# How fast languages change?



## effeundici

_First thought_: Yesterday I was watching an old Italian movie shot and dubbed in the 40's.

The movie was horrible but I was curious to catch a difference between modern Italian and Italian spoken 60 years ago.

Actually,with big surprise, I realized that the only difference was a heavy usage of the formal Voi (second plural), nowadays used only in Southern Italy.

All verbs, adjectives, expressions were alive and modern and pronounced exactly the same.

_Second thought :_ Am I right if I say that in 360 after Christ, people still spoke Latin in Italy? I think yes. Am I right if I say that in 960 after Christ people spoke Italian in Italy? Surely yes considering that the first written document in Italian language dates back exactly to that year.

Question: How is it possible that in 600 years Latin changed to Italian and in 60 years I cannot appreciate any difference?


----------



## Alxmrphi

effeundici said:


> _First thought_: Yesterday I was watching an old Italian movie shot and dubbed in the 40's.
> 
> The movie was horrible but I was curious to catch a difference between modern Italian and Italian spoken 60 years ago.
> 
> Actually,with big surprise, I realized that the only difference was a heavy usage of the formal Voi (second plural), nowadays used only in Southern Italy.
> 
> All verbs, adjectives, expressions were alive and modern and pronounced exactly the same.
> 
> _Second thought :_ Am I right if I say that in 360 after Christ, people still spoke Latin in Italy? I think yes. Am I right if I say that in 960 after Christ people spoke Italian in Italy? Surely yes considering that the first written document in Italian language dates back exactly to that year.
> 
> Question: How is it possible that in 600 years Latin changed to Italian and in 60 years I cannot appreciate any difference?



I think the number 540 might be relevant to your answer! (_Vedo che hai trovato una casa per la tua domanda_)

Basically I think the word revolution is also relevant, maybe there was a change that prompted a need for a new language, but I can understand what you mean, for English, it developed such a massive amount, but there are links etc, the same language, while Latin -> Italian is really a whole new language, grammar structure, dropping (essentially) of the case system, etc etc

_D'altronde_.... maybe this example was poor because I know if I gave you 10 things to which with Italian from the 1940s, you would find an amazing amount of difference, I think it's a bit strange you found this, maybe the language used was a bit limited in the sense that the parts that'd sound different might belong to a particular register that isn't used in the film. With another 10 films from the same era, I think you would see a big difference and would be able to see the development.

*Homework*: Watch 10 more films and then post back here with a more informed mind


----------



## effeundici

I think your thoughts cannot be discounted but let me tell you that I still think that the change of Latin in the first millemiun was much quicker than the change of Italian in the second millenium.

The first written document in Italian language is dated 960 a.c.

_*Sao ka kelle terre per kelle fini que ki contene trenta anni le possette parte Sancti Benedicti.* _
 
_Modern Italian : So che quelle terre entro quei confini che li contiene trenta anni le possedette la parte di San Benedetto_

(I know that those lands within those borders which contain them, belonged for 30 years to the organization of Saint Benedetto)

Someone who knows Latin could translate this into Latin and we could see that the difference from Latin to old Italian is much mich bigger than the difference from old Italian to modern Italian.

But the elapsed time is exactly the same :1.000 years.


----------



## sokol

effeundici said:


> Someone who knows Latin could translate this into Latin and we could see that the difference from Latin to old Italian is much mich bigger than the difference from old Italian to modern Italian.
> 
> But the elapsed time is exactly the same :1.000 years.


Well: languages change according to sociocultural and political developments; in a stable society change is likely to be slower and less profound than in troubled times.

Apart from that change happens on several levels: in the Roman Empire you have to differentiate between Vulgar Latin and educated speech of Latin orators (and probably one or two stylistic levels which are in-between).
It is known from classical comedies that some changes which already existed in Vulgar Latin were avoided by educated speakers, like the development of rather strict syntactic rules of Vulgar Latin compared to the relatively free syntax of Classical Latin (which orators used extensively); Seneca was one of the few who slightly deviated from the classical style and who employed a word order which has a "more natural" feeling to speakers of modern European languages.
(Also I posted yesterday about Cena Trimalchionis and hypercorrect "h" which shows that dropping of "h" already existed at Petronius' times.)

