by Aldus Marius on Fri Sep 23, 2005 8:00 am
Salvete omnes,
> Why & How did Latin die?
[blinks hard, twice]
It did?? (But it was fine when I left the house--!)
...Na; all kidding aside, if you read much at all of my early output to this Collegium, you will find me to be one of the most dyed-in-the-wool Living Latinists you are likely to run into anywhere. Acts of extreme Latinism on my part have included teaching the Mother of Languages to my whole corner of Riverside County, California, for no better reason than because I wished someone to talk to...and almost going to jail because one former-gangbanger pupil of mine spray-painted 'SPQR' on the side of a school building and the police thought they knew just who might have put him up to it.
I've said my Latin comes and goes. It has not always been thus. Before my brain went nova a few years ago, I had serviceable Latin. I was never an expert, of course; but I shared liberally what I had, especially with college classmates and with poor and homeless kids who had never before thought of learning anything just for fun. I last visited five years ago, and most of them were still at it. Even the ones who don't speak Latin anymore have never lost their fascination with Roman history and culture. So my motto on that has been, "Latin a dead language?? --Not within a 50-foot radius of me it aint!!"
But you want to know what happened to everybody speaking Latin. Even in Riverside it is not in daily use. The reasons in Riverside are only the natural consequences of the reasons in old-Roman Europe. And the reasons within the former Empire are much as Domina Cleopatra has said: The evolution of languages, and the passage of time.
The Latin spoken even in the City of Rome had always at least two flavors: that of the educated classes, and that of the man on the street. (It is the same with any tongue; someone said, several topics down, that the most beautiful Spanish s/he'd ever heard was spoken in Mexico City, yet the only Spanish I knew from that country was that 'Tex-Mex' garbage I had to put up with in Dallas on a daily basis.) The common variety of a language is much the more flexible, and much more widespread. Whereas the hallmark of the educated form is its degree of standardization, street-language changes very rapidly indeed as it takes on slang, new words, and new meanings for old words.
Given its prevalence over a wide-enough area, a language like street-Latin will also develop local dialects. As I asked once in "Latin Tips and Tricks", how would a Hispano-Roman pronounce Latin, except with a Baetican or Tarragonan accent? These accents, and some vocabulary, are likely to reflect the cultures that already existed before Rome came; a Celtiberian learning Latin will sound different than a Dacian doing the same thing, because their native-language bases are different. So you see that even from the time Latin was introduced to an area, it was already subject to regional influences.
Now fast-forward this process about four hundred years. That 'conquered' Spanish Province is now furnishing Emperors, grammar professors and a lot of administrative and military types, who make up the bulk of the literate population. For quite a ways around the Provincial capital, Hispano-Latin is the de facto standard of educated discourse...and, at least since a native son took the throne, it may be considered fashionable in the Mother City as well. Romans of Italia hear this and are affected, whether by acceptance, adaptation or revulsion. Cultural interchange is never one-way; if the Spaniards got Romanized, the Romans must have been 'Spanished', at least a little bit.
The same sort of thing is flowing from and back to every other Province in the Empire. Adaptable Romans take a little from here, a bit from there as they see fit. Conservative ones shake their heads and wonder why everyone these days talks like a damn furriner. Some things don't change.
And then, the Fall. The Provinces get cut off from one another and the cultural (including linguistic) interchange becomes severely localised. Latin in these places is changing and adapting the way it always has...but the Spaniards don't get to talk to the Britons much anymore, and the Britons can't remember the last time there was a Dacian in town. So the evolution of each region's version of the language is now taking place in isolation. Early on, the difference between one dialect and another was about the difference between English as spoken in New England, and English as spoken in the southeastern US. Later, it became the difference between Elizabethan English and the modern variety. We can read Shakespeare, but most of us need a glossary.
A few hundred years after that, you've got regional 'Latins' that are no longer fully mutually comprehensible. Oh, the roots are the same, and you can pick out a word here and there, enough to give you the sense of what's being said; but the dialects are well on their way to becoming full-blown languages.
There was no point at which everybody in the Empire just quit speaking Latin. If you asked a Spaniard in AD 800 what language he used, he'd have insisted it was Latin...with Celtiberian, Phoenician, Greek, Visigothic, Moorish, and soon to be Arab influences. In Italia it would've been Ostrogoths, Vandals, and Franks tacking their 'spin' on Latin onto the pre-existing Italic, Celtic and Greek mix. Change the names of the newcomers and you could tell this story about every single Province. Nobody's Latin was any more pure, any more "Roman", any more faithful to the Heritage than anyone else's.
It is the fragmentation of the Empire that enabled the influence of invading peoples on what were already some fairly distinct regional dialects of Latin. And it is that influence which propelled each of these dialects into becoming a separate language, a language of the Romance family.
In short (I should be banned from using that word, huh?): Latin never died. It evolved into something(s) else.
In fide,
Aldus Marius Peregrinus.