A natural history of Latin
In many instances the changes were quite radical. We have already talked about the important place that the art of public speaking had in Roman life, and the normal verb for ‘to make a speech’ was oráre. The speech itself was called orátio. But in Christian Latin the verb orare meant ‘to pray (to God)’ and oratio meant ‘prayer’. Another common Latin word is gratia, which means ‘thanks’ or ‘favour’. In Christian Latin, on the other hand, it had a precise theological meaning, namely ‘grace’, most commonly in the phrase Dei gratia ‘the grace of God’.
Among the many loanwords from Greek we may mention baptizare ‘to baptise’ and ecclésia ‘church’. In a sense such words were less confusing, as they had only their Christian meanings. At the same time, their pronunciation and spelling made it clear that they were foreign. The word baptizare, for instance, contains the letter z, which does not occur in indigenous Latin words and which represents a Greek sound usually pronounced [ts] in Latin.
As we have seen, the Christians created a large new vocabulary for themselves. In the beginning it probably sounded strange and perhaps even funny to many people, but as Christianity in time came to take over the whole empire, all these Christian words and meanings were incorporated into Latin. This is the normal course of events when a new phenomenon enters society: it brings its own vocabulary with it. Christianity led to enormous changes in people’s everyday lives and their way of thinking, and hence many new words and expressions were needed. The people who brought this about were of course not just translators and hymn-writers but a whole host of missionaries and preachers, priests and bishops. Many of them were also writers. They wrote sermons, hymns, long, dense commentaries on the Bible, controversial pamphlets against the pagans, and not least theological treatises, frequently with the aim of attacking heretics.
It was not easy to know at the time who actually was a heretic, or haeréticus. It depended on who was successful in having their view of original sin or the Trinity finally accepted as the true teaching of the Church. The winners were rewarded not least by having their
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attacks on their opponents preserved even down to modern times, whereas the books of the losers have in general disappeared. Someone who won on every occasion was Augustine, the greatest of the Catholic Church Fathers. He started life as a teacher of rhetoric, but converted to Christianity at about the age of thirty. He became a priest, and later bishop, in the small town of Hippo near Carthage in present-day Tunisia, where he spent fully forty years until his death in the year 430, just at the moment when the Vandals conquered and occupied the province.
Augustine is one of the most productive writers in world literature. He devoted much of his energy to the analysis of theological questions in a series of long treatises, in an unending fight against Donatists, Pelagians, Priscillians, and others who on some point disagreed with him and (later) with the whole Church. He also wrote an enormous number of sermons, hymns, and other occasional pieces. However, more than anything else he is famous for two works. The first, Confessiones ‘Confessions’, is always to be found in surveys of the history of world literature, as it is the first personal autobiography which is not just concerned with what happened but which also tries to describe the writer’s personal development. It covers Augustine’s life from his birth until his conversion. The other work is called De civitate Dei ‘The City of God’. The immediate cause for him to write this was the assault on and plundering of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 CE. This was an unparallelled event, in that it showed that the capital of this great empire could be taken by its enemies just like any other city. Some saw it as a punishment visited on the Romans because they had abandoned the old gods and converted to Christianity, and Augustine’s work started life as a refutation of this idea. But it grew in the writing into an ambitious philosophical study of the relation between the Earthly City and the Kingdom of God.
Augustine summarizes the whole of Christian teaching, combining it with a wide variety of ideas derived from non-Christian philosophy. In this way he and his predecessors created a whole system of thought, a Christian philosophy. For someone who is not a Christian many of
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his ideas are strange or even repugnant. This is especially true of the idea of original sin, the idea that man is born evil and has to be redeemed by the Saviour. But for almost one and half millennia his thought constituted one of the foundations for all discussions of the human predicament. He was one of the last ancient philosophers but at the same time one of the foremost intellectual figures of the era that was to come.
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Part II
Latin and Europe
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Europe after Rome
No one knows why the Roman empire collapsed in the west. Within a few decades at the beginning of the fifth century, the territory where Latin was spoken went from being a single empire under a single emperor to being a number of separate states, most of them governed by Germanic kings. The empire had evidently grown weaker, since otherwise it would not have been so easy for the various Germanic groups to help themselves to chunk after chunk, but historians are still debating the reasons for this weakness. Current research points particularly to the fact that the population seems to have diminished drastically in the period before the Germans arrived, but once again no one knows why this should have been the case.
The new states were not that different from those that already existed or which came into existence beyond the borders of the Roman empire, to the east and the north. As time passed, the differences in society and culture between the former empire and what had traditionally been regarded as the homelands of the barbarians became smaller and smaller. There were two principal reasons for these changes. First, much of what had characterized Roman society disappeared. The large and efficiently run army was disbanded, as was the system of civil servants and tax collectors which underpinned it. People shook off their taxes, but that meant they no longer received military protection. Trade and communication were in turn reduced, and people moved out of the towns, some of which ended up as nothing but heaps of ruins. Most people now lived in the countryside or in small towns and had little contact with the surrounding world. In this way conditions became almost the same as they had been in the areas that had never belonged to the empire.
Second, all western and northern Europe gradually acquired the same religion. Christianity became stronger at about the same rate as the Roman empire grew weaker. By the sixth century the greater
A natural history of Latin
part of the former empire was populated by Christians, and from the seventh century vigorous missionary activity began to be undertaken in the north and east. By the eleventh century, Christianity had triumphed in modern-day Ireland, Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, and Croatia, and was well advanced in Scandinavia.
