A natural history of Latin
Over the following centuries, the use of Latin declined gradually, and in many areas very slowly. English made its way into the educational system, but Latin remained indispensable for higher studies until about a hundred years ago, and was a required entrance qualification for the study of certain arts subjects at Oxford and Cambridge until the late twentieth century. Within the Church, Latin was used universally until the Reformation, and for many purposes much longer. In diplomacy, Latin was obligatory until the seventeenth century, and in the learned world, most people wrote in Latin up to that time too. For example, Newton used the language for his most famous work on physics, the Principia Mathematica.
The early immigrants brought knowledge of Latin into North America. The language naturally was important in education in the colonies, just as in Britain. It was no coincidence that the constitution of the United States was heavily influenced by the ideas of the Roman republic. The eighteenth-century politicians were well acquainted both with the Roman state and with its language. One obvious trace of that acquaintance is to be seen in the many towns and states with Latin-based names, for example Cincinnati, Urbana, and Virginia.
Latin has a very long and varied history in Britain. First, it was the language of the occupying Romans in antiquity, and was probably spoken by many people. It then disappeared for a few hundred years, to be reintroduced as the language of the Church around 600. It flowered for a couple of centuries, was almost obliterated again, but was firmly established once more and became a language for all educated people from the twelfth century and for several hundred years thereafter. Only in the last century was it finally superseded by English in all domains of use.
Latin in schools
As we have seen, in Roman schools the main aim was to teach the pupils to speak well so that they could become lawyers and politicians.
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When the Church took over it had other priorities, and the monastic schools were, in consequence, very different from the schools of the Roman empire. One of the people responsible for forging the new education system was Cassiodorus. He lived in Italy in the sixth century, and was for most of his life a high-ranking civil servant. At that time Italy was ruled by the Ostrogoths, and Cassiodorus, who belonged to a distinguished Roman family from southern Italy, made a career for himself at the court of the Ostrogothic king. Among other things he was in charge of the chancellery, and wrote a large number of official letters in an ostentatious and difficult Latin. When he was about sixty, he left the royal court and retired to a monastery which he had founded on his ancestral estate. There he dedicated himself to a Christian life and to writing Christian works, of which he composed a large number over a period of several decades. He was over ninety when he died.
One of these works is a handbook designed to help student monks, which gives a very clear indication of the direction education was to take for several centuries thereafter.The handbook has two parts, the first of which is entirely devoted to how to study the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers. The schools followed suit. The main purpose was to provide a Christian education, and at the heart of that was the need to be able to read the Bible in Latin. A common method employed throughout most of the Middle Ages was to let the pupils begin their acquaintance with the Bible by reading the first lines of the first psalm in the Book of Psalms, which goes as follows:
Beatus vir, qui non ábiit in consilio impiorum et in via peccatorum non stetit et in cáthedra derisorum non sedit.
Here is the very literal translation from the authorised ‘King James’ version of the English Bible (1611):
Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly nor standeth in the way of sinners nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.
If the translation reads strangely, it is at least in part due to the fact the Latin is in turn a translation from Hebrew and the translators
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have tried to represent the Hebrew original as literally as possible, which does not easily chime with the normal rhythms and patterns of Latin. Here is a more modern version from the New Living Translation:
Oh, the joys of those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or stand around with sinners, or join in with scoffers.
This helps to make sense of the passage, but obviously was not of much use to medieval children! They had to learn Latin at the same time as they were learning all the psalms. Once they had learnt the first verse, they had to learn the second and then the third and so on until the last verse of the last psalm, number 150.
As a language teaching method this is hardly brilliant, but it was quite practical for a future monk to be required to learn all the psalms by heart in Latin. In a very rigidly ordered existence, they were part of the ritual at the frequent prayer sessions that the monks had to take part in. In a week they managed to get through all the psalms and a good deal more besides. The next week they went through the whole lot again. The week after that . . .
