# The status of Latin



## Muz1234

I know Latin is a dead language, but I'm very curious how the Romans communicate during their time. Are dead language really worth to learn?


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## Circunflejo

Muz1234 said:


> I know Latin is a dead language


Well, it's debatable. It's still the official language of the Vatican City and of the Catholic church even though mass is usually celebrated in the vernacular language(s) of each territory.


Muz1234 said:


> Are dead language really worth to learn?


Dead languages that originated living languages, yes, sure. Dead languages that didn't originate any living language, just if you have a specific interest in the dead language.


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## elroy

Circunflejo said:


> Well, it's debatable.


As far as I know, it's not debatable at all.  Latin is pretty much the textbook example of a dead language.


Muz1234 said:


> I'm very curious how the Romans communicate during their time.


I'm not sure what this has to do with Latin's being a dead language.  It's a dead language now, but it hasn't always been dead.  Can you clarify your question?


Muz1234 said:


> Are dead language really worth to learn?


There is no single answer to this question.  Whether it's about a dead language or a living language, each individual person needs to decide for him or herself whether the language is worth learning, and that depends on what benefits learning the language could bring to them in particular.


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## Penyafort

According to several definitions, Latin is not an _*extinct language* _but it is a clear example of a _*dead language*_, because even if the language continues to exist and be used by a number of people (and I know some who do it fluently), it is no longer the native language of a community. This is indeed an interesting distinction because the two words are often seen as interchangeable by many people.

Obviously, for those who consider the extant Romance languages as nothing but evolved regularized colloquial Latin, the definition would not apply. 

As Elroy says, whether it's worth learning it or not depends pretty much on each individual. To me, it definitely is, as I couldn't conceive my interest in all the Romance sisters without being properly introduced to their mother too. Latin can be to many Europeans at certain points what Sanskrit means to Southern Asians, or Classical Arabic to Muslims, or traditional Chinese characters to modern Chinese. It's been the language of culture of an important part of the world for almost two millennia, and the legacy of it is clear for everyone who knows about it. Without it, perhaps half of this very post I've just written should be replaced by other words.


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## Perseas

Penyafort said:


> According to several definitions, Latin is not an _*extinct language* _but it is a clear example of a _*dead language*_, because even if the language continues to exist and be used by a number of people (and I know some who do it fluently), it is no longer the native language of a community.


Does it mean that if Latin was not the language of the Vatican City or the Catholic Church, would it be extinct?


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## Olaszinhok

I can only say that in Italy in the most prestigious Secondary School (Liceo Classico) both Latin and Ancient Greek are compulsary subjects and the students have to  study them for five years.


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## Perseas

Olaszinhok said:


> I can only say that in Italy in the most prestigious Secondary School (Liceo Classico) both Latin and Ancient Greek are compulsary subjects and the students have to  study them for five years.


Thanks. I'm just trying to understand some differences between a dead language and an extinct language.


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## Olaszinhok

Penyafort said:


> Latin can be to many Europeans at certain points what Sanskrit means to Southern Asians, or Classical Arabic to Muslims, or traditional Chinese characters to modern Chinese


You forgot to mention Ancient Greek and its huge impact on ancient art, literature and philosophy. Greece is the cradle of western civilization, after all.


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## apmoy70

Circunflejo said:


> Well, it's debatable. It's still the official language of the Vatican City and of the Catholic church even though mass is usually celebrated in the vernacular language(s) of each territory.


If we take that as a given, then neither Koine Greek is dead 'cause it's the liturgical language of the Greek speaking Orthodox Churches (Greece, Cyprus, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Constantinople/Istanbul, S. Albania); nor Ge'ez (the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Tewahedo Church), nor Coptic (the liturgical language of the Egyptian Coptic Church), nor Syriac (the liturgical language of the Nestorian Church of the East)


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## Penyafort

Perseas said:


> Does it mean that if Latin was not the language of the Vatican City or the Catholic Church, would it be extinct?


No. The language is not only associated to the Catholic Church. In fact, among those I know who speak it fluently, some use the Ecclesiastical pronunciation but some use the Classical one.


Olaszinhok said:


> You forgot to mention Ancient Greek and its huge impact on ancient art, literature and philosophy. Greece is the cradle of western civilization, after all.


I was about too, but I know it may be a touchy matter, as unlike we Latins, Greeks tend to see a continuous history in their language between Ancient and Modern, so it's not a _dead language_ for them.


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## Perseas

Penyafort said:


> I was about too, but I know it may be a touchy matter, as unlike we Latins, Greeks tend to see a continuous history in their language between Ancient and Modern, *so it's not a dead language for them*.


I see your point here, but (in my view), if Latin is a dead language, then Ancient Greek is a dead language too.
Also, it's interesting where one sets the limit between the dead language and the modern language.
(E.g. Latin--> M. Romance languages, A. Greek --> M. Greek)


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## Penyafort

Perseas said:


> I see your point here, but (in my view), if Latin is a dead language, then Ancient Greek is a dead language too.
> Also, it's interesting where one sets the limit between the dead language and the modern language.
> (E.g. Latin--> M. Romance languages, A. Greek --> M. Greek)


But would you say it is so for a majority of Greek speakers? (And I say that regardless of whether they understand or not Ancient Greek)

Yes, setting the limits is often conventional. English speakers also consider the Beowulf a masterpiece of Old English literature, regardless of whether Old English is really Old English or inintelligible Anglosaxon.


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## Perseas

Penyafort said:


> But would you say it is so for a majority of Greek speakers?


There are also people who believe this:
"Several studies by Greek and foreign scientists have indicated that the Ancient Greek language, apart from being a living language, is also a therapeutic one, as it is said to posses the ability to cure many disorders, for example dyslexia."
Reprogramming the Brain by Learning Ancient Greek

What should one comment on this?


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## Circunflejo

elroy said:


> As far as I know, it's not debatable at all. Latin is pretty much the textbook example of a dead language.


Not everybody agrees (example: Is Latin a Dead Language? - Ancient Language Institute) and that's why it's debatable.


apmoy70 said:


> If we take that as a given, then neither Koine Greek is dead 'cause it's the liturgical language of the Greek speaking Orthodox Churches (Greece, Cyprus, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Constantinople/Istanbul, S. Albania); nor Ge'ez (the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Tewahedo Church), nor Coptic (the liturgical language of the Egyptian Coptic Church), nor Syriac (the liturgical language of the Nestorian Church of the East)


Well, we could talk about it but note that what I said goes way beyond that. It's the official language of a state and new literature is writen in Latin virtually daily (starting with the official bulletin of the state in which is the official language). You can find Latin in an ATM of that state...


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## elroy

I’m sure you’ll find at least someone who disagrees with pretty much anything.  That doesn’t make it debatable.  The vast majority of both scholars and laypeople absolutely agree that it is a dead language.  Its status as the official language of the Vatican City and the Catholic Church doesn’t say anything about whether it’s dead or alive.  Anyone can declare a dead language their official language if they want to.  It’s a dead language because it’s no one’s native language and is thus not organically developing as living languages do.


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## Circunflejo

elroy said:


> The vast majority of both scholars and laypeople absolutely agree that it is a dead language.


That means there's a minority that doesn't agree.


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## elroy

That’s not enough to call it “debatable.”


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## Circunflejo

elroy said:


> That’s not enough to call it “debatable.”


Wherever there's no agreement, there's room for debate.


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## elroy

"debatable" doesn't mean there's any possible room for debate.  If 99.99% of people agree about something, we wouldn't call it "debatable."  As I said, I'm sure you can find at least one person that disagrees with anything; by that logic, everything is debatable and the term has no meaning.


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## Sobakus

With Latin, one should always be very sensitive to choice of words. There have been many Latins and not all of them are apt to be described as dead to the same extent. What Augustan-age Romans would have recognised as their Latin (say, from Livius Andronicus to the end of the 2nd century AD) is the language usually called "Latin" and hence "dead" by linguists, but paradoxically it never suffered language death, and there currently exist individuals that participate in communities whose Latin speech would have most likely been recognised by these same Romans as the same Latin, pronunciation included (here I'm refraining from talking about entire communities).

Latin began "dying" at the time when the speech of upper-class urban Romans began crystallising as a literary standard (3d century BC), and as a result the tension between that standard and the spoken varieties had been growing throughout the Late Latin period until the link finally snapped* at different times in different places, at the turn of the 9th century in Northern France and up to two centuries later in southern Italy, after a period of an almost complete breakdown of literary production ("the Dark Ages").** This gave rise to literary Romance languages on the one hand and to Medieval Latin on the other; Latin isn't extinct because it lives on in the former of the two, and some of those languages are still called "Latin" by their speakers.

* You have to literally imagine any language with a literary standard as being in a state of tension: usually but not always it's the popular language that's trying to pull away. If the distance becomes too great, what used to be difference in register becomes difference in language (diglossia), sometimes very quickly and violently, as in the case of Old French. It's still not clear to historical linguists exactly how this happens and under what conditions, even in such a crazy long and well-researched case as Latin-Romance.
** Perhaps the breakdown itself is best treated as the breaking point, and not the emergence of written Romance vernaculars.


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## dojibear

Muz1234 said:


> I'm very curious how the Romans communicate during their time.


Back in Roman times, "Latin" was the fancy language of books, scholars, teachers and speech-givers.
Most Romans did not speak "Latin" at all. Instead they spoke a different language we now call "vulgar Latin",
which was closer to modern Italian than it was to ancient Latin.

But old Latin and old Greek were the language of European scholars from the year 0 to the year 1900 or later.

Those were the international languages of Science and Literature, for all those centuries. Even as recently as
1850, any highly-educated Englishman or American had studied both Greek and Latin. Even in high school in
1960, I studied Latin for two years. I had to wait until college to study ancient Greek.


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## Sobakus

dojibear said:


> Back in Roman times, "Latin" was the fancy language of books, scholars, teachers and speech-givers.
> Most Romans did not speak "Latin" at all. Instead they spoke a different language we now call "vulgar Latin",
> which was closer to modern Italian than it was to ancient Latin.


Afraid to say that this view was considered fishy even at the end of the 19th century; today it's been utterly discredited. This view has been inherited from the Renaissance, when this question was hotly disputed, and reflects a pre-scientific view of language with a heavy admixture of Marxist ideology. The unfortunate choice of the term "Vulgar Latin" by Hugo Schuchardt for his groundbreaking study promoted it to a popular myth, propagated among other things by Wikipedia. I have a whole selection of quotations lambasting this term (for which literally dozens of different definitions exist, because it's essentially undefinable) but this one by Kruschwitz, Halla-Aho (2007) seems to me to convey the gist particuarly well:


> We are neither the first nor the last scholars to criticise the term vulgar Latin, and one might ask what Väänänen's study and the other numerous studies  addressing the problem of vulgar Latin are about if there is no such thing as vulgar Latin – as we argue here – and if the average graffito-writer was not the vulgar and ignorant semiliterate person he was once thought to be? Instead of attempting to define what vulgar Latin is, we approach the problem by asking exactly what the study on vulgar Latin is concerned with. For it appears that vulgar Latin is a term used to describe scattered bits of what more accurately should be called "variation and change in Latin". — We claim that vulgar Latin, as defined above, is used as an noun standing for "variation and change in Latin". This is why there is no meaningful definition of the term; after all, we do not try to capture the whole picture of variation and change in modern languages by calling it vulgar German, English, or Finnish. — However, within one language the different forms, both written and spoken, still form a continuum, and there is no justification in positing in Latin a situation with two macro-registers, as it were, 'literary Latin' and 'vulgar Latin'. The whole scope of variation was, even in Latin, much more complex than this.


Classical Latin was a language like any modern one.


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## Red Arrow

Muz1234 said:


> Are dead language really worth to learn?


At the risk of sounding harsh, I think it is worth mentioning the actual reason why many people learn Latin and Ancient Greek: out of prestige and/or because their parents want them to.


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## apmoy70

Penyafort said:


> I was about too, but I know it may be a touchy matter, as unlike we Latins, Greeks tend to see a continuous history in their language between Ancient and Modern, so it's not a _dead language_ for them.