So there was an overlap, changes which became obvious only with the first written Italian documents in the middle ages actually go back a thousand years (but weren't adopted fully then, or only in Vulgar Latin).

It would be interesting to compare Vulgar Latin of Petronius' or Seneca's time with medieval Italian - but there might not exist a grammar of Vulgar Latin as spoken then by the lower classes (also it would be difficult to reconstruct one as most Latin documents we know are written in classical Latin - in the Latin language used by orators and poets).

This I think shows that language change partly is quicker to happen in non-standard variety while the standardised variety is conservative and tries to prevent change.
If you take a look at Italian I am sure that at the level of colloquial speech there was much more change over the last 60 or so years than in standard language - right?

Another remark concerning Italian - it has changed little since the Middle Ages if you compare with other languages (like French, English, German where there were radical changes).
So it also depends on language and its particular history too.


Anyway, it is all but *impossible *to say "language changes (say) 5% of its structure over a period of (say) 100 years": that's not predictable, it all depends on several factors:
- historical and socioeconomical developments might introduce new words (taken over from new migrant groups, or made necessary because of new technologies, etc.: humans needed a whole new vocabulary when they moved from gatherer-and-hunter-societies to agricultural ones);
- new influences of neighbouring languages or "world languages" due to changes in the political weight of speakers of those languages (like English replacing French as the most widespread language of business and culture in the 20th century);
- conservationist movements to cleanse a language of loans (which actually does not really conservate language as it once was but invents new words with the means of the own language for new things, rather than loan a term - like Spanish "hilo" for English "thread": a Spaniard from the early 20th century would not understand a sentence where "hilo" is used for "(forum) thread" because the internet didn't exist then);
and many more.


To conclude, I am sure that Italian has indeed changed since World War II. Only the change is not very obvious because standard language has remained (it seems) rather conservative.
If you take a look at Italian as spoken in the year 2500 AD one might discover that some tendencies already present around about 2000 in colloquial speech made their way to standard Italian, and changed the language structure significantly: to give a though experiment.


----------



## palomnik

I'm not an expert on language change, but a couple of observations are in order:

-in the 1940's there was still a tendency in media to prefer to be somewhat conservative in the colloquial levels used.

-languages tend to change slower phonetically and syntactically with the spread of literacy among the speakers of the language.


----------



## Alxmrphi

palomnik said:


> I'm not an expert on language change, but a couple of observations are in order:
> 
> -in the 1940's there was still a tendency in media to prefer to be somewhat conservative in the colloquial levels used.
> 
> -languages tend to change slower phonetically and syntactically with the spread of literacy among the speakers of the language.



Personally taking a current example now, how much stuff like text language or internet language provides a good basis to argue that with this massive (current) spread, it's probably more year by year than in the last 30.

Also, a spread of literacy can lead to many people becoming bored with certain words and, they're always on the hunt to over exaggerate what they want to say combine words and adapt them (to then also become plain and boring in the future). I was thinking about this when I read a BBC article titled "When did 100% stop being enough", and people had to start saying 110%, then 150% etc ... with a lot more readers and writers I think this has an affect as well.

Not to argue against your point or anything but I just wanted to point out there are loads of other factors that can affect it, the idea of a mass single language making things steady makes absolute perfect sense to me.


----------



## PABLO DE SOTO

The spread of literacy makes the language more uniform and the regional variations tend to approach the standard version of the given language, so the regional variations do change because of the spread of literacy.


----------



## federicoft

effeundici said:


> Question: How is it possible that in 600 years Latin changed to Italian and in 60 years I cannot appreciate any difference?



Just to address the particular question, Italian has undergone significant reorganization since the 40s, especially in spoken language (maybe that's why we usually don't realise how much has it changed). While we can still find the language spoken sixty years ago perfectly natural, the language spoken today would have certainly left disconcerted our forefathers.

Just think of the simplification of the pronominal system. 
The 3rd person subject pronouns (_egli, ella, essi_) are not used anymore; the object pronouns (_lui, lei, loro_) are used instead.  
_Gli_ is now used for both singular and plural as dative pronoun; the plural pronoun _loro_ is almost obsolete in this usage.
The generic, uninflected _che _is used instead of many declinable pronouns (article/preposition+_cui_/_quale_).
The demonstrative pronouns have reduced from three (_questo, codesto, quello_) to two (_questo, quello_). The neuter demonstrative pronoun _ciò _is also often replaced by _questo_.
etc.