The whole point of this education, then, was to learn to pray in the right way in the right language. When the ancient schools disappeared, the idea of educating someone for a career in society disappeared too.Thereafter,for the pupils in the monastic and cathedral schools the purpose of a Latin education was primarily prayer and the service of God.The language of course had other important functions, but its religious use was and remained the fundamental one, because education was in the hands of the monasteries and churches, which is where it stayed for more than a thousand years. Throughout Europe, the church authorities were in charge of education until the French Revolution and in some places much longer than that. Cassiodorus stands at the beginning of a tradition which determined the role of education almost up until our own times. But his handbook had a second part. This describes non-religious education, which was divided into the seven ‘liberal arts’, artes liberáles, which are: grammática, rhetórica, dialéctica, arithmética, música, geometría,
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astronomía, or grammar, rhetoric, dialectics (also known as logic), arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. It was not enough just to read the Bible; even the pious had to learn a good deal more besides.
This was not Cassiodorus’ own idea, but rather the end result of lengthy debates amongst leading Christians in late antiquity. Men like Augustine and Jerome, who had received a long and thorough traditional kind of education, asked themselves whether it was right to go on reading and enjoying the pagan philosophers and poets. They did represent culture, but at the same time they might tempt people away from the path of righteous learning into sin or doubt or even downright apostasy. Eventually they reached a compromise: Christians should be allowed to read non-Christian works, but only so as to find better ways of reinforcing their faith. It was not a good idea to give up reading the ancient writers, since they were the best, but one should not let oneself be led astray by their arguments. The aim was to absorb their knowledge and their elegant written style, and to use them in a different way, to wrest the weapons from the hands of the pagans, as the saying has it.
The result of these reflections was that the pupils should also have a quantity of classical education served up to them in harmless, bite-sized chunks. The seven liberal arts provided the appropriate institutional framework which lasted throughout the Middle Ages. Of these seven, the first three provided the foundation and were of the greatest practical value. They were called the trívium, literally ‘three ways’, and they were the only ones that were taught, together with religion, in elementary school. In Sweden that led to the lowest level of schooling being called ‘trivial school’, just as in English some schools came to be called Grammar Schools because they taught (Latin) grammar, while in English the adjective trivial has come to mean ‘minor, unimportant’ because it originally referred to things taught at the beginning of the school curriculum. The first art, then, was grammar, obviously meaning Latin grammar. Theoretical concepts like gender (genus) or tense (tempus) were learnt from a grammar book. The one which was used in teaching
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beginners was almost always a small compendium written in the fourth century by a man called Donatus, whose name, with time, became almost synonymous with grammar itself. The terms in Donatus are not difficult for someone who has been taught the grammar of a European language. He starts with the names of the parts of the sentence or partes orationis. These are: nómen, pronómen, verbum, advérbium, particípium, coniúnctio, praeposítio, interiéctio. The corresponding English terms are: noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, participle, conjunction, preposition, and interjection. As is clear, we have taken our terms for the parts of speech over lock, stock, and barrel from Donatus.
There is a small difference in that under nomen he included both what we call nouns and what we call adjectives. This last term comes from later grammars, which distinguish the nomen substantivum, literally ‘substantive name’ and the source of the rather more specialized English term substantive, and the nomen adiectivum, literally ‘adjacent name’, so called because one of its most common uses is to stand beside a noun. Thus grammar in Cassiodorus’ school was not that different from what was, until relatively recently, taught in our schools too. Rhetoric, by contrast, was a condensed version of what Cicero and Quintilian had taught, and does not directly correspond to anything in the modern syllabus. Even so, it had a much smaller role when compared to the importance of this subject in antiquity, and it was not used to train people in making speeches in Latin, since that was not important in the Middle Ages. Rhetorical devices were, however, useful in writing and sometimes in preparing sermons. Dialectics or logic dealt with fundamental philosophical concepts and the ability to draw formally correct conclusions from a set of premisses. It was a subject which at first had had hardly any place in Roman schooling, but interest in it increased in late antiquity. Christians felt they had to have some knowledge of philosophy in order to defend their faith against well-educated pagans.