Well, leaving aside nationalisms, the history of Greek is a bit peculiar in that as late as the 14th c. CE most contemporary Greek writers combined features of Classical Greek and higher registers of the vernacular of their time, into an elaborated stylistic and rhetorical language that resembled the Attic language than of that of their era. Every writer, from the monk who compiled collections of synaxaria (saint's lives) in the 6th century, to the prose writer of 11th century, used a more learned form of Greek because it was a diachronic symbol of cultural prestige. Fast forward to the 18th century, and Nicodemus the Hagiorite, a priestmonk and scholar, a prominent theologian (and saint in the Orthodox Church), translates the Christian Gospels into...Homeric Greek! What is the need for translating Christian texts into a long gone (2 and a half millenia) language?
Α sample of his translation in _dactylic hexameter_:

Εἰρήνη χαρίεσσ᾿ ἐπ᾿ ἀπείρονα δῆμον ἐσεῖται. [Let us attend, Peace be with all]
Ἐκ δ᾿ ἀρ᾿ Ἰωάνοιο, τόδ᾿ ἔστι βροντογόνοιο. [The reading is from the Holy Gospel according to John]
(John 20:19-15)
Ἀλλ᾿ ἄγετ᾿ ἀτρεμέσι χρησμοὺς λεύσωμεν ὀπωπαῖς.
Εὖτε δὴ ἠέλιος φαέθων ἐπὶ ἕσπερον ἦλθε.
Καὶ σκιόωντο ἀγυιαί, ἐπὶ χθονὶ πολυβοτείρη,

Ἤματι ἐν πρώτῳ, ὅτε τύμβου ἆλτο Σαωτήρ,
Κληϊσταὶ δὲ ἔσαν θυρίδες πυκινῶς ἀραρυῖαι,
Βλῆντο δὲ πάντες ὀχῆες ἐϋσταθέος μεγάροιο

Ἔνθα μαθηταί, ὁμοῦ τε ἀολλέες ἠγερέθοντο,
Μυρόμενοι θανάτῳ ἐπ᾿ ἀεικέϊ Χριστοῦ Ἄνακτος,
Καὶ χόλον ἀφραίνοντα Ἰουδαίων τρομέοντες,
Ἤλυθε δὴ τότε Χριστὸς Ἄναξ θεοειδέϊ μορφῇ
Ἔστη δ᾿ ἐν μεσσάτῳ ἀναφανδόν, καὶ φάτο μῦθον.
Εἰρήνη ὑμῖν φίλη, ἡσυχίη τ᾿ ἐρατεινή.
Ὡς εἰπών, ἐπέδειξεν ἐὴν πλευρὴν ἠδὲ χεῖρας·
Γήθησαν δὲ μαθηταί, ἐπὶ ἴδον Εὐρυμέδοντα.
Τοὺς δ᾿ αὖτις προσέειπεν Ἰησοῦς οὐρανοφοίτης·
Εἰρήνη ὑμῖν φίλη, ἡσυχίη τ᾿ ἐρατεινή·
Ὡς ἐμὲ πέμψε Πατήρ, ὃς ὑπέρτατα δώματα ναίει,
Ὧδ᾿ ἐγὼ ὑμέας εἰς χθόνα πέμπω εὐρυόδειαν.
Ὡς ἄρα φωνήσας, μύσταις ἔμπνευσ᾿ ἀγορεύων·
Πνεῦμα δέχνυσθ᾿ ἅγιον φαεσίμβροτον, ὑψιθόωκον·

Ὧν μὲν ἀτασθαλίας θνητῶν ἀφέητ᾿ ἐπὶ γαῖαν,
Τοῖσιν ἦ που ἀφίενται ἐπ᾿ οὐρανὸν ἀστερόεντα,
Ὧν δ᾿ ἀρ᾿ ἐπεσβολίας ὑπερφιάλων κρατέητε,
Τοῖσιν ἀλυκτοπέδης κεῖναι σθεναρῶς κρατέονται.
Θωμᾶς δ᾿ ᾧ ἐπίκλησις ἅπασι Δίδυμος ἀκούειν,
Οὐχ ἅμα τοῖς ἄλλοις μύσταις πρίν ὁμώροφος ἔσκε,
Ἰησοῦς ὅτ᾿ ἔβη εἴσω μελάθροιο ἑταίρων.
Ἴαχον οὖν ἄλλοι τούτῳ ἐρίηρες ἑταῖροι·
Εἴδομεν ὀφθαλμοῖσιν Ἰησοῦν Παγκρατέοντα.
Τούς δ᾿ ἀπαμειβόμενος Θωμᾶς προσέφησεν ἀτειρής·
Ἴχνια ἢν μὴ ἴδω μετὰ χείρεσιν ἡλοτορήτῃς,
Δάκτυλον ἐμβάλω τε ἐκείνου ἔνδοθι χειρός,
Χεῖρά τ᾿ ἐμὴν εἴσω πλευρῆς οἱ ῥεῖα βαλοίμην,
Οὔποτε ὑμετέροισι λόγοις κεφαλῇ κατανεύσω.

Up until the early 20th c. every writer strove for a classical style and considered themselves as contributors in a long chain of continuous tradition spanning from Homer to Papadiamantis (Alexandros Papadiamantis 1851-1911, the Greek Dostoyevski, who wrote short novels considered masterpieces in the artificial language of Katharevousa).
As one of my professors at Uni said regarding the language question in Greece, "every prose writer, poet, chronicler, historian until 1976, always looked back and compared his language with the learned literature of 1st, 6th, 10th, 14th centuries". 


Perseas said:


> There are also people who believe this:
> "Several studies by Greek and foreign scientists have indicated that the Ancient Greek language, apart from being a living language, is also a therapeutic one, as it is said to posses the ability to cure many disorders, for example dyslexia."
> Reprogramming the Brain by Learning Ancient Greek
> 
> What should one comment on this?


There's also the nutcases who think that the abolition of final -ν from nouns, is a crime against humanity because its frequency stimulates brain cells  (true story, I'm not making it up!)


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## Hulalessar

"Vulgar Latin" is a rather unfortunate phrase (at least in English) because of the everyday meaning of "vulgar". It would be better known as "Spoken Latin", but "Vulgar Latin" is very much with us and if you start to call it something else you only sow confusion.

Despite the situation being complicated, I think it is still possible to talk sensibly about Vulgar Latin and (literary) Latin. When Latin was first written it would have represented the then current way of speaking. Over time there would have been increasing diglossia. Written Latin became standardised in the Late Republic. Since then, all literary Latin, whether called Classical Latin, Late Latin, Medieval Latin or Renaissance Latin, is essentially the same thing. Latinity may have dropped off at various times, but there were also periods when there were revivals and writers sought to emulate the best writers of the Empire.

No one is sure what Vulgar Latin was like at any time, but is is reasonable to assume that, from at least the time of the Late Republic, it moved further and further away from literary Latin. A significant event in the history of Romance languages is the Edict of Tours in 813. It required priests to deliver their sermons in the _rustica romana lingua_. So, we know that by 813 sermons in Latin were not generally understood by the uneducated. The everyday language, whilst its speakers may have thought of it as, or called it, Latin, was not anything which today we would label Latin.

Unlike Proto-Romance, which is a hypothesis spoken by no one, Vulgar Latin actually existed - it is just that we have little idea of what is was like. Just because it existed and changed over a long period does not mean it cannot have a name.


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## Sobakus

@Hulalessar Sorry if I come across as overly argumentative, but it seems like you aren't recognising what I write in my previous message. Sociolinguistic variation in Latin obviously existed, and this is the only sense in which Vulgar Latin uncontroversially existed. But it doesn't look to me that's the sense you intend. One study identified over a dozen senses for the term, and "Spoken Latin" isn't a sufficient definition either. Depending on when and by whom you believe it was spoken, and its relation to its apparent antipode, "Written Latin", gives you a host of alternative definitions. Importantly, it's been long recognised as an error to equate the "spoken <=> written" dichotomy with the "literary <=> non-literary" or with "standard <=> non-standard", and this error is endemic to many of the definitions assigned to that term; this conflation seems to me to underlie your position as well.

The fact is that the term is utterly corrupt. It exists in abstract from theory, it has its own life, and definitions are shoehorned to fit that term post-factum, in part to explain its usage. It originates in a pre-scientific understanding of language, in an age when sociolinguistics was unheard of. Nobody calls variation in English "Vulgar English", and if someone did, it would stand out as hair-raisingly anachronistic and unjustifiable. This is no different with Latin - corrupt terminology should be corrected, especially when it serves as a Trojan horse for outdated and discredited theory, impeding understanding and research.

Here's another extended quotation, this time from A. Varvaro (2013):


> In accordance with a tradition that goes back to at least the humanist period, it has long been the norm to consider Latin as referring solely to the language of writers, both great and minor, of Roman literature, a practice that goes hand in hand with that of equating Latin with the established models of the literary language as instilled by grammarians. As has been observed for some time, this naive conception is not supported by the texts themselves. Yet Schuchardt’s (1866–68) insightful study, while perfectly illustrating the early variation present within the language, had the undesirable consequence of popularizing, probably well beyond the author’s own original intentions, the concept of ‘Vulgar Latin’, which, in my opinion, has greatly harmed the development of research in this area ever since. His Vokalismus, like all of his later works on vulgar Latin, is given over entirely to reporting deviations from the classical norm, irrespective of period of attestation (from Plautus to the later authors), region or text type. This assorted mass of evidence has been portrayed in terms of a misleading synchrony, syntopy and symphasy to create a non-existent system, certainly distinct from that of the literary norm but above all viewed as an alternative system existing within a sort of diglossic situation. [...] This portrayal is clearly absurd.


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## francisgranada

It seems that this discussion is _mainly _about the definition of the terms "extinct language" and "dead language". Spontaneously for me both these terms could mean the same, but their "technical" meaning is a question of definition. Possible definitions:

An _extinct language_  could be a language that has stopped evolving, it did not continue to be spoken in no form for some reason, e.g. all the speakers were killed, they adopted an other language, etc ... (examples: Sumerian, Livonian, Gothic, ....)

A _dead language_  could be a variety of a (documented) language spoken in a determined period of its evolution,  no more spoken in this form in a "natural" way, nobody has it for mother tongue, etc. (examples: Old English/Anglosaxon, XI century Castilian, Old Hungarian, etc.).

From this point of view, the _Latin _is not an extinct language as it continues to exist in form of   Romance languages. On the other hand, according to the previous possible definition, the _classical Latin _can be considered a dead language, as it did not survive "naturally" (e.g. it is not the mother tongue of anybody, as far as I know).

The status of a language is not necessarily "definitive" of permanent. A dead language can also be revived  or "reintroduced" (maybe the modern Hebrew could be an example).


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## Quiviscumque

Sobakus said:


> [...] Latin isn't extinct because it lives on in the former of the two, and some of those languages are still called "Latin" by their speakers.


Concerning Spanish, perhaps readers of this thread know that the Spanish dialect spoken by the  expelled (in 1492) Jews is called Ladino.
On the other hand, I usually make a little fun of those present Spanish speaking fellows that say they speak "Español latino":_ Anne latine loquimini_?


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## Penyafort

Quiviscumque said:


> Concerning Spanish, perhaps readers of this thread know that the Spanish dialect spoken by the  expelled (in 1492) Jews is called Ladino.
> On the other hand, I usually make a little fun of those present Spanish speaking fellows that say they speak "Español latino":_ Anne latine loquimini_?



"Roman" and "Latin" can be seen today in the names for Romanian, Romansh, Ladin and Ladino, but many other Romance languages have been named by their speakers "Roman" or "Latin" at some point in the past.

"Español latino" is one of the worst names possible indeed. I guess it has succeeded because people prefer an identity to being accurate. Variedades americanas del castellano doesn't sound cool at all.


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## jimquk

Penyafort said:


> "Roman" and "Latin" can be seen today in the names for Romanian, Romansh, Ladin and Ladino, but many other Romance languages have been named by their speakers "Roman" or "Latin" at some point in the past.
> 
> "Español latino" is one of the worst names possible indeed. I guess it has succeeded because people prefer an identity to being accurate. Variedades americanas del castellano doesn't sound cool at all.


Why not just americano, mexicano, etc?


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## S.V.

francisgranada said:


> this discussion is _mainly _about... "extinct language" and "dead language"


Ah, also mentioned "_Barbaren_" to Muz in #21. The show had some lines in Latin. Accessible, for his curiosity.


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## Perseas

Penyafort said:


> "Roman" and "Latin" can be seen today in the names for Romanian, Romansh, Ladin and Ladino, but many other Romance languages have been named by their speakers "Roman" or "Latin" at some point in the past.


In Greek, "Romioi" is also a name for the Greeks and "Romeika" is the Greek language.
E.g. _Είμαστε Ρωμιοί (We are Romioi, i.e. Greeks) _or_ Μιλάμε ρωμαίικα (We speak romeika, i.e. Greek)._

Ρωμανία (Romania) was an endonym for the Eastern Roman Empire.


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## apmoy70

Perseas said:


> In Greek, "Romioi" is also a name for the Greeks and "Romeika" is the Greek language.
> E.g. _Είμαστε Ρωμιοί (We are Romioi, i.e. Greeks) _or_ Μιλάμε ρωμαίικα (We speak romeika, i.e. Greek)._
> 
> Ρωμανία (Romania) was an endonym for the Eastern Roman Empire.


The speakers of Pontic Greek who still live on the southern Black Sea coast (northern Black Sea Turkish coast) call their language _Romeyka_ (or in Turkish _Rumca_ [ˈɾumd͡ʒa]):


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## Penyafort

jimquk said:


> Why not just americano, mexicano, etc?


Mexicano would only include Mexican varieties.

Americano would imply that there is a common Latin American Spanish variety, something that is linguistically false, even when it is often presented that way for convenience or when trying to compare it to British English and American English.


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## Olaszinhok

apmoy70 said:


> The speakers of Pontic Greek who still live on the southern Black Sea coast (northern Black Sea Turkish coast) call their language _Romeyka_ (or in Turkish _Rumca_ [ˈɾumd͡ʒa]):


Are those old ladies speaking Greek in the video? It does not sound Greek at all to my ears, unlike the interviewer's language.


