# From Latin to Italian



## Hulalessar

*Split off from **this thread**.*
*Frank, moderator EHL*

There are two separate streams: one is the gradual emergence of the Romance languages from (Vulgar) Latin and the other the continued use of Latin. The two streams have their sources going at last two millennia. The Latin of Cicero no more reflects the speech of everyday life in Rome in the first century BC than than a _Times_ leader reflects the everyday speech of London today.

The waters of the two streams mingled from time to time and indeed continue to mingle. If Medieval Latin reflected the local Romance language, then Renaissance Latin attempted to eliminate it. Standard Italian has been subjected to deliberate archaising.


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## franz rod

> a différenciation du roman ŕ partir du latin est plus tardive en Italie: les premiers textes italiens ne sont attestés qu'au Xe sičcle.



The first attestation of a "proto-Italian" is the "indovinello veronese" of the 8th century not 10th century.



> Standard Italian has been subjected to deliberate archaising.



Why do you think this?  Some languages change more, others, like Italian or Sardinian, less.


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## Hulalessar

franz rod said:


> The first attestation of a "proto-Italian" is the "indovinello veronese" of the 8th century not 10th century.



It is not universally agreed that the "indovinello veronese" is the first attestation of something that can be described as Italian rather than Latin



franz rod said:


> Why do you think this?  Some languages change more, others, like Italian or Sardinian, less.



The language situation within what is now Italy has always been complex. Since it is the centre from which Latin was spread there is, as one would expect, a wide diversity of languages descended from Latin some of which may have a sub-stratum of non-Latin Italic (or indeed non-Italic) languages. Naturally all these peoples needed to communicate with each other and a sort of middle ground  emerged which, with the prestige of Florence and the Tre Corone, was largely based on Tuscan. The need became more urgent with the invention of printing. The literary language of the Tre Corone offered a shining example that people felt compelled to follow and had the added advantage of not actually being used by any region, the Tuscan vernacular having moved away from the language of the Tre Corone.

150 years ago, which is a short time in the history of a language, only a very small percentage of the population of Italy spoke "Italian" and it is therefore for the majority of the population only a recently acquired language. The language learned is to a significant extent an artificial language, rather than one which has evolved naturally. (The same can of course be said of many standard languages.)

As I understand it, Sardinian is only conservative phonologically.


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## franz rod

> It is not universally agreed that the "indovinello veronese" is the first attestation of something that can be described as Italian rather than Latin



"_Se pareba boves, alba pratàlia aràba 
__et albo versòrio teneba, et negro sèmen seminaba"_

This is Latin? Surely not. There was no more noun declension. This is an archaic Italian dialect.




> The language situation within what is now Italy has always been complex. Since it is the centre from which Latin was spread there is, as one would expect, a wide diversity of languages descended from Latin some of which may have a sub-stratum of non-Latin Italic (or indeed non-Italic) languages. Naturally all these peoples needed to communicate with each other and a sort of middle ground emerged which, with the prestige of Florence and the Tre Corone, was largely based on Tuscan. The need became more urgent with the invention of printing. The literary language of the Tre Corone offered a shining example that people felt compelled to follow and had the added advantage of not actually being used by any region, the Tuscan vernacular having moved away from the language of the Tre Corone.
> 
> 150 years ago, which is a short time in the history of a language, only a very small percentage of the population of Italy spoke "Italian" and it is therefore for the majority of the population only a recently acquired language. The language learned is to a significant extent an artificial language, rather than one which has evolved naturally. (The same can of course be said of many standard languages.)



Well, it's not a good justification to explain the situation of Italian because this is the situation of all standard languages: the languages that we call French, German, Spanish are at first only a local dialect so everywhere the language situation was and maybe is complex.  Only some dialects become languages thanks to their cultural or political importance.  More over diglossia is diffused in all regions (with the continuous influences between the "upper"  language and popular one)  and everywhere the writing has brought conservatice tendencies .
Sardinian is considered the most conservative neo Latin language not only phonologically.  Maybe has Sardinian has been subjected to deliberate archaising? Surely not.


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## Hulalessar

franz rod said:


> "_Se pareba boves, alba pratàlia aràba
> __et albo versòrio teneba, et negro sèmen seminaba"_
> 
> This is Latin? Surely not. There was no more noun declension. This is an archaic Italian dialect.



It is certainly not classical Latin. Whether it is very late Latin or very early Italian is though probably no more than a question of labelling. Any point on the continuum from Latin to Italian that you point to and say: "Before this date is Latin and after Italian" is going to be arbitrary. I also feel the text is perhaps rather too short to draw too many conclusions from it and that is perhaps why the experts disagree. Whether Latin or Italian it is obviously a significant text in the history of Italian.




franz rod said:


> Well, it's not a good justification to explain the situation of Italian because this is the situation of all standard languages: the languages that we call French, German, Spanish are at first only a local dialect so everywhere the language situation was and maybe is complex.  Only some dialects become languages thanks to their cultural or political importance.  More over diglossia is diffused in all regions (with the continuous influences between the "upper"  language and popular one)  and everywhere the writing has brought conservatice tendencies.