This was just an example, there are many other notable changes though. These tendencies, which are collectively referred to as 'italiano neostandard' by scholars, are not always considered standard Italian (despite not being considered dialectal or substandard forms), and the language is still taught in accordance with the old norm. But I'm confident things will change in a matter of few years.


----------



## Alxmrphi

> _Gli_ is now used for both singular and plural; the plural pronoun _loro_ is almost obsolete.



I know that _Loro _was obsolete now when it's the formal plural (_formal of voi_) but I thought referring to "them" with _loro_ was still absolutely fine? 
Is that not the case? Or were you referring to the formal "you" usage?


----------



## effeundici

I think that:

- it's very true that the language spoken in the 40's seems natural to us
- it's *very* true that the contemporary language would be very strange for someone who got asleep in 1942 and was woken up just yesterday (just consider the huge amount of English loans in topics like business and technology)

Probably I have an answer to my question: Italian spoken in the movies from the 40's seems natural to me because it's the Italian I still *read *in books and newspapers.

@Alex: _dico loro - I tell them _it's definitely not very used in spoken language; it's been replaced by _gli dico_


----------



## palomnik

Alxmrphi said:


> Not to argue against your point or anything but I just wanted to point out there are loads of other factors that can affect it, the idea of a mass single language making things steady makes absolute perfect sense to me.



Your point is taken, and that's why I limited my comments to change "phonetically and syntatically."  The one area where languages change tremendously any more is in amount of vocabulary.  I wanted to work in that point, but I couldn't see how to do it without wandering down some irrelevant trails.


----------



## federicoft

Alxmrphi said:


> I know that _Loro _was obsolete now when it's the formal plural (_formal of voi_) but I thought referring to "them" with _loro_ was still absolutely fine?



Yes it is, as F11 said I meant just when replaced by 'gli' as dative pronoun. 
In all other cases it's not just perfectly fine, but it has also greatly extented its usage to the detriment of the subject pronouns (essi, esse).


----------



## Frank06

Hi,

Just some random thoughts...



effeundici said:


> _Second thought :_ Am I right if I say that in 360 after Christ, people still spoke Latin in Italy? I think yes. Am I right if I say that in 960 after Christ people spoke Italian in Italy? Surely yes considering that the first written document in Italian language dates back exactly to that year.


- I'd be careful with 'exactly'. Latin, Italian, it's all a matter of labels. If we'd change (just for the sake of this debate) the label Latin to 'Old Italian' then we'd have the same problem as for English: where does Old English/Italian stop and Middle English/Italian start?



> Question: How is it possible that in 600 years Latin changed to Italian and in 60 years I cannot appreciate any difference?


- The answer lies in the question, no? 600, 60...
But I guess it also depends on what you mean by both Latin and Italian. The codified standard languages (or in the case of Latin classic Latin) or the real stuff, I mean, spoken language varieties?

- What may look as a spectacular change may just be the result of another dialect becoming dominant (and standardised). I think this more or less happened for Dutch in Flanders, at least when comparing Flemish medieval texts and modern Standard Dutch.

- As for your question how fast do languages change: It's a bit like trying to determine the actual speed of cars throughout history while one only has a series of road signs with the maximum speed limits. On the other hand, I wonder how you would quantify the speed of language change?

Groetjes,

Frank


----------



## Alxmrphi

> @Alex: _dico loro - I tell them _it's definitely not very used in spoken language; it's been replaced by _gli dico_



But as a subject pronoun? (i.e. for emphasis) _ma *loro *mi hanno chiesto di andare..._


----------



## effeundici

Alxmrphi said:


> But as a subject pronoun? (i.e. for emphasis) _ma *loro *mi hanno chiesto di andare..._


----------



## berndf

sokol said:


> This I think shows that language change partly is quicker to happen in non-standard variety while the standardised variety is conservative and tries to prevent change.