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## apmoy70

Olaszinhok said:


> Are those old ladies speaking Greek in the video? It does not sound Greek at all to my ears, unlike the interviewer's language.


Yes they are, with a heavy Turkish accent


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## Olaszinhok

apmoy70 said:


> Yes they are, with a heavy Turkish accent


Thank you. It sounds Turkish to me.

Can you understand Griko?  A variety of Greek spoken in some remote villages in southern Italy.


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## apmoy70

Olaszinhok said:


> Thank you. It sounds Turkish to me.
> 
> Can you understand Griko?  A variety of Greek spoken in some remote villages in southern Italy.


I find much more difficult to understand it in comparison to Calabrian Greek. Perhaps Griko has been for a longer period separated from the mother language, Calabrian Greek on the other hand seems to me closer to Byzantine/Modern Greek:
(From 3:55)





But I feel we have hijacked the thread @Olaszinok


----------



## jimquk

Penyafort said:


> Mexicano would only include Mexican varieties.
> 
> Americano would imply that there is a common Latin American Spanish variety, something that is linguistically false, even when it is often presented that way for convenience or when trying to compare it to British English and American English.


Indeed, but still better than calling all New World Spanish varieties Latino.


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## Penyafort

jimquk said:


> Indeed, but still better than calling all New World Spanish varieties Latino.


Indeed. I wonder if children today think that reggaeton was a thing in the Roman Empire, because they were supposed to listen to Latin music.

I've just checked "Latin American Spanish" in Wikipedia. It wisely redirected me to the entry "Spanish language in the Americas".


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## Hulalessar

Sobakus said:


> @Hulalessar Sorry if I come across as overly argumentative etc



The point that I was trying to get across is that we can distinguish between two distinct things: writing which is signs on paper or some other medium and speech which is sounds. That holds true even though writing can be uttered and speech written down and writing and speech may influence each other.

When it comes to Latin considered as writing there is a huge corpus of texts labelled "Latin" stretching back more than two millennia. These texts may vary in literary quality and register and exhibit a few different grammatical forms, but they have an essential unity such that, even though an expert in Latinity may be able to distinguish between something Cicero wrote and something written by someone in the Vatican yesterday, no one has a problem agreeing they are all Latin. Like it or not, this is what the average person today thinks of as Latin and that is because Latin is almost always only encountered in writing.

Now our average person who has encountered Latin is probably happy to accept that the Romance languages do not descend directly from the language written by Cicero. They will perhaps have read a statement to that effect or to the effect that they descend from "everyday Latin", "the Latin spoken by ordinary people" or "the Latin spread across the Roman Empire by Roman soldiers". Whatever they have been told, they will have the idea that there were two kinds of Latin which were related to each other. If we are going to talk about these two distinct things they need to have labels. What are these labels to be? It is all very well saying the position is complex and we should not talk about spoken and written Latin, but if you do how are we going to talk about Latin? Whilst from one point of view there is a nexus between all varieties of Latin, "Latin" is also an abstract term covering all the instances which can be classed as Latin. If we insist too much on the unity of Latin we come close to saying that French and Spanish are Latin which is the same as saying that French and Spanish are the same. The fact is that people use words and phrases in a fluid way with context determining the meaning. Anyone engaged in a social science does of course need to define their terms when addressing fellow social scientists, but they should not insist on the same rigour from non-specialists.

Many people have a broad idea shared with others about what they mean by "Vulgar Latin" which is sufficient to enable them to have a reasonable discussion. If we are to blame anyone for the term it is the Romans themselves who used the phrase "sermo vulgaris".


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## Sobakus

If we define Vulgar Latin as "spoken Latin", then by definition all the Latin that's come down to us is not it. If we don't one can easily talk of spoken Classical Latin and written Vulgar Latin, and proceed to identify the latter with Plautus for example, which naturally has been done.

It's precisely that those people should be told that there was no two opposed kinds of Latin in precisely the same way there is no two opposed kinds of English, Spanish, Russian etc. There was complex variation, as there is in those languages, that cannot be reduced to any dichotomy, and any attempts to do so are doomed to failure. If people want to talk about some identifiable part of the variation inside Latin, they should refer to it in a way that would also be applicable to a modern language. Otherwise all they're doing is projecting their fantasies onto history because history, unlike reality, is open to fantastical, ideological reinterpretation, as exemplified in nationalistic myths, Graeco-Roman statues of white unpainted marble or crocodile-skin dinosaurs.

Using a corrupt term with at least over a dozen definitions simply can't be conductive to understanding. It would be obstructive enough if a linguistic term changed its definitions according to the whims of its user; but the term in question has no identifiable definition at all, certainly none that is consistent with modern scientific understanding. It's a truism that disagreement and confusion is often rooted in words, and many a philosophical problem has been resolved simply by restating it clearly and shedding the dead matter that inevitably becomes accreted to it, at which point the problem disappears. If the specialists don't know what the term means, then non-specialists have all the more reason to avoid it; in this case however much of the dead matter has been contributed by the non-specialists, and the sooner they stop contributing it the better.

The Romans' concept of "common speech" can't be used to justify the idea of a hidden unified alternative linguistic system for Latin any more than the same concept held by any modern person can for any modern language. Lat. _vulgāris_ "common to all" is a straightorward false friend with En. _vulgar_ "base, sordid". Apart from this, the only reason it appears that it can in one case but not the other is the distinction our brains make between history and reality in the amount of evidence needed to justify the same belief - there's nothing like the past to project a fantasy onto (see _the good ol' times_).

Talking about the unity of a parent language does not entail postulating a unity of its daughter languages, which is a synchronic issue and one primarily of a cultural nature. What's more, talking about a Vulgar Latin simply transposes the question of unity onto it from Classical Latin - many accounts as well as the vulgar base sordid popular imagination still assign a unity to that new entity, which is precisely the 'dichotomy' issue highlighted in the quotation.


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## Hulalessar

Sobakus said:


> If we define Vulgar Latin as "spoken Latin" etc



I have been thinking about how to respond and have decided first to ask a question:

Before the Edict of Tours was issued in 813 priests were delivering sermons in a language their parishioners did not understand. After the Edict was issued priests started preaching in what the Edict calls _rustica romana lingua. _What is your name for the language priests were preaching in (a) before 813 and (b) after 813?


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## Sobakus

Hulalessar said:


> I have been thinking about how to respond and have decided first to ask a question:
> 
> Before the Edict of Tours was issued in 813 priests were delivering sermons in a language their parishioners did not understand. After the Edict was issued priests started preaching in what the Edict calls _rustica romana lingua. _What is your name for the language priests were preaching in (a) before 813 and (b) after 813?


They were preaching in various Romance vernaculars, in this case late common Gallo-Romance vernaculars, early Old French/Old Occitan, both before and after - changing the name of the same linguistic system around the first metalinguistic testimony wouldn't make much sense. This in turn descends from what can be termed Late Gallic Latin. There are many proposals on when Late Latin ends and Romance begins, but it's generally evident that the perdiod between the 6th and the 8th centuries is a gray transitional area as far as Gaul is concerned.

Calling any of this Vulgar Latin results in its conflation - under the various defintions - with the language of Plautus, of Classical-period merchants and soldiers, of early graffiti, curse tablets and late epigraphy, with 6-10th century Italian land grants etc etc, the absurdity of which I can only underline yet again.

By the way, the priests had always preached in that, the edict simply recognises that the Latin brought by the reformists from Britain - the newly classicising Medieval Latin - could obviously not be equated with what the priests had been preaching in. It signals a conscious decision to break with the (just barely) living and inherited Latin tradition, now recognised as hopelessly corrupt, for good and create two new traditions instead (of course the Latin that the British scholars brought with them is itself rooted in Hiberno-Latin, a scholastic tongue divorced from any vernacular). It's because the parishioners could not understand the newly-forged Latin that the mention is made of this - to ward against overzealous priests anxious to adopt the reforms to the detriment of their congregation, no doubt with extant precedents.


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## Penyafort

The impact Franks had on northern Gaul during that period can't be disregarded, though, as it was definitely higher than that which other Germanic languages had in more southern areas. The expansion of this impact to Northern Italy and Northeastern Iberia through the Carolingian Empire might have triggered a sort of discontinuity which would have contributed to foster the difference in several contexts. Words now considered to be the first written accounts in the Romance languages began showing up during that 9th century and the following one.


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## Sobakus

Yes, and that's what I wanted to stress - Gallo-Romance, especially in the north, is already distinct enough from other *synchronic *branches that lumping it together with anything is detrimental to correct understanding. Lumping it into Vulgar Latin is a much greater crime because that term is not only undefinable in synchrony but also diachorincally encompasses the good part of a millenium and includes the end and beginning of two distinct literary traditions. It's like lumping together Old English and Early Modern English.

A peculiarity of Gaul that I don't think I've read a mention of before is that it underwent prolonged Germanic influence - the 'prolonged' part is what sets it aside from other areas as a qualitatively different type of contact situation - while simultaneously being the last refuge of the inherited Latin tradition. What's more, eventually it was the Germanic elite who were the custodians of that tradition, while the rest of the population were characterised by contact and bilingualism with the Celtic Gaulish. So literary Latin was passed down among the non-Romance speaking foreigners, while Romance speakers ended up without access to the literary tradition. This seems to me like a good recipe for accelerated linguistic evolution, the results of which were eventually canonised by the Carolingian renewal and the emergence of written Old French.


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## Kevin Beach

St Jerome's rendering of most of the Bible in the late 4th century AD was into a form of the Latin language already known as "Vulgata". His translation in itself is some evidence of what the language was at that time.


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## Sobakus

Kevin Beach said:


> St Jerome's rendering of most of the Bible in the late 4th century AD was into a form of the Latin language already known as "Vulgata". His translation in itself is some evidence of what the language was at that time.


_[biblia sacra] vulgāta_ means "the [holy books] in common circulation", it's not a reference to anything language-related. Jerome's version is replete with translationese from Hebrew and Greek and is not representative of ordinary speech. It a translation that's supposed to preserve the truth of the divine revelation, and hence even the grammar is often literally translated.

Russians have a nice sarcastic word for this - _надмозг nadmózg_ "abovebrain", translating _overmind_, taken from one of those translation efforts that first flooded Russia in the 90s; it can also refer to the authors of these translations. By now there's a sort of parallel language in existence that is limited to translations from English and if taken on its own looks like robot speak (making the term "abovebrain" quite felicitous), but everyone's gotten used to hearing it on the TV (especially adult cartoons) and reading it on the Internet, mainly on wikipedia (which is often just translation from English), Russian-language blogs that translate English-language blogs etc. That language is no evidence for spoken Russian, and personally it makes me nauseous every time.

The effect on ordinary Romans of Christian translations from Greek was probably similar to that (adjusted for the widespread bilingualism in the cities), and also to how the KJB reads to modern English speakers - the otherwordliness of the language adds to the mystic experience. Besides, I believe Jerome's version became the "common" one only during the Middle Ages, after the Carolingian times. At least it consistently sticks to the literary standard; from the little that I've seen, the previous disparate translation efforts, collectively known as _[biblia sacra] vetus latīna_, are sometimes more representative of speech and sometimes word-by-word translationese that lacks any sense outright.


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## Kevin Beach

Sobakus said:


> _[biblia sacra] vulgāta_ means "the [holy books] in common circulation", it's not a reference to anything language-related....


Can you cite authority for that assertion, please?


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## Sobakus

Kevin Beach said:


> Can you cite authority for that assertion, please?


You only need to check the dictionaries for the participle vulgātus and the verb vulgō.


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## Kevin Beach

Sobakus said:


> You only need to check the dictionaries for the participle vulgātus and the verb vulgō.


I'm afraid that doesn't persuade me. Translating a participle doesn't tell you what it relates to. It could still be just as much "language" as "usage".


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## Sobakus

Kevin Beach said:


> I'm afraid that doesn't persuade me. Translating a participle doesn't tell you what it relates to. It could still be just as much "language" as "usage".


No, there's no way that "a popular novel" can mean "a novel in a popular language, according to popular usage etc". The reason you're skeptical about this and want evidence for what naively looks like the only possible reading is precisely that myth of "Vulgar Latin" that's the subject of this topic - this is confirmation bias. By _sermō vulgāris_ the Romans referred to "common parlance" and not to a parlance about something common; and by "a widely-circulated book" they meant a book that had been made to circulate widely, and not a book in a special language of the common plebs that differed from Classical Latin. It's the latter interpretation that's quite a leap and would need a lot of evidence to support it, while a dictionary is enough to be certain about the combined meaning of the words _biblia, sacra_ and _vulgāta._

Not to mention that Jerome's translation is precisely the opposite of that mythical language - it's a consciously classicising, literary, professionally standardised canon of texts. It's written in full agreement with Late Latin grammatical doctrine and is used to this day to teach "correct" Latin.