I agree. However, no two situations are alike. Standards have arisen in different ways with what may be called a conscious input varying in degree. In the case of Italian that conscious input was to engage in deliberate archaising. The relative conservatism of Italian may also in part be explained by the fact that in the Middle Ages Tuscan was the most conservative of the Italian vernaculars, which in turn may be explained by Tuscan having an Etruscan sub-stratum.



franz rod said:


> Sardinian is considered the most conservative neo Latin language not only phonologically.  Maybe has Sardinian has been subjected to deliberate archaising? Surely not.



Since I know nothing about Sardinian it would be unwise for me to comment.


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## franz rod

> It is certainly not classical Latin. Whether it is very late Latin or very early Italian is though probably no more than a question of labelling. Any point on the continuum from Latin to Italian that you point to and say: "Before this date is Latin and after Italian" is going to be arbitrary. I also feel the text is perhaps rather too short to draw too many conclusions from it and that is perhaps why the experts disagree. Whether Latin or Italian it is obviously a significant text in the history of Italian.


Well, every name is arbitrary so maybe we can call nowdays Italian a "modern Latin", but the "indovinello veronese" has some features (there's no more noun declension, some consonants in the end of substantives and verbs dissapear, some vocals change) that link it more to "so-called" Italian than Latin.



> Standards have arisen in different ways with what may be called a conscious input varying in degree. In the case of Italian that conscious input was to engage in deliberate archaising. The relative conservatism of Italian may also in part be explained by the fact that in the Middle Ages Tuscan was the most conservative of the Italian vernaculars, which in turn may be explained by Tuscan having an Etruscan sub-stratum.


The situation of Italian is more complex: you spoke about "tre corone" as if Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarca had written in the same way but this didn't happened.  Italian is not the product of a deliberate archaising (Dante for example suggest the importance of use Italian instead of Latin) but, like in any other languages, the result of different tendencies.
Are you sure that Tuscan is the most conservative vernaculars in Italy?
Etruscan sub-stratum?  The population of Etruria was deeply changed by the allocation of veteran legionaries under Sulla's dictatorship.

Unfortunately my poor English doesn't allow me to express exactly what I want to say.


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## sokol

franz rod said:


> The situation of Italian is more complex: you spoke about "tre corone" as if Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarca had written in the same way but this didn't happened.  Italian is not the product of a deliberate archaising (Dante for example suggest the importance of use Italian instead of Latin) but, like in any other languages, the result of different tendencies.



Unfortunately I don't know much about possible archaising tendencies in Italian; but I do know that in Italy Latin was used longer than elsewhere for written purposes, it took Italian quite long to emerge as a language of literature, compared with Spanish and especially with French.

And while Latin was still widely used it might still have had a considerable influence on Italian - if not deliberate, possibly (no language planning existed then, at Dante's time and in the centuries before him - of that I think we can be sure).

Concerning the name you're of course right - in theory, the name of the language is entirely arbitrary, and if any language could claim to be the closest kin to Latin then certainly Italian would have the right to do so.

And as the name's arbitrary anyway we might as well stick to tradition and use "Latin" for the variety of Latin used by the Church in the Middle Ages and the Vulgar Latin spoken in the 5th/6th century while Italian should be attributed to Dante's language and the language spoken of the Italian population since probably the 10th century (or earlier?).

There has been a transitional period between, say, 5th and 10th century of which we don't know much because the written language was Latin. I'm sure Italian linguists will have some idea about this period - but I, unfortunately, haven't which is why I'd rather not offer guesswork here.


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## franz rod

> I do know that in Italy Latin was used longer than elsewhere for written purposes, it took Italian quite long to emerge as a language of literature, compared with Spanish and especially with French.



Compared with Spanish or French? You should say compared to Provencal.
At the end of 14th century Italian already had a literature tradition and in the 15th century it  was used as a "language of culture" in all Italy (compared to Spanish, 1492, or French 1539).



> And while Latin was still widely used it might still have had a considerable influence on Italian - if not deliberate, possibly (no language planning existed then, at Dante's time and in the centuries before him - of that I think we can be sure).



Latin influenced mainly the vocabulary (phenomenon spread in all Europe): If you read a text in medieval Latin you can recognize that the syntax is totally different from classical Latin (it seems that every-day speech influences Latin not the contrary as I saw reading the statutes of my city and other documents).


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## berndf

franz rod said:


> Compared with Spanish or French? You should say compared to Provencal.
> At the end of 14th century Italian already had a literature tradition and in the 15th century it was used as a "language of culture" in all Italy (compared to Spanish, 1492, or French 1539).


I think, Sokol was referring to Old French which had already many characteristics of an official and literary language in its own rights in the Early Capetian dynasty (11th century).


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## sokol

berndf said:


> I think, Sokol was referring to Old French which had already many characteristics of an official and literary language in its own rights in the Early Capetian dynasty (11th century).