This seems to have happened with Italian. Its pace of changes obviously slowed down when it became a literary language. Unfortunately the, as you wrote, the precise development stages of Vulgar Latin and their timing are hard to reconstruct because of lack of evidence. Until rather late in the first millennium people who would naturally say _caballo/cavallo grande_ would equally naturally write _equus magnus_.


----------



## Athaulf

sokol said:


> Well: languages change according to sociocultural and political developments; in a stable society change is likely to be slower and less profound than in troubled times.



Although it sounds very intuitive, I'm not sure if this is claim is consistent with real world data. I'm familiar with the rudimentary outline of the history and typology of most European languages,  and I honestly don't see much correlation between "troubled times" and the speed of language change. 

Admittedly, certain social and economic circumstances predictably cause a mass influx of loanwords -- it's clear why massive amounts of technical terminology in many languages have been borrowed from English recently. Language extinction also occurs under more or less predictable and well understood circumstances. However, when it comes to phonetic and grammatical changes, the situation is much less clear. For any example where "troubled times" coincided with rapid language change, you can find other places where similar changes occurred in times of comparable stability, and it's similar for the correlation between social and linguistic stability. 

We've already had a long discussion about this topic a while ago, though.



> Another remark concerning Italian - it has changed little since the Middle Ages if you compare with other languages (like French, English, German where there were radical changes).
> So it also depends on language and its particular history too.


I'm not very familiar with the history of the Italian language, but I'm suspicious about whether its conservativeness is truly natural, or whether it's a consequence of archaizing tendencies during the history of its standardization. When I look at various regional languages of Italy, they tend to look much less conservative and Latin-like than standard Italian. Was it really the case that the Tuscan dialect that served as the basis for standard Italian happened to be extraordinarily conservative? Or have the people historically involved in its expansion, from the medieval Tuscan literature to the _Risorgimento_, intentionally archaized it?


----------



## sokol

Athaulf said:


> Although it sounds very intuitive, I'm not sure if this is claim is consistent with real world data. ...
> Admittedly, certain social and economic circumstances predictably cause a mass influx of loanwords -- it's clear why massive amounts of technical terminology in many languages have been borrowed from English recently. Language extinction also occurs under more or less predictable and well understood circumstances. However, when it comes to phonetic and grammatical changes, the situation is much less clear.


Well yes, obviously in times of rapid social and political change obviously influence on vocabulary (new terms, or loans from cultures becoming dominant) are the most obvious changes, and it is not as easy when it comes to phonetics, phonology, morphology and grammar.

So you have a point I agree.  - Also, even concerning vocabulary puristic movements might sweep foreign vocabulary away and replace it with calques so that language seems not to change too rapidly.


Athaulf said:


> I'm not very familiar with the history of the Italian language, but I'm suspicious about whether its conservativeness is truly natural, or whether it's a consequence of archaizing tendencies during the history of its standardization.


In my opinion it is the latter; Italian probably was the one Romance language which was most influenced by Latin - but I am not an expert on Italian either.

Italian dialects of course are in some cases radically different from standard language; if Lombard Italian or Venetian would have been the model for Italian standard language then surely Italian would look much "less conservative".
Conservative tendencies exist in all languages, stronger in some and weaker in others; might be that they were stronger in Italy and thus made modern standard language look so "conservative".


----------



## effeundici

Just to be sure I've checked Italian books written in 13th century;they are understandable and it's not easy to find words no longer used or radical changes.

I definitely would say that Italian has been, all summed up, very conservative in the last 800 years.


----------



## Alxmrphi

Hey F11... can I ask what you mean by 'conservative' ? I don't understand it here.. (I didn't understand it in Athaulf or sokol's posts either)


----------



## Athaulf

Alxmrphi said:


> Hey F11... can I ask what you mean by 'conservative' ? I don't understand it here.. (I didn't understand it in Athaulf or sokol's posts either)



In the context of language change, a conservative language means one that has changed relatively little and preserved lots of archaic features. Of course, a language can be conservative in some regards and innovative in others.