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## Sobakus

Actually, one way for this misinterpretation that I can see is the analogy between _liber Graecus_ and _liber vulgātus_ - if the former can mean "a book written in Greek", then it appears as if the latter can be taken to mean "a book written in a wide-spread language". Clearly this depends on the fact that _Graecus_ in _sermō Graecus_ denotes a linguistic variety - compare 'an argot song, a cockney poem'. Now suppose you were able to prove that the Romans used _vulgātus_ to designate a linguistic variety, roughly equivalent with 'wide-spread', as in 'he speaks wide-spread', 'this graffiti is in wide-spread'. Now let's replace 'Greek' with 'wide-spread' and get 'a wide-spread book'. Clearly such an interpretation as "a book in a wide-spread type of speech" would be the last thing to come to mind upon hearing this phrase. This follows from the simple fact that we're dealing with a participle, which expresses a verbal action on its object, represented as the head of the noun phrase, namely 'book'; and even if this participle were to be conventionalised as the name of a speech variety (for which I've seen zero evidence after years of looking), one still couldn't help but see the participle's argument structure (to X an Y > an Xed Y).


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## Kevin Beach

Sobakus said:


> You only need to check the dictionaries for the participle vulgātus and the verb vulgō.


I'm afraid that doesn't persuade me. It doesn't tell me what the participles describe, the usage or the language.


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## Sobakus

Kevin Beach said:


> I'm afraid that doesn't persuade me. It doesn't tell me what the participles describe, the usage or the language.


Just above you'll find two detailed messages explaining why there's no reason to believe it describes anything other than the text itself.

p.s.: *VULGATE*, _noun_ A very ancient Latin version of the scriptures, and the only one which the Romish church admits to be authentic. It is so called from its common use in the Latin church.—Webster 1828

_Insuper eadem sacrosancta synodus … statuit et declarat, ut haec ipsa vetus et vulgata editio, quae longo tot saeculorum usu in ipsa ecclesia probata est …_ "Moreover, the same Holy Council … decrees and announces that this precise old and widely-circulated edition, which has been made good by its many centuries of use in the Church …"—Council of Trent, 8 April 1546

_Aeditio communis et vulgata_ "The common and wide-spread edition"—Girolamo Seripando writing shortly before it and mirrorring J. Driedo's _communis aeditio vulgata_ from 1533, which is the earliest such use I've found.


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## Hulalessar

There is something like equivocation going on in this thread.

At one level there is an unarguable distinction between speech and writing; the former is sounds and the latter is marks on paper or some other medium.

Once a written language gets going diglossia develops. Then the difference is not just that one is sounds and the other is marks, but that the language for each is different. The degree of diglossia varies over time and place. Speech and writing may influence each. What is recognised socially as "standard" speech may be more like the written variety than anything recognised socially as "non-standard" speech. Both speech and writing may have various registers. A spoken variety can be written down and a written variety spoken. Just because these interactions exist does not mean that we cannot recognise that, as language, speech and writing are two distinct but related things.

The vast corpus of Latin texts we have was almost all conceived as writing. Some of this writing may give us a hint of the way people were speaking, but no way is there anything like a sufficient record which tells us how people were talking in the market place at any given time or place.

If we can use "French" to mean not only the French found on the pages of _Le Figaro_ and the language spoken on the streets of Paris, but also all written French going back to the Strasbourg Oaths and all spoken varieties reasonably considered French, then we ought to be able to use "Latin" in the same way. If we accept the distinction between speech and writing considered as language (acknowledging that the distinction may not always be a hard and fast one) then we can reasonably talk about spoken and written Latin. There is no reason why these two distinct strands should not each have a name. For various reasons, and mostly because for centuries no one has spoken as a mother tongue anything we would today call Latin, spoken Latin is generally referred to as "Vulgar Latin" and written Latin simply as "Latin". The labels do not imply that either is something fixed over time.


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## Penyafort

Still nowadays a thing that's been spread/published/popularized in the Romance languages is a thing that's been _divulgata_.


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## Sobakus

No, the term "diglossia" does not refer to what develops with a written standard - a written standard belongs to the same language. Diglossia is the presence of two distinct languages with two distinct standards in relation to the same individual or a community. One cannot speak of monolingual English speaker diglossia just because they finished school. One or more written standards can stand in opposition to one or more spoken standards of different linguistic distance. Accepting the difference between speech and writing as a difference of language goes far beyond confusing the "spoken <=> written", "literary <=> non-literary" and "standard <=> non-standard" oppositions - such a conflation simply doesn't have anything to do with sociolinguistics. I remember reading a paper or two explaining the relationship between these notions, but I can't seem to find it. I remember it had something to do with Saussure, Coseriu and the notion of diasystem (you can google for these), but maybe I was just reading about them at the same time.

As far as we know, there was no distinctly identifiable language or even dialect variety opposed to written Latin throughout time and space as you think there was. Even the notion of a homogeneous, standardised written Latin is not supported by reality for any period - Latin had never been standardised in the modern sense. Like we call all English English and all Old French Old French, we call all Latin Latin unless we're being mislead by mistaken and prescientific notions about language. Your idea of "Vulgar Latin" looks precisely the same as Italian speakers calling everything that isn't standard Italian 'dialetto', whether it be Tuscan, Sardinian or the Gallo-Italic of Sicily. One doesn't have to be a linguist to see how indefensible this is, and I'm not sure why you're still defending it after all my efforts. And in the end, even if your definition were defensible on its own, it would still be competing with a dozen other often incompatible definitions for the same term. For example, some (E. Pulgram and R.A. Hall come to mind) have identified Vulgar Latin/Romance as a separate Italic language, with Latin as its sister.


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## berndf

Sobakus said:


> No, the term "diglossia" does not refer to what develops with a written standard - a written standard belongs to the same language. Diglossia is the presence of two distinct languages with two distinct standards in relation to the same individual or a community.


In languages with strong regional dialects, spoken and written language are often so different that they are best understood as different languages and the use of written and spoken language by the same speaker can indeed adequately be described as _diglossia_.


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## symposium

Sobakus said:


> Your idea of "Vulgar Latin" looks precisely the same as Italian speakers calling everything that isn't standard Italian 'dialetto', whether it be Tuscan, Sardinian or the Gallo-Italic of Sicily.


I assume these are and have always been called dialetti not as in "local varieties of Standard Italian" but as in "local varieties of modern Latin".


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## Sobakus

berndf said:


> In languages with strong regional dialects, spoken and written language are often so different that they are best understood as different languages and the use of written and spoken language by the same speaker can indeed adequately be described as _diglossia_.


Absolutely, and this doesn't happen overnight either so diglossia comes in degrees. Some written codes are even created artificially from the start as written koines (German, Finnish, medieval Iberia). Just as well diglossia can be identified inside the written language itself - modern legal English and a lot of classicising English poetry comes to mind (see my thoughts in Poetic structure) - as well as in spoken language - the argots, creoles etc. But the existence of a written standard is not what diglossia describes.


symposium said:


> I assume these are and have always been called dialetti not as in "local varieties of Standard Italian" but as in "local varieties of modern Latin".


It's difficult to understand what you mean when you join "have always been called" with "modern Latin", unless by the latter you mean "(Italo-)Romance languages". In any case, my informed feeling tells me that you're projecting the modern situation and metalinguistic awareness too far into the past, and that this use of the word _dialetto_ (which is clearly not inherited) gained currency sometime during the Italian unification/linguistic tuscanisation when the current state of diglossia first arose, and together with it the need to distinguish the local vernacular as different from something else. In the thread Medieval names of Romance languages I explain that during the Renaissance, the pairing _Latin–vernacular_ was referred to by the Latinate upper classes as _grammatica–vulgāre_, while the people still referred to the entirety of vernaculars of Italy indifferently as _Latino,_ as some Romance speakers still do; I've never seen _dialectus_ used in contrast to Latin during the Renaissance - that word wasn't even considered Latin but Greek, just as in Antiquity, and its few occurrences are limited to discussions about Greek (see this from 1473, which by the way is preciesly part of the Renaissance debate around what language the Romans spoke and already rejects the position that "they spoke Italian"). I think its use was adopted specifically to express an opposition to standard Italian during the last couple of centuries.

Here's the first occurrence of _dialetto_ that GDLI mentions, again as a description of Greek, in a linguistic work from 1570. Here's the first Latin use that I've found in reference to an Italian venacular, from 1758.


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## Kevin Beach

Sobakus said:


> Just above you'll find two detailed messages explaining why there's no reason to believe it describes anything other than the text itself.
> 
> p.s.: *VULGATE*, _noun_ A very ancient Latin version of the scriptures, and the only one which the Romish church admits to be authentic. It is so called from its common use in the Latin church.—Webster 1828
> 
> _Insuper eadem sacrosancta synodus … statuit et declarat, ut haec ipsa vetus et vulgata editio, quae longo tot saeculorum usu in ipsa ecclesia probata est …_ "Moreover, the same Holy Council … decrees and announces that this precise old and widely-circulated edition, which has been made good by its many centuries of use in the Church …"—Council of Trent, 8 April 1546
> 
> _Aeditio communis et vulgata_ "The common and wide-spread edition"—Girolamo Seripando writing shortly before it and mirrorring J. Driedo's _communis aeditio vulgata_ from 1533, which is the earliest such use I've found.


Yes, it is widely-circulated, common and wide-spread precisely because it was written in the _language of the people - the *lingua vulgata*_. That's why the Pope asked St Jerome to make the translation!


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## Sobakus

Kevin Beach said:


> Yes, it is widely-circulated, common and wide-spread precisely because it was written in the _language of the people - the *lingua vulgata*_. That's why the Pope asked St Jerome to make the translation!


Kevin, you're being thoroughly unreasonable here. We both know that you have no evidence for this assertion, and that it's based on a mere popular belief, itself rooted in the popular belief in a "vulgar Latin". I think I've amply demonstrated in this topic that both these beliefs are erroneous.

I'm acquainted first-hand with the Romans' rhetorical terminology and metalinguistic comments on contemporary linguistic situation, and there exists no evidence for such an expression as _lingua vulgāta_ referring to any such language of the people during the time of Jerome; nor have I seen any evidence for its existence at any later period either (Middle Ages or the Renaissance). This expression means "wide-spread language", which is not equivalent to "the language of the people" but can in fact be the opposite of it - a language common to every region but native to none, a _lingua franca_ (as used here).
The use of _vulgāta_ in reference to Jerome's Bible translation dates from the Renaissance and cannot be traced to the linguistic situation in the late Empire.
The only thing that the Latin grammar allows it to conceivably describe as "wide-spread" is the literary production itself. Your assertion that it was wide-spread because of being written in some special language is based on belief in pure myth with no evidence to support it. The facts are:
Jerome's translation is written in a consciously literary, consistent, grammarian-approved style. It was conceived as an effort to standardise a disparate canon of texts, some violating the literary norm at every turn. It has *nothing whatsoever* to do with any "language of the people".
Jerome's translation had remained generally unaccepted until the High Middle Ages. That is to say, as long as there conceivably existed a "Latin of the people", his translation remained unadopted. It was only after Latin became well and truly a dead language of scholasticism that Jerome's literary and classicising translation found acceptance. The "language of the people" at that point were the Romance vernaculars that lacked any Bible translations.
If any Latin translation of the Bible was called _vulgāta_ during the Antiquity, it would have been the _Itala/vetus Latīna_; in fact it seems that this was only used in reference to the Greek Septuagint (p. 25-26).

I'm sorry that I have to be this assertive, but I find it necessary when my reasonable arguments and the evidence that you yourself requested is being talked past in an effort to perpetuate the myths I believe I've already succeded in conclusively dispelling. Countering reason and evidence with subjective belief based on popular myth on a forum dedicated to educating people simply won't do. What I find especially objectionable is the belief that one's opponent must provide evidence for their assertions, but that one is not bound by the same obligation; that one can remain unconvinced by reason and evidence while remaining convinced by mere speculation and myth.


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## Kevin Beach

Sobakus said:


> Kevin, you're being thoroughly unreasonable here. We both know that you have no evidence for this assertion, and that it's based on a mere popular belief, itself rooted in the popular belief in a "vulgar Latin". I think I've amply demonstrated in this topic that both these beliefs are erroneous.
> 
> I'm acquainted first-hand with the Romans' rhetorical terminology and metalinguistic comments on contemporary linguistic situation, and there exists no evidence for such an expression as _lingua vulgāta_ referring to any such language of the people during the time of Jerome; nor have I seen any evidence for its existence at any later period either (Middle Ages or the Renaissance). This expression means "wide-spread language", which is not equivalent to "the language of the people" but can in fact be the opposite of it - a language common to every region but native to none, a _lingua franca_ (as used here).
> The use of _vulgāta_ in reference to Jerome's Bible translation dates from the Renaissance and cannot be traced to the linguistic situation in the late Empire.
> The only thing that the Latin grammar allows it to conceivably describe as "wide-spread" is the literary production itself. Your assertion that it was wide-spread because of being written in some special language is based on belief in pure myth with no evidence to support it. The facts are:
> Jerome's translation is written in a consciously literary, consistent, grammarian-approved style. It was conceived as an effort to standardise a disparate canon of texts, some violating the literary norm at every turn. It has *nothing whatsoever* to do with any "language of the people".
> Jerome's translation had remained generally unaccepted until the High Middle Ages. That is to say, as long as there conceivably existed a "Latin of the people", his translation remained unadopted. It was only after Latin became well and truly a dead language of scholasticism that Jerome's literary and classicising translation found acceptance. The "language of the people" at that point were the Romance vernaculars that lacked any Bible translations.
> If any Latin translation of the Bible was called _vulgāta_ during the Antiquity, it would have been the _Itala/vetus Latīna_; in fact it seems that this was only used in reference to the Greek Septuagint (p. 25-26).
> 
> I'm sorry that I have to be this assertive, but I find it necessary when my reasonable arguments and the evidence that you yourself requested is being talked past in an effort to perpetuate the myths I believe I've already succeded in conclusively dispelling. Countering reason and evidence with subjective belief based on popular myth on a forum dedicated to educating people simply won't do. What I find especially objectionable is the belief that one's opponent must provide evidence for their assertions, but that one is not bound by the same obligation; that one can remain unconvinced by reason and evidence while remaining convinced by mere speculation and myth.


