammars. I described how Russian nouns inflect for six cases and that Russian adjectives can take up to eighteen (!) forms apiece. Well, Latin scoffs at Russian. In Latin, verbs can decline (a pretentious term used by grammarians which means “change”) into one hundred different forms… each! While the three genders a Russian noun can take (masculine, feminine, or neuter) one can usually discern by looking at the noun’s final letter, Latin forces her poor learners (almost exclusively Catholic priests, nowadays) to memorize the gender of every single noun with minimal exceptions. Latin word order also sounds pretty funky to us as it very rarely follows the subject-verb-object (SVO) order we’re used to in English. So, while we might say “We made him our king,” a Roman would say, “Regem [eum] fecimus [nostrum],” or “A king [him] made-us [we].”
But, if Latin is so complicated, why are the three languages I mentioned above – Spanish, French, and Portuguese – some of the easiest for English speakers to learn? How did the Latin aqua (water), which could also become aquae, aquarum, aquis, or aquas depending on the situation, morph into the Spanish and Portuguese agua and the French eau which lack (as all other nouns in those languages do) any other forms? Three factors played the most critical roles in shaping the romance languages as we know them today: time, location, and laziness.
To examine these factors in action, let’s take a trip to Rome circa 100 CE. At this point in time, the average Roman spoke a language fairly similar to that of classical Latin literature studied by some tortured high school students today. Parenthetically, the Latin letter v was pronounced like an English letter “w” and the letter c was always pronounced like a “k.” So, the proclamation of victory veni, vidi, vici (“I came, I saw, I conquered”) coined by Julius Caesar was actually pronounced, “weni, widi, wiki.” The spoken language retained a highly complex grammar and speakers of modern romance languages might be able to pick out a familiar word here and there. Classical Latin is the Latin which comes to mind when you think of Latin. It’s complicated, sounds fancy, and is a language every philosophy major and know-it-all must familiarize themselves with.
Let’s now fast forward to 500 CE. Here’s where things get interesting. At this point, the average Roman citizen spoke a version of Latin known to us today as Vulgar Latin. The complicated case inflections for nouns are melting away as Roman tongues grow less willing to twist themselves around the often dense consonant clusters those inflections create in words. Let’s see an example of a sentence in Classical Latin: “Marcus mihi librum patris dat,” meaning “Marc gave me his dad’s book.” Notice the um at the end of librum, the is at the end of patris, and the t at the end of dat. Those endings all indicate grammatical cases (or tense, in the last example). Eventually, Romans decided (unconsciously and over centuries) to omit them in everyday speech. By 500 CE, this sentence would sound like, “Marco mi da libru de patre.” Where did all those final consonants go? At this point, into the trash bin of history. Never again beyond this point will Latin (quickly splintering off into the individual languages we know today) adopt case endings for nouns (save for in Romanian, sometimes, but this is a result of Slavic influence, not its Latin origins).
With the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE, citizens of the former Roman provinces of Gallia (now France), Hispania (now Spain and Portugal), and Italia (now Italy) now lacked a common nationality. So, in addition to favoring easier pronunciations, the language spoken by former Roman citizens begins to develop into more diverse and distinguished regional dialects. However, even by 1000 CE, descendants of Romans from Hispania (now Spaniards and Portuguese) could still understand each other much as those who speak Spanish and Portuguese today enjoy much mutual intelligibility. Nevertheless, Latin has ceased to exist, and what we know today as Old Spanish dominates much of the Iberian peninsula and is influenced greatly by Arabic spoken by her moorish conquerors. The Old French language is affected greatly by the Germanic tribes who, a half-millenium previously, brought down the Western Roman Empire. Ever wonder why French has a thick, throaty r sound while Spanish and Portuguese (for the most part) feature a rolled r? You can thank the Germans for that.
Over the next millennium till today, the descendants of Latin grow increasingly dissimilar from one another and, overall, much simpler. Speakers of French did away with pronouncing almost every single word’s final consonant(s) in favor of speaking more quickly and just about every other romance language lost any semblance of Latin grammatical cases which once made their linguistic ancestor so complex. While Latin lacked any articles (“the” and “a” in English), speakers of Spanish, Portuguese, and French began using gendered pronouns as articles. So, Marcus mihi librum patris dat became Marco mi da libru de patre which then morphed into: Marco mi dio el libro de su padre (Spanish), Marco me deu o livro do seu pai (Portuguese), and Marco m’a donné le livre de son pere (French). Similar? Yes. Related? Unquestionably. Mutually intelligible? No longer.
The journey of Latin throughout the millennia is a fascinating one (at least for nerds like me). Especially if you speak a romance language, learning the history of your language’s ancestor might solve some mysteries, such as why the Spanish mano is feminine despite ending in o (answer: because the Latin manus was!). Regardless of which language you speak, it’s pretty cool to see the fate of the Latin language align with that of the empire which spoke it: dead and defunct, but still managing to bore high school students to tears.