Rome was the centre of the Church in this whole area, and in principle the Pope had sovereignty over all the bishops. The areas to the east and south, such as modern Ukraine, Romania and Greece, had also become Christian but in these areas the missionaries emanated from the Eastern Church, which had Constantinople as its centre. The Roman Church had Latin as its language, and it insisted on that in all contexts and in all countries. Missionaries obviously had to be able to speak the local language, but the service itself had to be conducted in Latin and all priests therefore needed to be able to speak Latin, at least to some degree. The Bible and all other religious works were also in Latin.
Since there were very few people outside the Church who could read and write, the consequence was that Latin became completely dominant as the written language throughout Europe. In every country there were also a number of people in high administrative positions who spoke Latin, and that ability was useful, among other things, in international contacts. Strangely enough, Latin became the most important written language and the international spoken language in virtually the whole of Europe, and over a much larger area than the western part of the Roman empire, where the language had been spoken in antiquity. Latin retained that pre-eminence for the best part of a millennium, and this explains why it has had such an enormous influence on almost all branches of European culture.
In what follows I will first discuss how it was that Latin disappeared as a native language while at the same time acquiring its unique role as the common language of communication for individuals from many language groups. I will then look in some detail at that
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language, how it varied from region to region, and how it differed from ancient Latin. I will introduce quite a few examples of how Latin was used, and is still being used, in many fields, and of how thoroughly it has infiltrated the modern European languages, including English. I won’t say anything about the death of Latin, as the language is still very much alive.
From Latin to the Romance languages
During the fifth century CE all the Latin speakers in the Roman empire saw great changes. Germanic tribes poured across the border and, not content with ravaging and plundering, stayed and seized power permanently in region after region of the old empire. Within a few decades both the authority of the emperor and his means of enforcing it had disappeared, and in the year 476 the last emperor in the western part of the Empire, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed and had no successor. Suddenly, all the rulers were German and not Roman.
This was certainly a revolutionary moment but the invasions meant less for the language situation than one might have imagined. The Franks, Vandals, Burgundians, Goths, Lombards, and all the other Germanic groups naturally came with their own languages, which all belonged to the Germanic family—which includes modern languages like English, German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages. One of the languages of the invaders, Visigothic, is well known from a translation of the Bible, the so-called Gothic or Silver Bible, which has survived. Unfortunately, we do not know much about the other Germanic languages in the Roman empire as no texts or inscriptions have been preserved. What they had in common, however, was that all of them, including Visigothic, soon disappeared. There were probably not very many Germanic speakers, and although they certainly assumed power and ownership of the land, they were surrounded by people who spoke Latin, and after
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a few generations they started speaking the same language as the people they ruled over.
The great exception, of course, was the invasion of England. The Angles, the Saxons, and other groups, notably the Jutes from Jutland (part of modern Denmark), not only conquered the earlier inhabitants, but their own Germanic language soon became the language of the majority. Latin did not survive as a spoken language. It is uncertain how many spoke it even in Roman times, for it seems that most people were still using the original Celtic language, called British, when the Germanic ships arrived. But a few hundred years later, the British language was found only in the western part of the island, where it stayed on, eventually being transformed into Welsh and Cornish. (Celtic, in the form of Gaelic, was in due course reintroduced to Scotland from Ireland.) The language of the Angles and Saxons came to dominate the island, and in due course also a large part of the rest of the world.
Within the rest of the empire, society did not at first change greatly as a result of the Germanic invasions. The new rulers often left the local administration in place, and in many respects life in the towns went on much as before. There were, for instance, still schools of the Roman kind well into the sixth century in a number of places, and still writers who were able to write Latin according to the old models. Gradually, however, the situation got worse and worse throughout western Europe. It became increasingly uncommon for people to use the written language, and the school system had collapsed completely by the seventh century in the greater part of Europe. Only in some towns in Italy was it possible to continue to go to school. The art of reading and writing did not disappear totally, however, due to the fact that the Church set up its own education system, a topic to which we will return later.
Nonetheless, the ability to read and write became very rare in Europe, especially during the seventh and eighth centuries, when many regions had neither a school system nor a functioning public administration. There was also a very low level of mobility among the population; almost everyone spent the whole of their lives on their farms or in their towns or villages. In such conditions, linguistic
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change is to be expected. All languages change with time, but how slowly or quickly they change depends to a large extent on the society and culture in which they are embedded. Some situations promote rapid change, others slow it up.
Roughly speaking, we can say that linguistic change depends on the interaction between two conflicting and incompatible tendencies. On the one hand we want to use language as an effective means of communication; on the other we want to sound as much as possible like the people closest to us and we prefer to speak a little differently from strangers.The first tendency may create large languages, with millions of people who speak in the same way and are able to understand each other without difficulty. The second tends to form small dialect areas, where the inhabitants of each town can immediately hear the difference between their own dialect and that of the neighbouring town, and where people may not even understand those who live a few miles away. Hence large, strong states are linked to large languages. During the Roman empire it was extremely useful to be able to speak with people in the same language in every town, and that was exactly what many travellers did. The shared written language also obviously reinforced the tendency towards a common norm across the whole of the Empire. In the new situation that obtained after the collapse of the Empire, the motivation for a common language disappeared. Almost no one travelled, and contacts between any given place and its surrounding regions were reduced to a minimum. The written language had very little influence, since almost no one learnt to read or write.
As a result, there was no longer anything to hinder the development of local dialects. It seems that the spoken language changed very fast between the sixth and the eleventh centuries throughout the area where people used to speak Latin. Moreover, the changes went in partly different directions in different regions, so that each region or sometimes even each town had its own form of speech. Little by little the changes accumulated to such an extent that people who lived a great distance apart were no longer able to understand each other straightaway.
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