I don't think you have provided any _objective_ evidence at all, but you clearly believe what you say and don't want to be influenced against it.  This exchange risks turning into the sort of posts that should not appear on this site. I therefore withdraw from it.


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## berndf

Kevin Beach said:


> St Jerome's rendering of most of the Bible in the late 4th century AD was into a form of the Latin language already known as "Vulgata". His translation in itself is some evidence of what the language was at that time.


The designation _Vulgata_ for Jerome's translation doesn't occur before the 16th century. I am afraid this says nothing about the popular language in the late empire.

The notion of "Vulgar Latin" is clearly a retrospective idealised concept that serves as a common label for the largely unattested grammatical, morphological and phonological changes that led from classical Latin to early Romance languages. As many of these changes are common among all or most Romance languages, it is reasonable to assume that they occurred when the empire was still intact and local vernaculars were connected but it is nevertheless just a convenient abstraction.


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## Sobakus

Kevin Beach said:


> I don't think you have provided any _objective_ evidence at all, but you clearly believe what you say and don't want to be influenced against it.  This exchange risks turning into the sort of posts that should not appear on this site. I therefore withdraw from it.


I think this appraisal is unfair, and precisely the opposite of what's happening. I believe what I say in the same way I believe what time and date it is. I have no attachment to my beliefs and can always be influenced to change my mind. Thus I'm hoping to profit from other people's knowledge just as I'm hoping they can profit from mine. Not only have you given my mind-changing machinery no fuel to run on, I have been able to procure ample amounts of fuel that makes it run in the opposite direction.

Here's what I think happened:

you started with the assumption that there existed a special language of the people called 'lingua vulgāta'. This is what I call The Myth;
then you looked at the name 'Vulgāta' under which Jerome's translation is known, and where a naïve reader who's consulted the dictionary would see "the wide-spread, well-known edition" as the only possible interpretation, you instead saw something consistent with The Myth, despite possessing nothing that can pass as evidence for that interpretation;
finally you proceeded to use that interpretation, intuited solely based on The Myth, as supporting evidence for The Myth itself;
now, I have provided a mass of evidence that your interpretation cannot be reconciled with; but even if I hadn't, your argumentation would still be untenable as being circular.
To recapitulate the objective evidence I've provided:

the word _vulgātus_ was not used in reference to any language variety;
the only Bible it was used in reference to, as far as I've seen, was the Septuagint;
Jerome's Bible was not written in anything that can be singled out as "the language of the people";
Jerome's Bible could not and was not singled out as "the wide-spread, you-know-which one" until the Renaissance.
Virtually all of these facts I've found out by personal research while trying to verify if your suggestions had any validity.


berndf said:


> The notion of "Vulgar Latin" is clearly a retrospective idealised concept that serves as a common label for the largely unattested grammatical, morphological and phonological changes that led from classical Latin to early Romance languages.


Not only that, but this - reconstructed Latin aka Proto-Romance - is just one of many definitions of “Vulgar Latin”, and not the popular one at that. Most people use it to refer to attested but non-standard Latin - naturally, according to their conception of what 'standard Latin' is, which can be as much part of the problem.


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## berndf

Sobakus said:


> Not only that, but this - reconstructed Latin aka Proto-Romance - is just one of many definitions of “Vulgar Latin”, and not the popular one at that. Most people use it to refer to attested but non-standard Latin - naturally, according to their conception of what 'standard Latin' is, which can be as much part of the problem.


There are indeed occasional attestations of changes that are typical for reconstructed proto-Romance, like the erosion of the case system or long _e_/short _i_ confusion, hyper-correct _h _as a sign of the sound being mute, etc. The very concept of Vulgar Latin implies that these changes are assumed to be routed in popular speech in imperial times. In this regard it makes sense to talk of those attestations of "Vulgar Latin". It is maybe unfortunate that modern linguists have continued this Renaissance term as it can easily lead to misinterpretation when taken out of context. One should maybe speak of _Pre-Proto-Romance_ and _Proto-Romance_ instead of _Vulgar Latin_ and _Proto-Romance_.


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## Penyafort

But terms are always going to be misleading, as Proto-Romance would also mean that there was one single common stage of the language at one point in history, when it was rather a gradual series of areal changes*, as we can see when confronting Sardinian, the Eastern languages, and the Italian and Western clusters. (In fact, I've also seen the use of the term, 'Vulgar Latin', applied to the last clusters, which is still weirder.) 

*To me, the evolution of CE/CI (1, Sardinian, ke/ki; 2, Romanian/Italian/Mozarabic, t͡ʃe/t͡ʃi; 3, Western, t͡se/t͡si) as well as the voiceless preservation of -p-/-t-/-k-, are quite revealing.


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## Hulalessar

The last few threads show that confusion reigns.

I think that berndf is on my wavelength. Vulgar Latin may be an abstraction, but it is no more or less an abstraction than "English" in a book title such as "The History of English".

'The notion of "Vulgar Latin" is clearly a retrospective idealised concept that serves as a common label for the largely unattested grammatical, morphological and phonological changes that led from classical Latin to early Romance languages. As many of these changes are common among all or most Romance languages, it is reasonable to assume that they occurred when the empire was still intact and local vernaculars were connected but it is nevertheless just a convenient abstraction.'

I agree with the above, though I would leave out the word "idealised." Vulgar Latin is something just as a mammal is something, even though something cannot be a mammal without being same kind of mammal.

I would make a clear distinction between Vulgar Latin and Proto-Romance. The two are quite different conceptually. The former is a thing which had real existence and was spoken but about which we know very little for certain; the latter is a hypothetical reconstruction spoken by nobody.

I hasten to add that I recognise that "Proto-X" (where X is a language or name for a group of languages) is something of an ambiguous term as it can mean either a hypothetical reconstruction or the unrecorded immediate common ancestor of a group of languages.

The position of the Romance languages is a bit of an oddity. It is probably the group of languages whose history is better known than any other. There is though a significant lacuna. There is a nice trajectory of written texts going back from today more then two millennia which, even if they display different registers and styles, employ fundamentally the same language. However, sometime in the ninth century, texts begin to appear in languages which, whatever you want to call them and even if the people at the time considered them Latin, would not be recognised today as Latin. The important point is that there are no intermediate texts. That is the lacuna which made people realise that over a period (starting point unknown) the way the few who could write wrote and the way people spoke as they went about their everyday business must have gradually drifted further and further apart.


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## Sobakus

@Hulalessar So as I understand it, you still believe there existed a self-contained linguistic system “Vulgar Latin” in the same sense there exists “English”, “Dutch” etc? And that this system was homogeneous throughout the Empire, which explains the similarities between modern Romance languages, which all descend from this very system? And that it stood in opposition to the self-contained linguistic system “written Latin”, like “English” stands in opposition to “Dutch”, which was not only homogeneous but largely unchanging, has had an uninterrupted tradition up to this day, and left no descendants of its own?

Whatever your answer, I would like you to illustrate, compare and contrast using modern languages.


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> I hasten to add that I recognise that "Proto-X" (where X is a language or name for a group of languages) is something of an ambiguous term as it can mean either a hypothetical reconstruction or the unrecorded immediate common ancestor of a group of languages.


It is an idealisation in the sense that it does not represent an actual language (or at least none we know of) but serves as an umbrella for a group of developments in popular language that must have occurred at some point in the transition from classical Latin to Proto-Romance. And I agree with @Penyafort that Proto-Romance is in itself only an idealisation.

These development we group under the label "Vulgar Latin" are almost completely undocumented as the written standard language was practically frozen. We therefore use a simplified model of two separate but in themselves consistent and static languages, Classical and Vulgar Latin. But this is not because we believe this represents what actually happened but because we do not know the details and this rather crude and simplistic model is sufficient to describe the the transition to early Romance languages and is simply a convenient façcon de parler.


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## Sobakus

@berndf The thing is that such a view represents a teleological fallacy. A future form of language X will inherit a certain collection of traits that currently exist in language X, and will develop many new ones, while shedding others; for complex reasons we only begin to understand, many of these traits will be present in all or most of the branches, and this is where abstraction comes into play; but there currently exists no coherent, homogeneous, self-contained system distinguished by virtue of containing all those traits, and some of them are still barely identifiable or even non-existent. Those that do exist are currently spread around across different dimensions of sociolinguistic variation - styles, registers, sociolects, dialects, obscure internet imageboards, even other languages. Many of them are latent in the system, have low frequency, and are still awaiting to exploit a future structural gap. It's only in retrospective that the illusion arises of these traits being widespread and forming a coherent system. This has long been recognised to be a gross misrepresentation of the actual state of any given natural language (see quotations). Failing to recognise it as a such poses a fundamental obstacle to understanding linguistic variation and evolution.

The umbrella term for the developments on the way from Latin to Romance is “Proto-Romance”, and this is generally used in conjunction with using the Comparative Reconstruction Method as employed for entirely non-attested languages. Accordingly, one of the leading publications concerned with this has as its fundamental principle to not take into account any written Latin data whatsoever - this is the "Latin as spoken by nobody, reconstructed as if written by nobody", which doesn't stop them from assigning it a date (3d century as the cut-off for the split of Sardinian). Incidentally, this poses a deep philosophical problem for the Comparative Method which is yet to be resolved.

There really is no place for any other linguistic entity that can be labelled as “Vulgar Latin” in any modern framework that I know. It only perseveres as an established shorthand for "variation and evolution in Latin". The unfortunate consequence of this is that it continues to serve as a Trojan horse for all that outdated, even prescientific theoretical baggage, and this is why _R. Wright (1982), Late Latin and Early Romance, p. 54_ rightly says that:


> "The phrase “Vulgar Latin”, however, deserves to be banished at once from serious scholarly use, as have been _phlogiston, humours_, and _the music of the spheres._"


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## berndf

Sobakus said:


> It's only in retrospective that the illusion arises of these traits being widespread and forming a coherent system.


It might be an "illusion" but it is still a a useful abstraction as long as you use it in context. But taken out of context, it can indeed be very misleading. The same happens in physics. Physicist love using colourful language but thus is only to assign intuitive interpretation to abstract concepts and when people without physics training, physicist's metaphors are often taken too literally creating all kind of misconceptions.


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## Sobakus

berndf said:


> It might be an "illusion" but it is still a a useful abstraction as long as you use it in context. But taken out of context, it can indeed be very misleading. The same happens in physics. Physicist love using colourful language but thus is only to assign intuitive interpretation to abstract concepts and when people without physics training, physicist's metaphors are often taken too literally creating all kind of misconceptions.


Right, but the fundamental difference here is that with VL, the specialists themselves recognise that the term has no identifiable meaning; and that at earlier stages of scientific development it wasn't a mere metaphor, but that it was underlied by what is now recognised to be a clearly identifiable ideological position; and that this position is irreconcilable with modern understanding of language variation. No context can really help with this, it's not a matter of misunderstanding when there's no correct interpretation to begin with.

I've just read J. Milroy (2012), Sociolinguistics and Ideologies in Language History in The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics (LibGennable/SciHubbable) which gives a brief yet exemplary overview of this very problem in relation to modern languages (also highly relevant is the next chapter "Language Myths"). With Latin, a major factor contributing to The Myth is historical distance (which makes projecting an idealised fantasy easy), as well as the understanding of “Classical/written Latin” as an artificial, unchanging literary language that nobody spoke, simply because people see that that's what Latin is today (also not true in a major way, btw). The myth of “Vulgar Latin” is intimately connected with this other myth, which is in fact even more fundamentally misleading; and I believe if one of them is banished, the other will disappear almost on its own. It's the dualistic fallacy - smash one leg and the whole crumbles.

I personally don't see how the term (VL) can be used informally without causing major misunderstanding, not when I've found that it repeatedly results in misunderstanding even with reasonably-informed people; and it's really trivial to avoid using it - just use all the same terminology you'd apply to any modern language, especially your own. This in itself will help you start thinking of Latin as a language like any other.


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## Michael Zwingli

Muz1234 said:


> Are dead language really worth to learn?


I think so, given certain circumstances, and for a certain reason.


Circunflejo said:


> Well, it's debatable. It's still the official language of the Vatican City and of the Catholic church even though mass is usually celebrated in the vernacular language(s) of each territory.


This, however...whether Latin is "dead" or not...has nothing to do with the reason for _studying_  it, as opposed to "learning" (to converse in) it.


elroy said:


> Whether it's about a dead language or a living language, each individual person needs to decide for him or herself whether the language is worth learning, and that depends on what benefits learning the language could bring to them in particular.


