9 ms·

> Imagine if you could visit Rome today, and find it still populated by Latin-speaking, toga-wearing Romans. Maybe no more togas, but isn't this basically true

> Imagine if you could visit Rome today, and find it still populated by Latin-speaking, toga-wearing Romans. Maybe no more togas, but isn't this basically true? While for example Spanish is Basquified and French is Germanicified, modern Italian is basically the direct descendant of classical Latin just as Mandarin is a direct descendant of classical Chinese.

kafkaesque 10y ago
Uh, no? The two broad categories are high Latin and low Latin. Put another way, classical Latin and vulgar Latin. Low Latin was the vernacular and already used by most by 270 AD, including poets, who greatly influenced the formation and unification of the new Latin language. The "Latin" that is generally studied at university these days comes from a mediaeval Latin that is a simplification of this old, vernacular form. Actually, during the period of classical Latin, the vulgar form already existed and broke off into at least a dozen dialects, some of which include old forms of French, Spanish, Portuguese, and, of course Latin, of which there were many versions. It was a fight between the two, but nobody really used classical Latin in everyday speech. These days, there are I want to say probably a dozen dialects in Italy. But Italian is a simplification of Roman Latin with minor influences by other Romance languages and even less influences by other world languages such as Arabic. My basic conclusion to what you say is, there is no way you can understand classical Latin if you speak modern Italian.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  There is also no way to understand classical Chinese if you speak any modern Chinese language. > The "Latin" that is generally studied at university these days comes from a mediaeval Latin that is a simplification of this old, vernacular form. This is certainly not the case in the US. That sounds more like studying church Latin, which will be mocked if you're studying Latin outside an explicit religious context. Where are you?
  - huahaiy 10y ago
    Not really. Ancient Chinese poems as far back as 3000 years ago are still required materials for recitation by Chinese school children. Any educated modern Chinese can read and understand ancient Chinese text.
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago
      > Ancient Chinese poems as far back as 3000 years ago are still required materials for recitation by Chinese school children. This is true. > Any educated modern Chinese can read and understand ancient Chinese text. This is false. Try them on something they haven't seen before. Furthermore, just as modern Chinese who have studied ancient Chinese can read it, modern Italians who have studied Latin can read that, too. In fact, modern Italians who have studied ancient Chinese can even read that! That doesn't mean their knowledge of Italian is helpful; it isn't.
      - huahaiy 10y ago
        I was merely questioning the claim that modern Chinese cannot read ancient Chinese. I made no claim whatsoever on Italian as I have no knowledge on that matter. However, I have first hand knowledge that modern educated Chinese can read ancient Chinese text, which by definition means reading text they have not seen before. The Chinese writing system changed very little since Han dynasty. Even with the mainland Chinese's simplified Chinese system, most mainland Chinese can still read traditional Chinese without special training. Because the simplification was mostly codifying the existent shortcuts in ordinary people's hand-writings.
        GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
        Sinologist Victor Mair reports: " On Thursday we had our Spring mid-term examination. I always test the students on a seen portion and an unseen passage. Because we go over the text in class together so very carefully, they usually do well on the seen passage, but often the unseen passage — for which I try to pick a text that is at about the same level of difficulty as the stage we're at in class at the time — completely throws the students for a loop. This time it happened that the students (2 from China, 2 with a Japanese background, 2 from the United States, 1 from Hong Kong, 1 from Vietnam, and 1 from Ghana) were stymied by the unseen passage that I gave them. They could understand all of the characters singly, and I even gave them additional vocabulary notes and explanations. But they just couldn't make sense of the passage as a whole nor even of its constituent sentences. Among the 9 students, only 2 could roughly figure out what was happening in the unseen passage. Of course, this is terribly frustrating for the students, but it is also good practice to push them to their limits to see what they can do unaided (like letting a child try to ride a bike without training wheels after a period of using them). In cases like what happened on Thursday, I tell the students that I will be lenient, so I'll add on 20 or 30 points to their grade because I fully realize how hard the test is. If they can get any part of it, I'm proud of them." ( http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24459 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24459 ) and also a detailed answer from an otherwise-anonymous stackoverflow user: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/15452/can-chinese-people-read-the-literature-of-2-500-years-ago-as-easily-as-yesterday http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/15452/can-chines...
- empath75 10y ago