Apart from the foundational language subjects grammar and rhetoric, philosophy was the only one of the seven liberal arts to be taught in Cassiodorus’ school. The remaining arts, the so-called
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quadrívium or ‘four ways’, were, according to the ancient way of looking at things, four further sub-branches of philosophy. More precisely, mathematics (mathemática) was one of the principal fields of philosophy, and was in turn divided into arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. That the first two belong under the heading of mathematics would probably not cause much disagreement, and astronomy definitely contains a considerable amount of maths, although we now believe that observation is also important. The place of music is more surprising. The reason it was classified as a sub-part of mathematics is because of harmonics. Already Plato had known that there are certain mathematical relations between, for instance, the length of a string and the pitch of the note it produces: a string which is twice as long will produce a note which is half as high. For this reason, mathematics, a branch of philosophy, was in antiquity regarded as the very foundation of music.
But not many pupils got as far as the quadrívium, and those who did probably derived only a limited amount of pleasure from their studies. What you could read about these subjects in Cassiodorus and even in the bigger handbooks which later became available was very meagre. It consisted of condensed and partly misunderstood digests of ideas which originally came from a variety of Greek authorities. In subjects other than religion, knowledge in the Middle Ages became quite restricted, even for people who had had all the schooling that was on offer. Apart from the knowledge of Latin, which covered grammar and some of the basic principles of composition, most of the rest was a training in logic.
This was not probably not such a bad thing. It was certainly the case that those who had attended the monastic schools were often able to make use of their abilities elsewhere than in monasteries or the Church. And this is hardly surprising. Since there were no other schools, it was obviously necessary to recruit people for any job that required the ability to write Latin from among those who had been to the Church schools. And people who were able to write were always in demand, mainly by princes and kings who needed help with administration and correspondence, of which there was a considerable
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amount even in hard times like the eighth century, when large parts of Europe were reverting to a local subsistence economy.
As time passed schools gradually improved, and education not only lasted longer but became more substantial. Even so the foundation was always Latin, since it was impossible to move on to other subjects without this basic linguistic tool. It goes without saying that Latin was also the language in which the classes were conducted and any textbooks written.
Around the twelfth century there was a period of real prosperity in western Europe both economically and culturally speaking. It was a time when there was enough money and know-how to build such magnificent places of worship as Notre-Dame in Paris or the cathedral at Chartres. The cathedral schools in these towns also developed into true intellectual centres, where there was advanced education and where teachers and students were able to question the established truths. The relation between religion and the philosophical ideas of antiquity provoked particularly intense debate in the best schools. Out of these schools developed the first universities, such as Paris and Oxford, and before long more had been founded in many other places.
Although the universities were much more advanced than the schools, they kept the language of the schools. Latin was the only language in the universities of Europe from their beginning and for many centuries thereafter. Not even the Reformation in the sixteenth century brought about any great change in this respect. Priests certainly had to conduct their services in the local language in Protestant countries, but they still had to learn to read, write, and speak Latin, since that was the language of the universities in which they received their training. It was not until the eighteenth century that universities started to use national languages, and in some places Latin was still the language of instruction into the twentieth century.
In schools things were not quite the same. Latin was generally the only school language until the fourteenth century, but by that time the Church schools started to face competition as the need arose for people who were able to read and write in the national language of
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the country in question. Little by little, therefore, these languages entered the Church schools as well, and Latin shifted from being the sole language of instruction to being the most important foreign language. It retained that status for as long as Latin was necessary in higher education, which meant in most cases down to the nineteenth century. Since then Latin has had a much less eminent place in the schools of Europe, even though several million students study it every year. Nowadays the students who choose it are those who want to acquire a better understanding of the history and culture of Europe in all but the last centuries. Of course, the interest is greatest in countries like Italy and France, whose national languages derive from Latin, and where written Latin has been in continuous use since the time of the Romans. In Britain the language has had a significant role for a rather shorter period, roughly from the seventh to the eighteenth centuries. On the other hand, Latin is perhaps the principal language through which people can have access to the earliest history of these islands, so to the extent that people want to be in touch with their roots, it is of great importance here too.