There seems to be a general drift in human language, especially within the IE language family, from the more synthetic to the more analytical, which drift has been ongoing for millennia now. Some linguists have suggested that this is a natural phenomenon within the context of human culture. If one speaks a highly analytic language such as English or Spanish, there is immense cognitive value in learning a highly synthetic language such as Latin or Ancient Greek. This is a major reason underlying the emphasis of Latin and Greek within the educational Trivium. For a speaker of an analytical language, the learning of a synthetic language presents to the mind entirely new ways of thinking, and greater cognitive rigor in thought. The "upper classes" of the Western world have long had their children study the classics because the laguage study involved _improves the cognitive ability of the individual_, as well as teaching the roots of Western thought and culture.


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## Michael Zwingli

Kevin Beach said:


> Yes, it is widely-circulated, common and wide-spread precisely because it was written in the _language of the people - the *lingua vulgata...*_


I do not think that the phrase *Biblia Vulgata *describes this. If Jerome wanted to indicate what you are suggesting that he did, I rather think he would have entitled his work simply *Biblia*, or perhaps Biblia Catholica or Biblia Romana, with a subtitle of a type resembling, *descripta ad lingua vulgata*, etc. Latin (at least, Classical Latin) was grammatically literal to a fault; in Latin, _implication_ never had a part in adjectivization, as it often does in modern English. I doubt that Jerome would have used the adjective *Vulgata* in order to imply that the unmentioned language of the composition is either "widespread" or "colloquial", but rather think he would only use the adjective in qualification of it's stated referent.


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## Hulalessar

Michael Zwingli said:


> There seems to be a general drift in human language, especially within the IE language family, from the more synthetic to the more analytical, which drift has been ongoing for millennia now. If one speaks a highly analytic language such as English or Spanish, there is immense cognitive value in learning a highly synthetic language such as Latin or Ancient Greek. This is a major reason underlying the emphasis of Latin and Greek within the educational Trivium. For a speaker of an analytical language, the learning of a synthetic language presents to the mind entirely new ways of thinking, and greater cognitive rigor in thought.



What we know of Indo-European languages certainly suggests a trend from synthesis to analysis. However, many linguists believe that language change is cyclical. Both synthesis and analysis are questions of degree and a language may be synthetic in one aspect and analytic in another. I would hesitate to say that Spanish is "highly" analytic. It has a simple noun system but a complex verbal system. Latin and Greek may appear to native English speakers to be highly synthetic, but compared to some languages are only moderately synthetic.

Whether language change is cyclical or not, synthetic languages like Latin, Greek and Sanskrit do not represent some peak of development. Synthetic languages are not repositories of rigour and analytic languages are not devoid of it. It is a question of focus. Analytic languages focus on the sentence stressing word order and tend to rely on context. That involves just as much brain power as getting all your endings right.

Whilst schoolboys learning it may not think so, Latin is not that different from English when you start considering languages like Finnish, Arabic and Chinese. Learning any language, rather than involving a different way of thinking, involves a different way of looking at things. If learning a different way of looking at things is beneficial, then the more different the language the better. What better than the syntactic ergativity of Basque, adjectives behaving like verbs in Japanese and no tenses at all in Thai to shake your ideas up?


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## Michael Zwingli

Hulalessar said:


> Whether language change is cyclical or not, synthetic languages like Latin, Greek and Sanskrit do not represent some peak of development. Synthetic languages are not repositories of rigour and analytic languages are not devoid of it.


That is not what I intend to suggest. What I mean is that all human thought (even mathematical) occurs through the medium of language (as "mathematics", or more precisely, mathematical notation, is a language) and the exercise involved in learning a more synthetic form of expression (determination of proper case, etc.) naturally lends richness, complexity and rigor to cognition.


Hulalessar said:


> Whilst schoolboys learning it may not think so, Latin is not that different from English when you start considering languages like Finnish, Arabic and Chinese. Learning any language, rather than involving a different way of thinking, involves a different way of looking at things.


Indeed! Well said, that. I do maintain that there are different ways of thinking involved, as well. I lack, however, easy access to the proper terminology that, say, a cognitive neuroscientist might have for an adequate exposition of this... I suspect that a similar benefit accrues bidirectionally, _analytic>synthetic_ and _synthetic>analytic_, however.


Hulalessar said:


> What better than the syntactic ergativity of Basque, adjectives behaving like verbs in Japanese and no tenses at all in Thai to shake your ideas up?


Absolutely. So many ways of thinking about subjective reality, so little time...(sigh).


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## berndf

Michael Zwingli said:


> That is not what I intend to suggest. What I mean is that all human thought (even mathematical) occurs through the medium of language (as "mathematics", or more precisely, mathematical notation, is a language) and the exercise involved in learning a more synthetic form of expression (determination of proper case, atc.) naturally lends richness, complexity and rigor to cognition.


I am not quite sure I can see what is more _rigorous_ about a strong past tense like he _ran_ (which is synthetic) than a weak past tense like _he loved_ (which essentially is a merged form of the phrasal _he love did_) and what should be even less _rigorous_ than a present perfect _he has travelled _(where auxiliary and main verb are still well separated and is thus the most analytic of the three forms).


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## Michael Zwingli

berndf said:


> I am not quite sure I can see what is more _rigorous_ about a strong past tense like he _ran_ (which is synthetic) than a weak past tense like _he loved..._


The rigor that I mention does not derive from verbal conjugation, but rather primarily from syntactic differences, from the need for expressing the same thoughts in differing ways which results therefrom, and also from the necessity for the determination of proper case in synthetic languages, especially where the number of grammatical cases has diminished and a logical rationale has informed the subsumation of one case into another (as is the situation with Latin, for instance). These necessities introduce a _rigor_ into the process of expression, the learning of which introduces new avenues of cognition.


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## S.V.

Michael Zwingli said:


> If one speaks a highly analytic language such as English or *Spanish*


Going through references like those, "encumbrance" sounds right, when thinking of Spanish & Latin. I would not be surprised if learning German were better for the cognition pathways you mention.  And we'd get the opposite, in German philosophers versed in Latin.


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## berndf

Michael Zwingli said:


> The rigor that I mention does not derive from verbal conjugation, but rather primarily from syntactic differences, from the need for expressing the same thoughts in differing ways which results therefrom, and also from the necessity for the determination of proper case in synthetic languages, especially where the number of grammatical cases has diminished and a logical rationale has informed the subsumation of one case into another (as is the situation with Latin, for instance). These necessities introduce a _rigor_ into the process of expression, the learning of which introduces new avenues of cognition.


I cannot see what this has to do with analytic vs. synthetic. Analytic languages express with syntax rules what synthetic languages express with inflections. Old English was certainly more synthetic than modern English, yet modern English gramar can distinguish things Old English could not. Modern English can distinguish present and future and it can distinguish aspects like progressive, perfect or habitual. All of these things Old English grammar could not distinguish.

And I am not sure these grammaticalised distinctions are always an advantage. German, e.g., has a word for _male doctor _and a word for_ female doctor_ but has no word just for _doctor_. This often is very awkward.


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## Hulalessar

Michael Zwingli said:


> I do maintain that there are different ways of thinking involved, as well.


That is getting into Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which takes you into other fields such as philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. Clearly one language may make distinctions that another does not. However, that does not mean that the distinctions cannot be perceived by the speaker of the language which does not make the distinctions. Spanish has two words for "brown" one meaning light brown and one meaning dark, but no word for what is covered by the English word "brown". If a Spanish speaker wants to know the English for different colours he may point to a colour chart and get an English speaker to tell him. If the English speaker says that both light and dark brown are "brown" the Spanish speaker may erroneously conclude that the English speaker cannot distinguish between the two browns when of course he can.

Colours are trivial. With abstract concepts like "beauty" it gets tricky because, starting with a sceptical approach, you cannot be certain that two native speakers of the same language understand the same thing by a particular word. If you cannot be certain what the native speakers think a word means you are going to have difficulty in establishing whether the speakers of another language have a word that matches. You also have the problem of whether words can express some concepts adequately or at all.

What ought not to be lost sight of by getting too metaphysical is that in practice language functions perfectly well. Each language is a system which, on the whole, serves its native speakers very well to express what they need and want to express. The question to ask about any language is not how its differs from another but what, in terms of its grammar, it can and must do.


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## Michael Zwingli

berndf said:


> I cannot see what this has to do with analytic vs. synthetic. Analytic languages express with syntax rules what synthetic languages express with inflections.


True, but we are not discussing the relative ability of languages to express, but rather the cognitive effects of studying languages different from what one knows. For the speaker of a relatively analytical language such as English, the necessity for proper inflection, especially in a language which has undergone greater or lesser case syncretism, forces the brain to determine applicable context, reference and meaning in ways which are not necessary when expressing thoughts in the well-known language. This naturally introduces a certain beneficial rigor in the expression of thought which would not be experienced otherwise. Perhaps, said rigor may diminish as facility of expression becomes more automatic in a language, which is why I think that the particular study of and the learning how to express thoughts in a language is where the benefit lies. Realize, now, that I have not studied this professionally of academically, and that this is merely my _opinion_, based on personal experience, of the benefit of studying Latin. I may be one of the least well versed folks on this site, when it comes to language theory.



berndf said:


> German...has a word for _male doctor _and a word for_ female doctor_ but has no word just for _doctor_. This often is very awkward.



Are you referring to describing a gender-mixed group of doctors, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

P.S.,
I can think of another benefit to studying Latin. Should one become proficient enough, one can read the sublime Cicero, who must certainly be reckoned as one of the greatest writers in any laguage throughout history (admittedly another opinion). I think that reading and understanding Cicero's complex prose can be viewed as an exercise in and of itself.


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## Olaszinhok

Michael Zwingli said:


> Some linguists have suggested that this is a natural phenomenon within the context of human culture. If one speaks a highly analytic language such as English or Spanish,


English is probably the most analytic IE language. Spanish (and most Romance languages) boasts a highly inflected verbal system. Just a comparison between the two languages:
_*to*_ go - *ir*
_*I*_ go - v_*oy*_
*you* go - v*as*
I *will* go - *iré*
I *would *go - ir*ía* and so on
I will not mention here the complexity of the Spanish Subjuctive in terms of morphology and syntax.
English needs personal pronouns, prepositions and auxiliaries to indicate verb tenses and moods while Spanish mainly uses different endings.
Besides, despite Spanish lost the cases it still preserves (unlike English) the gender and the adjectives can change according to gender and number.


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## pollohispanizado

Quiviscumque said:


> I usually make a little fun of those present Spanish speaking fellows that say they speak "Español latino":_ Anne latine loquimini_


I'm not sure why you would make fun of people for something they didn't even choose to call themselves. Blame the French:



> It was popularized in 1860s France during the reign of Napoleon III. The term Latin America was a part of its attempt to create a French empire in the Americas.[13] Research has shown that the idea that a part of the Americas has a linguistic and cultural affinity with the Romance cultures as a whole can be traced back to the 1830s, in the writing of the French Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier, who postulated that this part of the Americas was inhabited by people of a "Latin race", and that it could, therefore, ally itself with "Latin Europe", ultimately overlapping the Latin Church, in a struggle with "Teutonic Europe", "Anglo-Saxon America," and "Slavic Europe."[14


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## Michael Zwingli

Yes, @Olaszinhok, this is all true. Perhaps I mistakenly characterized Spanish as being "highly" analytic. I withdraw that statement.

For purposes of supporting my suggestion regarding value in the study of Latin, however, verbal inflection is of minor importance, amounting only to memorization of the conjugation patterns, the proper conjugatives being fairly clear once that is accomplished. From a cognitive perspective, the greatest benefit seems, in my own experience, to derive from the need to determine case, again within a system such as Classical Latin, which employs nominal/adjectival inflection but has undergone significant case syncretism. The  benefit accrues from the constant semantic determination involved therewith. Do you know what I am suggesting?  The gist of the OP's question seems to be "Is there any value today in the study of Latin?", and that is one benefit which, again, I remembered from my own experience. I think that this benefit would accrue to a Spanish speaker as readily as to an English speaker, as both of those languages have escewed grammatical case.


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## Michael Zwingli

Quiviscumque said:


> ...I usually make a little fun of those present Spanish speaking fellows that say they speak "Español latino".





pollohispanizado said:


> I'm not sure why you would make fun of people for something they didn't even choose to call themselves. Blame the French:


We are all propagandized by both government and industry, aren't we? Some of the dumb propaganda seems to stick, on occasion.

I am sure from the obvious tone of his post, that @Quiviscumque meant no offense. Along with the more serious discussion, I think we should also be open to a bit of good-natured humor. @Sobakus got mad at my joke yesterday, and @pollohispanizado gets mad today. Maybe taking offense is not the thing called for?

We must ask ourselves what forces drive  the use of terms like "Latino" and "Latin American". The suggestion of a Frenchman over 150 years ago does not account for it. As for "Latino" as a glossonym, I have never heard that, and am unaware that it is so employed. Instead, I thought it purely a demonym used by (the quite diverse) Hispanics of the Western Hemisphere. One hears "Latin Americans" describing themselves as "Latinos", but their language as "Espanol", rather than "(Lengua) Latina". I think that the term "Latino" continues in usage only because it serves an essentially political purpose: to define a political block in contrast to "Anglophone America". The motivation seems politically driven (of course, where there is politics, there are vested interests "pulling the strings"), and the term doesn't seem to have much use apart from that. Again, both politics and "politricks" (as they say in Jamaica) have their way with us far too often, IMHO.