  > My basic conclusion to what you say is, there is no way you can understand classical Latin if you speak modern Italian. As someone who knows a little latin, spanish and french, I think with a little bit of thought, you can get a decent gloss of quite a bit of classical latin. I'd say it's probably easier to guess at latin than trying to understand italian if you only know spanish. For example -- the first line of Caesar's commentaries: "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres" "All of Gaul is divided in three parts" Spanish (using google translate, because i'm lazy, but you get the idea): 'Toda la Galia está dividida en tres partes' French: Tout de la Gaule est divisée en trois parties Italian: Tutto della Gallia è divisa in tre parti
  - kafkaesque 10y ago
    Trust me, I understand what you mean, but it is not the same. I don't mean to brag, but I speak fluent Spanish, and I studied Italian, French, and Latin for four years. I never studied Portuguese, but I can read probably 50% of it and grasp about 70% of its meaning. Romanian looks a lot more like Latin, so I used to be able to spot some words in it, as well. My Latin is rusty these days, though. The difference between Classical Latin is that word meaning is very different, even though it looks similar. You can't go from a modern Romance language and back, but you can go from Classical/Vernacular Latin forward. Even Latin speakers would sometimes get confused which words were accusative and nominative cases in complex sentence structures. The easiest ones are genitive, ablative, and dative, but try reading literature that is long, and it starts getting complicated to parse who is doing the action to what. Not to mention the noun declensions, which are completely nonexistent in all modern Romance languages.
    - empath75 10y ago
      oh sure.. but the cognates are close enough that you can get a rough idea of what's being talked about in a lot of cases...
      - kafkaesque 10y ago
        You're right. There are a lot of cognates. But in first year Latin we are taught and given exams on false cognates, so I guess I always treated each cognate carefully because our prof was always trying to trick us! In translation class, we were taught about false friends, so this added to my paranoia probably.
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  Then isn't the analogy between Latin/Romance pretty comparable with Classical Chinese/Modern Chinese? Modern written Mandarin was standardized based on Northern vernacular Chinese dialects in early last century, which had diverged very far from the Classical Chinese of the Qing and Han dynasties (when the vernacular of the time was recorded and standardized). Without specifically being taught, Classical Chinese is mostly incomprehensible to a native Mandarin speaker -- the vocabulary has changed a lot and the grammar has shifted. To make things more difficult, because the sound system in Mandarin underwent simplification, many words that used to be differentiated are now homophones. Written Classical Chinese is also not readable without specific teaching -- even when characters are the same, the meaning has often diverged significantly. False cognates abound. To further the analogy, the regional Chinese 'dialects' like Cantonese, Fuzhounese, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, etc. are for the most part mutually incomprehensible, having developed their own sound systems, vocabulary, and grammar. A linguist would consider them separate languages, just like the different Romance languages. Source: am a native Cantonese and Mandarin speaker
- gpderetta 10y ago
  > These days, there are I want to say probably a dozen dialects in Italy. you are probably off by one order of magnitude.
rodgerd 10y ago
It would also be more accurate to talk about Latin reading, rather than Latin speaking. Imagine a modern Europe where people speak German, English, Italian, Spanish and all the numerous other variants, but still read and write everything and Latin.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  This was not unusual in premodern Europe. European scholastic work still happened in Latin in the eighteenth century. Dante is famous for being the first to publish in Italian ("housewive's Latin") rather than Latin, and he was writing literature in the 1300s, centuries after people stopped being able to understand Latin.
huahaiy 10y ago
Not really. Modern Italians are similar to their neighboring countries in term of people, i.e. Most of them are not direct descendants of Romans, but of the invading Goths, Lombards, and so on. They did adapt Latin as their language though.
- empath75 10y ago
  I think that's also the case for chinese, considering how many times it was invaded over the years.
  - huahaiy 10y ago
    I think the Chinese case is different in that they have never lost their majority status in term of population. Consequently, the invaders were either eventually assimilated into Han Chinese, be driven out or became one of the many minority ethnics in China. Modern China is still populated by more than 90 percent Han Chinese. Considering how many invaders have passed through China, the male DNA of Han Chinese are surprising homogeneous. The majority O3 haplotype is the same as those found in the ancient bones in some archaeological sites.
- GunboatDiplomat 10y ago
  Wikipedia suggests that this is not the case(1). And really, you wouldn't expect it to be. The population of Italy was over 5 million around the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and how many Ostrogoths were there? Maybe some hundreds of thousands? (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_Italy#Migration_Y-DNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_Italy#Migra...
  - huahaiy 10y ago
    What you cite here corroborates with what I said, i.e. the gene pool of modern Italians are not different from their neighboring countries, Frances, Germany and so on. Unless you claim that modern French and German are also all direct descendants of Romans, I do not see the narrative that modern Italians are the direct descendants of Romans can hold water. They cannot be both true. Take your pick.