Speaking and spelling
People for whom Latin was not a native language obviously had to learn to pronounce the words at the same time as they learnt to spell and write. But how could they know how they were supposed to sound? As Latin was no longer anyone’s native language, there was no one to imitate. In fact this was already a problem in late antiquity. By the fourth century pronunciation had changed a fair amount by comparison with the years around the birth of Christ. All languages change with time, and Latin was no exception. The teachers in the schools noticed that the spelling in the classical texts did not really square with the way both they and their students pronounced the words, and hence there were already debates about the rules of pronunciation among Donatus and his contemporaries.
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When the Emperor Constantine established Constantinople as the second capital of the empire, the problem grew yet larger. In the new eastern capital there was an urgent need to recruit people to carry out the imperial administration, which was conducted in Latin, but the people in that part of the empire spoke not Latin but Greek or some other tongue as their native language, and needed a very thorough training in Latin. This is the reason why Priscian compiled his grammar, the weightiest of all the ancient grammars and one which devotes quite a lot of space to the pronunciation of the language. The situation became even more difficult once Latin became a foreign language in the monastic schools which had hardly any contact with the former Roman world, as happened for instance in Ireland, and later in Germany and Scandinavia. In some places the pronunciation must have been quite peculiar.
Fortunately, it is not difficult to work out from the spelling how to pronounce most Latin words. The alphabet had been invented precisely for this language, and most of the sounds of Latin are also found in all or almost all European languages. There is, for instance, never any doubt about how to pronounce the letters in words like bona ‘good’, mitte ‘send!’, lectus ‘bed’. Some of the sounds, however, caused problems. In several cases this is due to the fact that the pronunciation of Latin had already changed in ancient times. A well-known example is the letter c, which in Latin in the classical period always represented a k-sound. Cicero would certainly have pronounced his name [kikero] and the word concepta ‘ideas’ was pronounced [konkepta]. However, in late antiquity the pronunciation changed when the sound came before the vowels e and i. What exactly the resulting sound was varied from region to region, as can still be seen in the different Romance languages. In Italian they use what phoneticians call a palato-alveolar affricate, the same sound as at the beginning of English chilly. In French on the other hand the corresponding sound is [s] in Cicéron and concepts. The Germanic languages have adopted a good many Latin words, and there too the pronunciation reflects this change. English has taken over the [s] from French in words like Cicero and
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concepts. German, by contrast, has the pronunciation which originally occurred in Old French, namely [ts] as in Cicero [tsitsero] and Konzept [kontsept].
How did people who knew Latin pronounce these words five hundred or a thousand years ago? We cannot know for sure, as there are no recordings or even detailed descriptions, but everything points to their already being pronounced in the different ways we have described in the different countries at that time. One good reason to believe this is the way loanwords are pronounced. There is no better explanation than to assume that they carried with them into the new language the pronunciation they had in Latin, the language they had been borrowed from. There were probably fixed norms for the pronunciation in all parts of Europe, but nonetheless a degree of local variation was permitted from region to region.
It was not just the Germanic languages which borrowed from Latin. Even the Romance languages did so frequently, although they had originated in Latin. A case in point is precisely the word concept in French. It is a typical learned word which probably did not exist at all in early spoken French, and it is not to be found in any of the written texts which have come down to us from the first 350 years of the language’s attestation. In fact it shows up for the first time in 1401. In English the corresponding word occurs in the sixteenth century. It is the same with thousands of words in the languages of Europe, as we shall see below.
Apart from loanwords, there is at least one more good reason to believe that the pronunciation of Latin was partly different in different places, namely our knowledge of the way Latin was traditionally pronounced in different European countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is well documented and indeed, here and there, there probably still are individuals who stick to this style of pronunciation, which really varied considerably from country to country. Nowadays the differences are smaller. In the course of the twentieth century there was a kind of reform movement, with the result that people now use more or less the same pronunciation wherever they are. This is a pronunciation which reflects the way
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