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## pollohispanizado

Michael Zwingli said:


> Maybe taking offense is not the thing called for?


I was just pointing something out that seemed to be unknown. There was a lot of criticism for the use of the word without any desire to find out why it is used. Plus, when is it ever helpful to "make a little fun" of people's identity?


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## Michael Zwingli

pollohispanizado said:


> ...when is it ever helpful to "make a little fun" of people's identity?


Often, if the tone is right, and there is common understanding. A few months ago my friend Mike B. (yes, way too many "Mikes" in the world) and I stopped for gas and coffee at a service station/convenience store near where we live. He gassed the car while I went in for the coffees. When I came out, I placed his coffee on top of the car, saying, "here's your coffee, Bonz". After we had left the station, Mike, who was driving, said, "hey, where's my coffee?" I looked around, and saw Mike's coffee pouring down the rear winshield of the car. My reaction was, "you left it on the roof of the car, ya stupid Polack!" His response to me was, "well, you put it there, you dumb Swizzerkraut!" And, we both laughed our asses off...

Point is, I think that @Quiviscumque's comment was clearly made good-naturedly, and not intended to "wound".


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## pollohispanizado

Michael Zwingli said:


> My reaction was, "you left it on the roof of the car, ya stupid Polack!" His response to me was, "well, you put it there, you dumb Swizzerkraut!" And, we both laughed our asses off...


That's nice. Of course, if a Polish immigrant had heard you, one who perhaps hears that regularly said with contempt at their job or in the streets, they likely wouldn't find it as good natured, regardless of your friend's reaction or your intention.


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## Michael Zwingli

Yes, but my point is that what I said was said to Mike, who is (partly) of Polish ancestry, and what he said was said to myself, who am (partly) of Swiss German ancestry. We could use the tone, context, and our common understanding to determine the meaning of the interaction. In like manner, I think that there are textual clues in @Quiviscumque's post (general tone, and use of the words "a little fun" and "fellows" (certainly of himself, no?) to indicate the tenor in which his post was made. We should be gentle with one another...

I have never heard "Latina" used to refer to Spanish, though, nor ever heard the term "Espanol Latino" at all. Is this "a thing" in the Hispanophone community?


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## pollohispanizado

Michael Zwingli said:


> I have never heard "Latina" used to refer to Spanish, though, nor ever heard the term "Espanol Latino" at all. Is this "a thing" in the Hispanophone community?


Yes. People (in general, though maybe not _all_) from Latin America actively identify as "latino/latina", and they speak some dialect that makes up the hugely diverse dialect continuum known as "español latino(americano)". This is especially true of the "Latin" (as they are commonly called in English) immigrant communities in North America. It's a denomination that gained ground due to the cultural and historial similarites among the former Spanish colonies, as well as the inaccuracy of a geographical one (9 countries and almost half of the Spanish-speaking New World are not in South America) or a linguistic-based one (we don't call North Americans "English", for example). It doesn't help that the US scooped up the name "American" in the 1800s, leaving the rest to define themselves as "hyphen"-Americans.


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## dojibear

pollohispanizado said:


> People (in general, though maybe not _all_) from Latin America actively identify as "latino/latina", and they speak some dialect that makes up the hugely diverse dialect continuum known as "español latino(americano)".


People in the "Latin American" countries speak languages other than Spanish/Portuguese. There were many languages ("native languages") spoken there before Europeans came, and some of those languages are still spoken today. A native language is used more in some areas (or by some people) than Spanish/Portuguese.

For example, the government of Mexico officially recognizes 63 native languages (they can be used when interacting with the government, getting official documents, etc.). Some have only a few speakers left, but 15 have more than 100,000 speakers. More than a million people speak Nahuatl. 

How Many Native Languages Are Spoken In Mexico?

Other countries, being smaller, have fewer native languages. Of course, indigenous language use ignores "country" borders. Aymara is spoken by a million people in an area that is part of Chile, Bolivia and Peru. It is an official language (along with Spanish) in Bolivia and Peru, but only has 20,000 speakers in Chile.


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## Penyafort

pollohispanizado said:


> and they speak some dialect that makes up the hugely diverse dialect continuum known as "español latino(americano)".


Which is more a social label than a linguistic reality, since the continuum is extensive from the Caribbean to the Canary Islands, and Canary Islanders are not Latin Americans.


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## Michael Zwingli

pollohispanizado said:


> the hugely diverse dialect continuum known as "español latino(americano)"


I have not heard of this before now. Not to stray too far from the OP's topic, but are varieties of Spanish dialect in the Americas so alike while at the same time being so different from Castilian to warrant the distinction? Having no personal expertise, I would yet be inclined to think, for instance, that Argentine Spanish is as distant (if not more distant) from Cuban of from Mexican Spanish as it is from Castilian. 


Penyafort said:


> Which is more a social label than a linguistic


I think perhaps this is right. In any case, I have always felt that "Spanish" evidences a fair amount of global uniformity, there being no dialects as different from Castilian as, say, Hatian _Kreyol_ is from standard French. Maybe I am wrong about that.


pollohispanizado said:


> It doesn't help that the US scooped up the name "American" in the 1800s, leaving the rest to define themselves as "hyphen"-Americans.


Yes, a classic case of expropriation, that, but far from a settled matter, I think. I am a bit surprised that a country like, say, Brasil hadn't yet gone into the Olympics calling themselves "America" in direct protest, which would be technically correct.


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## pollohispanizado

Michael Zwingli said:


> I have not heard of this before now. Not to stray too far from the OP's topic, but are varieties of Spanish dialect in the Americas so alike while at the same time being so different from Castilian to warrant the distinction? Having no personal expertise, I would yet be inclined to think, for instance, that Argentine Spanish is as distant (if not more distant) from Cuban of from Mexican Spanish as it is from Castilian


It truely is a continuum. For example, Mexico is a huge country: in the North they speak totally differently than in the South East, where the dialects become more and more similar to Guatemalan dialects, and so on. The dialectal diversity of the big countries is as notable as that between international standard varieties (usually based on the dialect spoken in the capital).


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## dojibear

Michael Zwingli said:


> I am a bit surprised that a country like, say, Brasil hadn't yet gone into the Olympics calling themselves "America" in direct protest, which would be technically correct.


Technically INcorrect, in my opinion. "North America" and "South America" are continent names, not country names. People normally define themselves by country, not continent. Brazilians calling themselves "Americans" would be like Egyptians calling themselves "Africans".


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## Michael Zwingli

dojibear said:


> People normally define themselves by country, not continent.


True.


dojibear said:


> North America" and "South America" are continent names, not country names.


True as well.
BUT, within the context of "Western Culture" (think we all know what that means), the term "America" in it's broadest sense refers to all the lands of the Western Hemisphere, and in actuality, the term was probably first coined to describe the lands of the Carribean rim, not North or South America. From a geographical perspective, Brasilians, Guatemalans and Cubans have as much claim to the appelation "American" as do citizens of the United States. The first use in writing of "America" as a geographical term was by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, in his famous map of the world of year 1507. Waldseemüller used the term to name only what we call _South America _(where Brasil is).


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## pollohispanizado

Michael Zwingli said:


> True.
> 
> True as well.
> BUT, within the context of "Western Culture" (think we all know what that means), the term "America" in it's broadest sense refers to all the lands of the Western Hemisphere, and in actuality, the term was probably first coined to describe the lands of the Carribean rim, not North or South America. From a geographical perspective, Brasilians, Guatemalans and Cubans have as much claim to the appelation "American" as do citizens of the United States. The first use in writing of "America" as a geographical term was by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, in his famous map of the world of year 1507. It was used to name only what we call South America.


A French guy told me yesterday that he doesn't know why Greece is considered Europe...  As usual, many things that we take for granted are grounded in political ideology.

But this is neither here nor there, as this thread is about the status of the Latin language.


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## Quiviscumque

pollohispanizado said:


> I was just pointing something out that seemed to be unknown. There was a lot of criticism for the use of the word without any desire to find out why it is used. Plus, when is it ever helpful to "make a little fun" of people's identity?



Ah, identities... Not getting into a beef, not me, a moderator  I stand corrected, sir!

On the other hand, I must say that the French origin of "Latin America" has been mentioned here by me several times. As far as I know, "Español Latino" is a more recent coinage.


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## dojibear

Michael Zwingli said:


> From a geographical perspective, Brasilians, Guatemalans and Cubans have as much claim to the appelation "American" as do citizens of the United States.


From a geographical perspective that is true. 

But from a country name perspective, the offical name of USA is "the United States of America", reflecting its history: it started as 13 independent colonies/countries/"states" that joined together as one country. That is what the "A" in "USA" stands for.

Having "America" in the country's name led to its citizens calling themselves "Americans". It wasn't their geographical location in the North America continent.


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## Michael Zwingli

dojibear said:


> Having "America" in the country's name led to its citizens calling themselves "Americans". It wasn't their geographical location in the North America continent.


Yes, of course. Originally a group of 13 individual, sovereign states. A bit unfortunate, though, that the founding fathers, when they decided to form a federation of said states, could not think of a name more individualistic in nature... I am enjoying this discussion, but perhaps we should return the OP's thread to him before we wear it out. For my part, I still hope for @Olaszinhok's response to my last reply to him, which was my last on-topic post.


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## pollohispanizado

dojibear said:


> From a geographical perspective that is true.
> 
> But from a country name perspective, the offical name of USA is "the United States of America", reflecting its history: it started as 13 independent colonies/countries/"states" that bjoined together as one country. That is what the "A" in "USA" stands for.
> 
> Having "America" in the country's name led to its citizens calling themselves "Americans". It wasn't their geographical location in the North America continent.



The history of the name is more convoluted than most people realize. The US was almost called _Columbia_:


> The name _Columbia_ not only broke with Britain; it also aligned the United States with newly freed Latin American republics. One of the largest was Gran Colombia, a short-lived state that covered a great deal of northern South America. As Fitz shows, the people of the United States initially greeted Latin American independence with enthusiasm, even naming some towns “Bolivar” after Simón Bolívar, the president at various times of Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru, and Gran Colombia. Today, there are towns called Bolivar in West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York.
> 
> It was the United States’ leap into overseas colonialism that changed things. After fighting a war with Spain in 1898, the United States annexed not only the Spanish colonies of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, but also the non-Spanish lands of Hawai‘i and American Samoa. This was its proud entrance into the imperial club, and the old names—the Republic, the Union, the United States—no longer seemed apt. It wasn’t a republic, it wasn’t a union (which suggests voluntary entry), and it included colonies as well as states.
> 
> As at the nation’s founding, writers proposed new names: Imperial America, the Greater Republic, the Greater United States. But the name that stuck was _America_. It had the virtue of making no reference to unions, republicanism, or statehood.


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## dojibear

Bummer. "Columbia" sounds cooler. And you'd get endless confusion with "Colombia".


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## Michael Zwingli

Please, @pollohispanizado, from what text did you extract the excerpt which you quoted in your post #104 above? I am interested to read further.


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## pollohispanizado

Michael Zwingli said:


> Please, @pollohispanizado, from what text did you extract the excerpt which you quoted in your post #104 above? I am interested to read further.


I had originally heard it on NPR, but the exerpt I took from this random website I found quickly.


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## Penyafort

Michael Zwingli said:


> I have not heard of this before now. Not to stray too far from the OP's topic, but are varieties of Spanish dialect in the Americas so alike while at the same time being so different from Castilian to warrant the distinction? Having no personal expertise, I would yet be inclined to think, for instance, that Argentine Spanish is as distant (if not more distant) from Cuban of from Mexican Spanish as it is from Castilian.


As I said, Caribbean varieties (Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, coastal Venezuelan...) sound close to the Canary Island variety. This Atlantic connection works smoothly as a continuum. At the same time, there is a bit of correlation between what in Spain is Northern vs Southern and in Hispanic America is upland vs coast.

The main reason why some Spanish speakers in the Americas think their dialects are closer among them is because of the fact that most dubbed films in the whole area have got used to a Mexican dubbing which, carefully deprived of localisms, is sold to Hispanic American countries as 'international', 'neutral' or 'Latin American' Spanish. But in reality, formal Mexican or Limeño are closer to formal Northern Spanish than to the variety spoken in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.



Michael Zwingli said:


> I think perhaps this is right. In any case, I have always felt that "Spanish" evidences a fair amount of global uniformity, there being no dialects as different from Castilian as, say, Hatian _Kreyol_ is from standard French. Maybe I am wrong about that.


There are several Spanish-based creoles around the world. One of the most spoken is probably Chabacano, spoken in the Zamboanga peninsula of the Philippines. (*Here *you can see the creolised structure of it with regard to Spanish. Many other major Philippine languages -Tagalog, Cebuano- have a large lexical base from Spanish, but they preserve their Malayo-Polynesian structure.)