kafkaesque 10y ago

Uh, no? The two broad categories are high Latin and low Latin. Put another way, classical Latin and vulgar Latin. Low Latin was the vernacular and already used by most by 270 AD, including poets, who greatly influenced the formation and unification of the new Latin language. The "Latin" that is generally studied at university these days comes from a mediaeval Latin that is a simplification of this old, vernacular form. Actually, during the period of classical Latin, the vulgar form already existed and broke off into at least a dozen dialects, some of which include old forms of French, Spanish, Portuguese, and, of course Latin, of which there were many versions. It was a fight between the two, but nobody really used classical Latin in everyday speech. These days, there are I want to say probably a dozen dialects in Italy. But Italian is a simplification of Roman Latin with minor influences by other Romance languages and even less influences by other world languages such as Arabic. My basic conclusion to what you say is, there is no way you can understand classical Latin if you speak modern Italian.

thaumasiotes 10y ago
There is also no way to understand classical Chinese if you speak any modern Chinese language. > The "Latin" that is generally studied at university these days comes from a mediaeval Latin that is a simplification of this old, vernacular form. This is certainly not the case in the US. That sounds more like studying church Latin, which will be mocked if you're studying Latin outside an explicit religious context. Where are you?
- huahaiy 10y ago
  Not really. Ancient Chinese poems as far back as 3000 years ago are still required materials for recitation by Chinese school children. Any educated modern Chinese can read and understand ancient Chinese text.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    > Ancient Chinese poems as far back as 3000 years ago are still required materials for recitation by Chinese school children. This is true. > Any educated modern Chinese can read and understand ancient Chinese text. This is false. Try them on something they haven't seen before. Furthermore, just as modern Chinese who have studied ancient Chinese can read it, modern Italians who have studied Latin can read that, too. In fact, modern Italians who have studied ancient Chinese can even read that! That doesn't mean their knowledge of Italian is helpful; it isn't.
    - huahaiy 10y ago
      I was merely questioning the claim that modern Chinese cannot read ancient Chinese. I made no claim whatsoever on Italian as I have no knowledge on that matter. However, I have first hand knowledge that modern educated Chinese can read ancient Chinese text, which by definition means reading text they have not seen before. The Chinese writing system changed very little since Han dynasty. Even with the mainland Chinese's simplified Chinese system, most mainland Chinese can still read traditional Chinese without special training. Because the simplification was mostly codifying the existent shortcuts in ordinary people's hand-writings.
      - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
        Sinologist Victor Mair reports: " On Thursday we had our Spring mid-term examination. I always test the students on a seen portion and an unseen passage. Because we go over the text in class together so very carefully, they usually do well on the seen passage, but often the unseen passage — for which I try to pick a text that is at about the same level of difficulty as the stage we're at in class at the time — completely throws the students for a loop. This time it happened that the students (2 from China, 2 with a Japanese background, 2 from the United States, 1 from Hong Kong, 1 from Vietnam, and 1 from Ghana) were stymied by the unseen passage that I gave them. They could understand all of the characters singly, and I even gave them additional vocabulary notes and explanations. But they just couldn't make sense of the passage as a whole nor even of its constituent sentences. Among the 9 students, only 2 could roughly figure out what was happening in the unseen passage. Of course, this is terribly frustrating for the students, but it is also good practice to push them to their limits to see what they can do unaided (like letting a child try to ride a bike without training wheels after a period of using them). In cases like what happened on Thursday, I tell the students that I will be lenient, so I'll add on 20 or 30 points to their grade because I fully realize how hard the test is. If they can get any part of it, I'm proud of them." ( http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24459 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24459 ) and also a detailed answer from an otherwise-anonymous stackoverflow user: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/15452/can-chinese-people-read-the-literature-of-2-500-years-ago-as-easily-as-yesterday http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/15452/can-chines...
empath75 10y ago
> My basic conclusion to what you say is, there is no way you can understand classical Latin if you speak modern Italian. As someone who knows a little latin, spanish and french, I think with a little bit of thought, you can get a decent gloss of quite a bit of classical latin. I'd say it's probably easier to guess at latin than trying to understand italian if you only know spanish. For example -- the first line of Caesar's commentaries: "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres" "All of Gaul is divided in three parts" Spanish (using google translate, because i'm lazy, but you get the idea): 'Toda la Galia está dividida en tres partes' French: Tout de la Gaule est divisée en trois parties Italian: Tutto della Gallia è divisa in tre parti
- kafkaesque 10y ago
  Trust me, I understand what you mean, but it is not the same. I don't mean to brag, but I speak fluent Spanish, and I studied Italian, French, and Latin for four years. I never studied Portuguese, but I can read probably 50% of it and grasp about 70% of its meaning. Romanian looks a lot more like Latin, so I used to be able to spot some words in it, as well. My Latin is rusty these days, though. The difference between Classical Latin is that word meaning is very different, even though it looks similar. You can't go from a modern Romance language and back, but you can go from Classical/Vernacular Latin forward. Even Latin speakers would sometimes get confused which words were accusative and nominative cases in complex sentence structures. The easiest ones are genitive, ablative, and dative, but try reading literature that is long, and it starts getting complicated to parse who is doing the action to what. Not to mention the noun declensions, which are completely nonexistent in all modern Romance languages.
  - empath75 10y ago
    oh sure.. but the cognates are close enough that you can get a rough idea of what's being talked about in a lot of cases...
    - kafkaesque 10y ago
      You're right. There are a lot of cognates. But in first year Latin we are taught and given exams on false cognates, so I guess I always treated each cognate carefully because our prof was always trying to trick us! In translation class, we were taught about false friends, so this added to my paranoia probably.
smallnamespace 10y ago
Then isn't the analogy between Latin/Romance pretty comparable with Classical Chinese/Modern Chinese? Modern written Mandarin was standardized based on Northern vernacular Chinese dialects in early last century, which had diverged very far from the Classical Chinese of the Qing and Han dynasties (when the vernacular of the time was recorded and standardized). Without specifically being taught, Classical Chinese is mostly incomprehensible to a native Mandarin speaker -- the vocabulary has changed a lot and the grammar has shifted. To make things more difficult, because the sound system in Mandarin underwent simplification, many words that used to be differentiated are now homophones. Written Classical Chinese is also not readable without specific teaching -- even when characters are the same, the meaning has often diverged significantly. False cognates abound. To further the analogy, the regional Chinese 'dialects' like Cantonese, Fuzhounese, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, etc. are for the most part mutually incomprehensible, having developed their own sound systems, vocabulary, and grammar. A linguist would consider them separate languages, just like the different Romance languages. Source: am a native Cantonese and Mandarin speaker
gpderetta 10y ago
> These days, there are I want to say probably a dozen dialects in Italy. you are probably off by one order of magnitude.

