Foreword
Romans in antiquity and one about Latin and Europe thereafter. The written language has in principle remained the same for two thousand years from antiquity until the present day. This book aims to give a portrait of that language.
While working on this book I have benefited from the opinions, advice and suggestions of Magnus Wistrand,Hans Aili,Eva Halldinger, and not least my wife, Christina Westman. The English version is not just a translation, since the text has been revised and adapted in many places, and a couple of sections are entirely new. It has been a great pleasure to cooperate in this work with the translators, Merethe Damsgård Sørensen and Nigel Vincent (who wrote the sections on Latin and German and on the pronunciation of Latin in England), and with John Davey at the Oxford University Press. None of them is to be held responsible for any remaining errors or flaws.
The translators of the English edition would particularly like to acknowledge the help of John Briscoe, Tim Cornell, Roy Gibson, Kersti Börjars, Martin Durrell, and Katy Vincent, not to mention Tore Janson!
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Part I
Latin and the Romans
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Lingua latina: a first acquaintance
Many Latin words are easy to understand. Here is one to start with:
femina
It is easy to guess that this means ‘woman’. It’s the name of several women’s magazines in various countries around the world and is also a brand of perfume. Then there are related words like feminine, female, and feminist. And it doesn’t take a big leap of the imagination to link it with the French word femme ‘woman’. It’s often that way when you study languages, particularly one as widespread as Latin. Latin words are sometimes borrowed unchanged.They also frequently appear as parts of learned or abstract words. English has borrowed large numbers of words from Latin, often via French. And there are even greater similarities with French, Spanish, and Italian, languages which have developed out of Latin.
Anyone who has a large vocabulary in English therefore already knows quite a lot of Latin words, and anyone who speaks Spanish or French knows even more. But it also works the other way round. Anyone who has acquired a basic Latin vocabulary will more easily be able to understand many words in other European languages.
Let’s build up a little more Latin:
femina clara
This is a bit harder, even if Claire and Clara are English names and clear is a loan from Latin (by way of French). Yet in Latin the word usually meant ‘light’ or ‘bright’, as in English a clear day, but also ‘shining’ or ‘famous’. So femina clara means ‘a famous woman’.
This example also shows us that Latin has a different word order from English. An adjective like clara usually comes after the word it goes with. The same word order can be seen in the phrase which is in the title of this section: lingua latina. One can guess that lingua means ‘language’ from the English word linguistics, which means
A natural history of Latin
the science of language, or indeed from the word language itself or the French word langue ‘language’. The word latina obviously means ‘Latin’, and so the whole phrase means ‘the Latin language’.
One might query this translation on the grounds that there is nothing in the Latin expression which corresponds to the English word the, or what is called the definite article. But Latin has no equivalent to the or to the indefinite article a/an. A Latin phrase like femina clara can be translated as ‘famous woman’, ‘a famous woman’, or ‘the famous woman’ depending on the context. This is in fact the way things are in most of the world’s languages. The definite and indefinite articles are by and large found in modern western European languages like English, German, and French.
Just a few words in Latin quickly give an idea of what is easy and what is difficult.The words are often already known, or at least you can often connect a Latin word with an English word you already know. But the rules for how you put the words together into phrases or sentences, that is the grammar of the language, are very different from those that apply in a language like English. In this book for the most part I focus on words in the main body of the text, and you can read it without bothering about the word endings or other complications. If you are interested, however, you can find the most important rules in the section entitled ‘About the Grammar’ at the end of the book.
Latin is written with what we have come to call the Roman alphabet, which English and most other European languages have taken over. Our script was originally created to write down Latin, and so the letters correspond very well to the sounds of that language. The words we have met so far are pronounced more or less as we would expect.