----------



## HUMBERT0

effeundici said:


> _Second thought :_ Am I right if I say that in 360 after Christ, people still spoke Latin in Italy? I think yes. Am I right if I say that in 960 after Christ people spoke Italian in Italy? Surely yes considering that the first written document in Italian language dates back exactly to that year.
> 
> Question: How is it possible that in 600 years Latin changed to Italian and in 60 years I cannot appreciate any difference?


 
I think… other factors come in to play than just language history and development, politics and historical events do impact how a language is perceived.

I do not think what we called “Italian” has changed more from its predecessor Latin or for that matter “lenguas neolatinas” neo latin languages, than for example Persian, Arab, Greek, English, Hebrew, Chinese, etc. from their older/archaic or classical forms in comparison with their modern versions (and they still keep calling it Arab, English, Chinese, etc). Because after all, Italian is Latin as it evolved in its own homeland, from contacts and influences from different languages thru many centuries, with a standardization process that has shaped it, with the advent of the modern world and its vocabulary, and its communication demands.

To me, the same goes for the other Romance languages French is Latin which evolved in northern Gaul, Spanish is Latin which evolved in northeastern/central Hispania, Romanian is Latin which evolved in Dacia, the same for rest Portuguese, Catalan, etc, . All have a claim in being heirs of the language and carrying the name Latin, of course all took different evolutionary roads, and they were all subjected to different conditions thru their history. For example, even Sephardics that carried the language called it “Ladino” still up to the XV century a person coming from Hispania, to some what they spoke was Latin. Latin evolved in the everyday speech of the masses thru the Roman Empire.

The ever more distinctiveness of the everyday Latin spoken by populations that emerge from the broken homeland/Roman Empire, the affirmation of nationality, dominance of one Latin local usage standard over other regional/local variants or even the Latin of their elders, already perceived by people at large as an archaic way of speaking by that time, and many other factors shaped the way people spoke subsequently.

After the downfall of the empire no kingdom in those days felt compelled to still call Latin what they spoke, after all… they were not Rome but former colonies of the empire, instead they affirm their distinctiveness along with their nationality, national boundaries, and conquests, etc.

Why Italy did not continue calling its national language “Latin” eludes me, to me, it’s the modern standardize version of Latin with all of its changes and nuances that evolved in its homeland, and no other language was imposed in the Italian peninsula to the people at large… they all continue to spoke Latin their own manner in their respective regions, and subsequently a standardize form was devised. I suspect it has to do with the fact that politically speaking there is not a continuum from old Rome to modern Italy (I mean no single unified Roman country across the centuries since the Old empire, that would had an unbroken chain of trying to maintain a Roman(now Italian) country with an everyday standardized albeit neo Latin), a national consciousness came much later, and a disconnection from the old empire with an archaic form of the same language to a modern self determine country was evident.​ 
Just a though...


----------



## CapnPrep

HUMBERT0 said:


> For example, even Sephardics that carried the language called it “Ladino” still up to the XV century a person coming from Hispania, to some what they spoke was Latin. Latin evolved in the everyday speech of the masses thru the Roman Empire.


But I imagine that they had a different word for actually referring to Latin, which was not a forgotten language, after all.



			
				HUMBERT0 said:
			
		

> Why Italy did not continue calling its national language “Latin” eludes me […]​


Again, because "real" Latin was still in use by a literate minority, and all people still came into contact with it in certain situations. Eventually (starting around the 8th century), it became clear that ordinary people simply couldn't understand Latin anymore. At first they did try calling the vernacular things like "new Latin" or "our Latin", but from a practical point of view it was impossible to continue calling it just "Latin".


----------



## effeundici

CapnPrep said:


> But I imagine that they had a different word for actually referring to Latin, which was not a forgotten language, after all.
> 
> 
> Again, because "real" Latin was still in use by a literate minority, and all people still came into contact with it in certain situations. Eventually (starting around the 8th century), it became clear that ordinary people simply couldn't understand Latin anymore. At first they did try calling the vernacular things like "new Latin" or "our Latin", but from a practical point of view it was impossible to continue calling it just "Latin".


 
Again it's *VERY *impressive for me, to realise that 

- 600 years were enough to change Latin into something called "new Latin" or "our Latin",and basically these were 2 different languages not reciprocally understandable
- after 800 years I can read Dante Alighieri, perceiving it simply like strange,different and unusual Italian.


----------