Exactly, and an early French version even is attested in the Oaths of Strasbourg while at the time in Italy Latin was still used for written purposes.
(We may assume that in the streets 9th century Italian was as much developed as French, only difference being that French was already written then, while Italian was not.)

I am not talking about _*quality*_ of literature (which is, for a historical linguist, rather pointless ) but about _*first attested written forms*_ of a language - and there's no doubt that Italian was a latecomer in this department.


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## berndf

sokol said:


> Exactly, and an early French version even is attested in the Oaths of Strasbourg while at the time in Italy Latin was still used for written purposes.


I did not mention the Strasbourg oaths on purpose, because one can argue that they are written representation of spoken vernecular. I think by positioning the beginning of literary Fench in the 11th century you are more on the safe side.


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## Hulalessar

All the Romance languages spoken in Italy are best regarded, at least historically, as dialects of Latin, rather than dialects of Italian. One of these dialects is today called Italian. If we compare this dialect not only with other dialects of Latin such as French, Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese, but also with the other dialects of Latin spoken in Italy, we may conclude that Italian (with perhaps one or two other dialects) has moved the least distance away from Latin without perhaps enquiring too closely precisely what we mean by that.

One of the reasons for the conservative tendencies of Italian may be that Tuscan developed from the Latin as spoken by the Etruscans. Now if anyone has to learn a language which has some degree of mutual intelligibility with his own there is a high chance that he will not bother to learn it well. It is quite possible therefore that when the non-Latin Italic speaking peoples who were absorbed by the Romans started to use Latin that they did not trouble to learn it properly, or at least spoke a form that was highly influenced by their own language. (If that is the case then it may go some way to explaining the diversity of varieties of speech in Italy.) Etruscan was a non-Italic (and indeed non-Indo-European) language. When the Etruscans learned Latin they learned “proper” Latin properly and may even have spoken it “better” than the average inhabitant of Rome. There may have been a sub-stratum of Etruscan, but it would not have interfered in the same way as an Italic language; probably no more that any Celtic language forms a sub-stratum to any form of English spoken in the British Isles.

So, by the time we get to the Tre Corone, Tuscan was probably already conservative compared to other vernaculars. What happened after that is much better documented and I refer to what I said above. I think that Italian has been subject to two archaising forces. The first is the understandable feeling (remembering that Rome is in Italy) that Italian is indeed Modern Latin and the second the reverence for the Tre Corone.


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## Outsider

Hulalessar said:


> One of the reasons for the conservative tendencies of Italian may be that Tuscan developed from the Latin as spoken by the Etruscans. Now if anyone has to learn a language which has some degree of mutual intelligibility with his own there is a high chance that he will not bother to learn it well. It is quite possible therefore that when the non-Latin Italic speaking peoples who were absorbed by the Romans started to use Latin that they did not trouble to learn it properly, or at least spoke a form that was highly influenced by their own language. (If that is the case then it may go some way to explaining the diversity of varieties of speech in Italy.) Etruscan was a non-Italic (and indeed non-Indo-European) language. When the Etruscans learned Latin they learned “proper” Latin properly and may even have spoken it “better” than the average inhabitant of Rome. There may have been a sub-stratum of Etruscan, but it would not have interfered in the same way as an Italic language; probably no more that any Celtic language forms a sub-stratum to any form of English spoken in the British Isles.


Those hypotheses can probably be tested by analysing the existing Latin inscriptions from those regions.


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## elpoderoso

Outsider said:


> Those hypotheses can probably be tested by analysing the existing Latin inscriptions from those regions.


 
Wouldn't the written/inscribed Latin of these regions have been the same as the Latin of Rome and not reflective of their spoken Latin?


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## Outsider

There were some regional variations in written Latin, at least in the late/medieval period. If such variations could be found in the classical period as well, this would support the hypothesis that 'the non-Latin Italic speaking peoples who were absorbed by the Romans started to use Latin that they did not trouble to learn it properly, or at least spoke a form that was highly influenced by their own language'.


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## sokol

Outsider said:


> There were some regional variations in written Latin, at least in the late/medieval period. If such variations could be found in the classical period as well, this would support the hypothesis that 'the non-Latin Italic speaking peoples who were absorbed by the Romans started to use Latin that they did not trouble to learn it properly, or at least spoke a form that was highly influenced by their own language'.



Unfortunately only few inscriptions in Vulgar Latin survived the ravages of time - noticeably those in the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum which probably aren't too relevant here as this region is showing some regional dialect variation (Oscan dialect, and some Greek influence).

I only remember dimly that those graffiti showed some variation which mostly is traced back to Oscan dialect, in the classical period of course.

Other sources are Latin comedies, e. g. Cena Trimalchionis (first century AD) where Trimalchio, the upstart, uses hypercorrect forms ("h" in places where there never was an "h" in proper Latin - which points to the fact that drop of "h" already was very widespread in Vulgar Latin at the time).

But as said above already, I only have knowledge of few and tiny snippets of the history of Latin/Italian language - all I can do is point out some of them and hope for somebody more knowledgeable to elaborate.


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