Obviously, there are still some differences. In the Latin of antiquity the letter c is only used to represent the sound which we indicate with k in words of Anglo-Saxon origin such as kill or king. Due to French influence, we have retained this value for the letter c in words of Latin origin such as clear or castle, but we pronounce it as [s] when followed by e or i. What the Romans never did was to use the letter c to represent an s-sound, so that we pronounce several words that
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Latin and the Romans
come from Latin in a way that would have surprised the Romans. For example, we say the word cell with an initial s-sound although it is in fact the English version of the Latin word cella ‘room’ which was pronounced with an initial [k]. It is the same with Latin names like Cicero (which the Romans pronounced approximately kickerow), Caesar and Cecilia. In other contexts, the modern pronunciation of Latin in Britain and northern Europe respects the ancient norms and uses the k-sound in all words that are spelled with a c.
Why there should be these differences requires quite a bit of explaining, and we will deal with the question later in the book. It has to do with the way the pronunciation of Latin changed over the centuries. Here I will just concentrate on how the ancient Romans pronounced their language. There is also a difference between English and Latin as far as the vowels are concerned. Latin had only five vowels, represented by the letters i, e, a, o, and u, which had more or less the same sounds as these letters do in modern Spanish or Italian, so that for example Roma, the name of the city of Rome, must have been said in much the same way by the Romans as it is by the Italians who now live there. Similarly, the Romans would not have much trouble recognizing modern Italian or Spanish words like casa ‘house’, tu ‘you’, and luna ‘moon’, whose pronunciation has changed very little in two thousand years. Although the single vowel letters are never associated with the kind of diphthongal pronunciation of the English i in wine or a in fate, there are three sequences of vowel letters which represent diphthongs, namely ae pronounced roughly as English I, oe as in English boy, and au as in English loud. With this knowledge you should be able to pronounce Latin words correctly according to the ancient norms. For instance, the Roman pronunciation of Caesar was very close to the modern German pronunciation of the word Kaiser ‘emperor’, perhaps not surprising since the latter is a Latin borrowing in German. The main rule is to pronounce each letter exactly as it stands and to use the same sound for a given letter in all contexts, as one would do for example with the English letters m or p.
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A natural history of Latin
There are relatively few complications. We have already met one in the word lingua. The group gu is pronounced [gw], so that lingua has two syllables. Similarly, the group qu is pronounced [kw], as in the word aqua ‘water’.
This just leaves the question of the stress. In Latin words the stress is always on the second or third syllable from the end. The second last or penultimate is the most common, as in the word latína, but several words are stressed on the third from the end or antepenultimate syllable, like fémina. (You can find the rules for determining the position of the stress in the section on grammar at the end of the book.) Quite often it is possible to guess which syllable is stressed, as the general rule is that the stress in modern loanwords is still on the same syllable. In this book we sometimes use an accent on the words with antepenultimate stress, particularly if the stress of a loanword is different from the Latin one. In the word list at the back, which contains all the words used in this book, there is an accent on all forms longer than two syllables, and if you are uncertain about how to stress a word, you can check it there. In an ordinary Latin text there are no accents, but we use them here to help the reader.
The earliest period of Rome
The long history of Latin started about 2,700 years ago. It is not always so clear how and where a language comes into existence, but in the case of Latin at least there is no doubt about the place. In the beginning the language was spoken only in the city of Rome and its environs. According to the tradition of the Romans themselves the city was founded in the year 753 BCE (to use our modern system of dating) and modern archaeologists and historians believe that this is quite close to the truth. A small settlement seems to have grown up in the eighth century BCE which included just that spot which was to become the centre of Rome throughout antiquity, the Forum Romanum ‘the Roman square’. One end of the square slopes
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Latin and the Romans
slightly up towards the Palatine hill, where you can still see part of the Via sacra ‘the Sacred Way’, which was used for processions. Beside the road the remains of ancient huts have been found.
We do not know much about the people who lived in this small town but as far as we can tell they spoke an archaic form of Latin. During the first centuries it was probably just a spoken language, but fairly early on it must have begun to be written down. There is an inscription on a stone in the Forum Romanum which has been dated to the sixth century BCE. It has been damaged and is not completely decipherable, but the letters are Latin and it is clear that the language is Latin. Written Latin therefore is at least two and a half thousand years old.