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## Michael Zwingli

Penyafort said:


> The main reason why some Spanish speakers in the Americas think their dialects are closer among them is because of the fact that most dubbed films in the whole area have got used to a Mexican dubbing which, carefully deprived of localisms, is sold to Hispanic American countries as 'international', 'neutral' or 'Latin American' Spanish.


Now that you mention it, a Puerto Rican friend of mine told me something of that nature once. It seems natural that media, as much as politics, influences language across national borders. We don't notice that phenomenon much in the U.S., since we are largely an exporter of media; Mexico is probably similar. People in nations which largely import media, though, must be effected quite a bit. This begs a question which is way off topic: is the ubiquity of mass media experienced by modern man a culturally, socially, and personally healthy thing?


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## pollohispanizado

Penyafort said:


> The main reason why some Spanish speakers in the Americas think their dialects are closer among them is because of the fact that most dubbed films in the whole area have got used to a Mexican dubbing which, carefully deprived of localisms, is sold to Hispanic American countries as 'international', 'neutral' or 'Latin American' Spanish. But in reality, formal Mexican or Limeño are closer to formal Northern Spanish than to the variety spoken in Buenos Aires and Montevideo


This is why I carefully steer clear of any mention of standard national varieties, because they are unnaturally chosen to reflect the linguistic standards proposed by the RAE. In reality, the diversity of the Spanish language as it is most used (i.e. in the streets, in conversation) is such that, if all the countries stopped using more neutral language to ease communication, mutual intelligibility would drop hugely. When I talk to any person who is not Mexican as I would a Mexican person, 100% of the time they don't understand the coloquialisms (even if they know one word or another due to having seen shows or movies from Mexico), and the coloquial use is where a language lives and breathes. As I mentioned, the internal diversity of Mexican or Colombian Spanish --or Peninsular Spanish, for that matter-- is far more notable than the difference between international standards. Given the right time and isolation, Spanish could end up going the way of Latin, with many daughter languages lexified by various substrates and adstrates. This is evident even in the current dialects, with the regions that had the least contact with the Metropolis having the most divergent features (considerable vocabulary from indigenous languages, and not only for flora and fauna; el voseo in Central America and historically isolated areas of Colombia, Venezuela, etc.; el rehilamiento del dialecto porteño, etc.) Imagínense, si Andrés Bello no hubiera intentado hacer que los chilenos se avergonzaran de su hablar (tratar a la gente de vos, ¡qué barbaridad!), más difícil aún sería que los entendieran el resto de los hispanohablantes.


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## Terio

Michael Zwingli said:


> I think perhaps this is right. In any case, I have always felt that "Spanish" evidences a fair amount of global uniformity, there being no dialects as different from Castilian as, say, Hatian _Kreyol_ is from standard French. Maybe I am wrong about that.


Haitian _Kreyol_ is by no way a dialect of French. It's a totally different language on it's own. It uses many words of French origine, but without studying it, a French speaker cannot understand it.


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## Terio

dojibear said:


> Technically INcorrect, in my opinion. "North America" and "South America" are continent names, not country names. People normally define themselves by country, not continent. Brazilians calling themselves "Americans" would be like Egyptians calling themselves "Africans".


What is curious, is that America is a country in North America. Anyway, the real name of the country is United States of America.


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## Michael Zwingli

Terio said:


> ...the real name of the country is United States of America


Yes, a pure descriptor used as a country name. The ancient Romans would be mortified...such a lack of imagination!


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## pollohispanizado

Terio said:


> What is curious, is that America is a country in North America. Anyway, the real name of the country is United States of America.


The name change coincides with the general adoption of Manifest Destiny, so I wouldn't quite call it "curious", but instead "calculated".



> Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Monroe, wrote, "it is impossible not to look forward to distant times when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits, and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent".


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## Sobakus

Michael Zwingli said:


> If one speaks a highly analytic language such as English or Spanish, there is immense cognitive value in learning a highly synthetic language such as Latin or Ancient Greek. This is a major reason underlying the emphasis of Latin and Greek within the educational Trivium.


If you're wondering why this remark has received numerous objections, it's because it's a well-known fallacy/placebo. Cue Gerhards & Sawert & Kohler (2019). _The Emperor’s Old Clothes: Fiction and Reality of the Benefits of Knowledge of Latin_ (it's in German but a translator like Deepl should work well):


> Although Latin is a non-spoken language and therefore has no communicative value, the number of students choosing Latin as a foreign language at school has increased over time. Several studies have shown that learning Latin does neither improve logical thinking, nor the acquisition of other foreign languages, nor linguistic abilities in the mother tongue. Despite the empirical lack of benefits associated with the acquisition of ancient languages, people might believe in such benefits and behave in accordance with their construction of reality. Based on a survey conducted among parents of students at German High schools (“Gymnasium”), we show that parents attribute extensively transfer effects to learning Latin. Furthermore, people with knowledge of Latin are rated more positively than those with knowledge of modern languages with respect to their general and cultural education, as well as their social status. We also demonstrate that although the illusory of the benefits of Latin is prevalent in all educational groups, it is particularly pronounced among the higher educated. They construct a social reality of which they are the greatest beneficiaries by using Latin as a symbolic capital.


Incidentally you're on the right track when you say:


Michael Zwingli said:


> [...]the necessity for proper inflection, especially in a language which has undergone greater or lesser case syncretism, forces the brain to determine applicable context, reference and meaning in ways which are not necessary when expressing thoughts in the well-known language.[...]Perhaps, said rigor may diminish as facility of expression becomes more automatic in a language


What you describe is nothing more than a coping strategy for poor comprehension. The rigorous mental struggle to determine case compensates for the brain's inability to successfully process language automatically. As its ability to do so improves, so does comprehension, and the need for "hunting for verbs" disappears. In fact the less one relies to such mental wrestling, the quicker one's brain will internalise the language, in no small part because conscious metalinguistic analysis starves the finite mental resources and is massively inefficient, which results in massively slow progress and serves to demotivate all but the most persistent (the infamous tales of poor students laboriously decoding 4 Aeneid sentences per lesson).

The fact that you struggle with Latin's relatively simple case system but not its complex tense system is determined by your native language's possessing a likewise complex tense system while lacking case - though admittedly Latin's notorious syncretism of many various endings doesn't help things.


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## Michael Zwingli

Sobakus said:


> The rigorous mental struggle to determine case


You can say that again! (My experience precisely...)


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## berndf

Sobakus said:


> The fact that you struggle with Latin's relatively simple case system but not its complex tense system is determined by your native language's possessing a likewise complex tense system while lacking case - though admittedly Latin's notorious syncretism of many various endings doesn't help things.


That is a good comparison. For me as a German, the case system of Latin is piece of cake compared to struggle to determine the correct aspect in the for a German extremely confusing English tense system.


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## Michael Zwingli

berndf said:


> For me as a German, the case system of Latin is piece of *case*


Haha, a beautiful "Freudian slip"...
I have heard that Germans have much less difficulty with Latin case than do English learners. I assume that is true for many Slavic speakers as well. I have always been envious.


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## dojibear

In the US, I studied Latin in high school. Latin cases (noun declension) were very easy. After all, we use all of them in English. 

Putting an ending on a noun to express that idea, instead of using a preposition or word order? Why, that's simpler!


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## Michael Zwingli

dojibear said:


> Latin cases (noun declension) were very easy.


If you mean memorizing the inflectional suffixes, then you are right...piece of cake, but in my experience, understanding the nature of the grammatical relationships which determine proper case is often quite troubling. For instance, in trying to say "Terentia is going to be the wife of Cicero", determining the proper case of Cicero can be difficult. A beginning English learner would say "well..._of Cicero_...well, genitive, then", and he would, of course, be wrong. Because the concept of future possession is grammatically implied in the thought, we must use the _dativus possessivus_ for Cicero, and so: _Ciceroni Terentia uxor erit_. (And this is a simple example!) For speakers of English, who do not have to consider case at all, such mental exercises can be, as @Sobakus has noted, "rigorous"...at least they were for myself.


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## Sobakus

They will in fact be quite a bit less wrong than if they reason the way you propose. Indeed, what would it tell somebody to know that the concept of possession is implied when the Genitive case is the prototypical means of expressing possession in Latin? This is a deductive rule of the type that are wielded as a rod by the teacher to prod the students - the teacher shouts "pay attention! possession is implied!" - and the poor student understands that even though they understand nothing, what they said is wrong, and the correct answer to "why"? is "because possession is implied". They might even convince themselves they understand what that means until asked enough questions to which they haven't been given answers to by their teacher. This is a blind person trying to answer what's the difference between spheres and cubes.

The only sure-fire way to know how something is actually said in some language short of asking a native speaker is by looking at the relevant words in a dictionary or a corpus, and optionally to internalise the reasons inductively. In our case one will first of all find that possessive Genitives and pronouns are perfectly grammatical. One may also find the Dative used in superficially similar contexts. The question one will have to answer then is what's the reason for the difference, which they might not be able to answer immediately, f.ex. because they haven't internalised the use of either case, or can't understand the entire context. If this isn't an issue, after comparing enough contexts they should see that the possessive Gen./pron. is used when the implicit question is "whose wife", focussing on describing the wife; and the Dative is used when it's "in relation to whom, who's being affected by her being a (such and such) wife". This isn't far from the distinction made by English in "he's my brother" vs. "who is he to you?" (though "he's a brother to me" is reserved for metaphorical brotherhood).

At that point it will be intuitively obvious that "Terentia is going to be the wife of Cicero" calls for the Genitive if we're answering "whose wife is she going to be", and for the Dative if we're answering "who is she going be a wife to" (_tibi numquam uxor erō_ "I'll never be your wife! = I'll never marry you").


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## Michael Zwingli

Sobakus said:


> ...the Dative if we're answering "who is she going be a wife to"...


Quite right! The statement could be rephrased in English as "Terentia is going to be (a) wife _to Cicero_", wherein the particular aspect of the _real_ relationship between Cicero and Terentia which results in the _grammatical_ relationship necessitating the dative in Latin is clearer. That type of construction, however, while grammatical, would yet be irregular and unusual in Standard English.


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## Sobakus

Michael Zwingli said:


> Quite right! The statement could be rephrased in English as "Terentia is going to be (a) wife _to Cicero_", wherein the particular aspect of the _real_ relationship between Cicero and Terentia which results in the _grammatical_ relationship necessitating the dative in Latin is clearer. That type of construction, however, while grammatical, would yet be irregular and unusual in Standard English.


The Dative in Latin is not necessitated by any real relationship. You would use it if for example to say that she's going to be a wife all right, and that Cicero is the person she's going to be a wife in relation to. It expresses a particular type of relationship with Cicero its focal point. In that same situation you could use the "to" construction in English - cf. this. If you just wanted to answer the question "whose wife is Terentia going to be?" or "who is she going to be?", you'd use the Genitive in Latin. Using the Dative in that situation would be as strange as using "to" in English.


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## berndf

Sobakus said:


> (_tibi numquam uxor erō_ "I'll never be your wife! = I'll never marry you").


I if you want to make the logic of the sentence clear, I think a better translations would be: *T*_*ibi *numquam uxor erō = *To you* I'll never be a wife_, or in German:_ *Dir* werde ich nie ein Weib sein_.


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## Sobakus

berndf said:


> I if you want to make the logic of the sentence clear, I think a better translations would be: *T*_*ibi *numquam uxor erō = *To you* I'll never be a wife_, or in German:_ *Dir* werde ich nie ein Weib sein_.


I was hoping this logic was clear from my previous "who is she going be *a wife to*", so I went for the idiomatic translation in order to highlight that while logically it ought to be "to", nevertheless English expresses this using possessive pronouns and 's. This causes confusion to both English natives and learners (just like possessive pronouns instead of articles).


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## Michael Zwingli

Sobakus said:


> The Dative...expresses a particular type of relationship with Cicero its focal point.


Yes. Even though the verb is intransitive, Cicero takes on a role similar to the indirect object in this sense.



Sobakus said:


> It expresses a particular type of relationship with Cicero its focal point.


If I understand you, you mean that in response to the way the question is framed, "Cicero" should take the genitive or the dative in the response? If asked _Cuius Terentia uxor erit?_, the answer should be Ciceroni etc., while if the question is _Quae Ciceronis uxor erit?_, "Cicero" takes the genitive in the reply? If, however, the statement is not made in reply to a question, then "Cicero" takes either dative or the genitive as a clue to the speaker's focus?


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## Sobakus

Michael Zwingli said:


> If I understand you, you mean that in response to the way the question is framed, "Cicero" should take the genitive or the dative in the response? If asked _Cuius Terentia uxor erit?_, the answer should be Ciceroni etc., while if the question is _Quae Ciceronis uxor erit?_, "Cicero" takes the genitive in the reply? If, however, the statement is not made in reply to a question, then "Cicero" takes either dative or the genitive as a clue to the speaker's focus?


No, the question and the reply should always be in the same case, otherwise it's a non-sequitur. The case used in these question-answer pairs depends on the information/meaning you're trying to express, as already described. I made the question explicit in order to demonstrate what new information the statement conveys - it doesn't have to be said in response to an actual question, but every sensible statement must convey some new information and so has a corresponding question.


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