rodgerd 10y ago

It would also be more accurate to talk about Latin reading, rather than Latin speaking. Imagine a modern Europe where people speak German, English, Italian, Spanish and all the numerous other variants, but still read and write everything and Latin.

thaumasiotes 10y ago
This was not unusual in premodern Europe. European scholastic work still happened in Latin in the eighteenth century. Dante is famous for being the first to publish in Italian ("housewive's Latin") rather than Latin, and he was writing literature in the 1300s, centuries after people stopped being able to understand Latin.

huahaiy 10y ago

Not really. Modern Italians are similar to their neighboring countries in term of people, i.e. Most of them are not direct descendants of Romans, but of the invading Goths, Lombards, and so on. They did adapt Latin as their language though.

empath75 10y ago
I think that's also the case for chinese, considering how many times it was invaded over the years.
- huahaiy 10y ago
  I think the Chinese case is different in that they have never lost their majority status in term of population. Consequently, the invaders were either eventually assimilated into Han Chinese, be driven out or became one of the many minority ethnics in China. Modern China is still populated by more than 90 percent Han Chinese. Considering how many invaders have passed through China, the male DNA of Han Chinese are surprising homogeneous. The majority O3 haplotype is the same as those found in the ancient bones in some archaeological sites.
GunboatDiplomat 10y ago
Wikipedia suggests that this is not the case(1). And really, you wouldn't expect it to be. The population of Italy was over 5 million around the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and how many Ostrogoths were there? Maybe some hundreds of thousands? (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_Italy#Migration_Y-DNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_Italy#Migra...
- huahaiy 10y ago
  What you cite here corroborates with what I said, i.e. the gene pool of modern Italians are not different from their neighboring countries, Frances, Germany and so on. Unless you claim that modern French and German are also all direct descendants of Romans, I do not see the narrative that modern Italians are the direct descendants of Romans can hold water. They cannot be both true. Take your pick.