During the first centuries the Romans were just an insignificant small group of a few thousand people among many other such groups to be found in Italy at that time. They lived in the region called Latium, which still bears virtually the same name. In Italian it is called Lazio, just like the famous modern Roman football team. To the north were the Etruscans, who lived in the area which is now called Tuscany and who were more numerous and more powerful than the Romans.
Obviously we do not know for certain what life was like in Rome in those early years, but the Romans possessed a rich store of traditions. According to legend, Rome was founded by a man called Romulus who in so doing killed his twin brother, Remus. When children, the two brothers had been left to die but had been nursed by a she-wolf and later rescued.A she-wolf is therefore one of the city’s most important symbols, and a very old bronze statue of her still exists. When Romulus founded the city, he became rex or king. The same root is found in regina ‘queen’ and can also be seen in English words like regent ‘someone who rules instead of the king or queen’ and regal ‘having to do with a king or queen’. Romulus was followed by another six kings, but the seventh and last king was overthrown and a different system of government was introduced. This is supposed to have happened in 509 BCE, a dating which is in all probability historically correct.
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A natural history of Latin
In the Romans’ way of seeing things, kings were not something to be desired. To be ruled by a king was for them more or less like living in slavery, and they looked down on other states that had that kind of government. Their own state was from 509 BCE a republic, a res publica, which literally means ‘public thing’ or ‘public affair’. In a res publica the highest authority lay not with a king but in principle with the pópulus or people. The idea of such a state has recurred time and again in history in many different forms. Both the leaders of the French Revolution and the founders of the United States took the Roman republic as an important model. The American Abraham Lincoln formulated the idea optimistically: ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’ Both the idea and the key word come from the Romans. The English word people derives from Latin populus, via the French word peuple.
In reality, what the Romans had could hardly be called a democracy. There were two men together who held the highest office in the Roman republic, and they did so only for a year at a time. Their title was consul, a word which is now used for an office in one branch of the diplomatic service. Consuls were elected by the people at a public meeting known as the assembly of the people.They had considerable power during their term of office, but as it was short and the two equal consuls had to agree, no one person was able to dominate politics for very long. What in fact governed Rome after the era of the monarchy was an assembly called the senatus. The Roman Senate consisted of a few hundred men (anything from 300 to 1,000 at various points in its history) who had been elected to public offices by the assembly of the people. The Senate comprised exclusively people who had held public office; for example all former consuls were senators. Although they only held their office for a year, once they became senators they held that position for life. All really important decisions were made by the Senate.
Many countries today have a political assembly called the senate; the best known of course is the American Senate. The fact that the American institution bears that name is clear proof of how much
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Latin and the Romans
Roman ideals meant when the American constitution was written. The Latin word senatus is built on the same root as the word senex ‘old man’, so that the original meaning was something like ‘the council of elders’. As members of the Senate kept their seat for life, the term was quite appropriate.
During this first period of its history Rome depended a great deal on its neighbours to the north, the Etruscans, and several of the kings were Etruscan. The transition from kingdom to republic also had to do with liberation from the Etruscans, and from that time on Rome began seriously to expand her dominion.
How Latin became Latin
Why did the first Romans speak a language of their own? How was it related to other languages?
To those of us who live in Europe in the twenty-first century it may seem strange that a small place with a few thousand inhabitants should have its own language. Languages like English, German, French, and Italian are spoken by many millions of people and are used over large areas. But it is not like that everywhere in the world. In Africa there are at least ten times as many languages as in Europe, although there are about the same numbers of people in the two continents. From a historical and geographical perspective you find that in the long run there is a strong correlation between the number of languages and the number of states or independent political entities. A very long time ago, when there were no large states but at most small tribes or clans, there were no large languages either. The reason is that the way people speak changes constantly. A group of people who live without much contact with other groups will gradually develop their own language, different from all others, although they may once have spoken the same language as people in adjoining areas.
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