When Will We Stop Speaking Latin?

Scholars have been for a long time fascinated by the question of when people stopped speaking Latin. Traditionally, arguments have proceeded along one of two lines. Some have proceeded by identifying those features that are distinctly ‘‘Latin’’ (as opposed to Romance) and trying to date when they disappeared from the living, spoken language; favorite candidates include the loss of the synthetic passive and future forms (amabit, amatur) and the breakdown of the classical five-case noun declension. Others have worked back from the modern situation of diverse Romance languages and tried to identify the first point at which it is possible to talk of a Latin continuum, in which an Apulian peasant, a soldier on the Rhine, and an aristocrat from Spain could expect to carry on a fairly comprehensible conversation in their everyday tongue. Each approach has its value, and its drawbacks. In the case of the first, it is clearly an important part of the historical linguist’s task to identify and date key changes, even if (as with the example of the English thou/thee/thy considered above) the answers are not always clear-cut; developments are seldom just linear, and dialectal and sociolinguistic factors must always be considered. In the second approach, the implicit definition of a language may be reasonable and in line with our expectation from fieldwork on modern languages, but in practice it rests on some problematic assumptions about what constitutes comprehension and everyday language. It also involves playing down the fact that some very well-attested features of the theoretical reconstructed proto-Romance are simply not attested at all in Latin texts. Above all, neither approach is testable enough. Absolute scientific testability is rare in historical linguistics, and while linguists are generally prepared to make limited claims for the truth of quite specific claims (e. g., that the loss of final /m/ was already under way in the preclassical period, or that edere was being displaced by manducare in popular speech by the second century), the sheer level of fuzziness involved in big questions of this kind is too high for most modern scholars.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Most traditional studies have acknowledged that in the spoken language, at least, the distinction between ‘‘late Latin’’ and ‘‘early Romance’’ is not an exact one. A more radical approach has been to question the validity of the distinction in relation to written texts as well. This school of thought, largely associated with Roger Wright (see Wright 2002), has stressed the ways in which written texts may be read differently over space and time. Shakespeare as staged in London today may sound very different from Shakespeare staged 400 years ago, or indeed from Shakespeare staged in Aberdeen or Adelaide today. By the same token, later Latin texts could have been read as something far closer to Romance vernaculars than has generally been assumed. Wright traces the distinction between ‘‘Latin’’ and ‘‘Romance’’ back to the ‘‘reformed’’ Latin pronunciation of the eighth-century English scholar Alcuin, with his insistence that within Charlemagne’s empire written Latin texts should be pronounced letter by letter, as a foreign language - as it was pronounced in contemporary England, in fact. Thus the break between the written and the spoken language turns out to be the result of changes not in speech patterns, but in reading and writing practices. The good sense displayed by this approach, and the weight of evidence collected in its favor, has won it considerable support. Others claim that in its strong form this hypothesis would require an eighth-century clerk, coming across a Latin phrase such as nautae mergebantur (‘‘the sailors were drowning’’), to read it as illi marinarii se annegavan or similar.

Other trends in later Latin linguistics include a new concentration on specialized technical vocabularies, such as those of medicine or veterinary science. Particularly important examples are supplied by Jean Andrd 1981, James Adams 1976, 2003, and David Langslow 2000. There has also been increasing emphasis on bilingualism and language contact in the late antique world (Adams again, and Fr{;d{:rique Biville 1990-5). The divide between ‘‘literary’’ and ‘‘linguistic’’ studies has been eroded (largely thanks to Jacques Fontaine and Michael

Roberts: see Fontaine 1968, Roberts 1989), and useful work has been done on the pragmatics and rhetoric of later Latin. Much valuable material can be found in the proceedings of the triennial colloquium Latin vulgaire - latin tardif. To date, seven volumes of this series have appeared (from different publishers), edited (in order) by J. Herman, G. Calboli, M. Iliescu and W. Marxgut, L. Callebat, H. Petersmann and R. Kettemann, H. Solin et al., and C. Arias AbeUan.