Why “Vulgar Latin” isn’t used by linguists anymore
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 มิ.ย. 2024
- The term "Vulgar Latin" has been so misused over the centuries that it has lost all meaning. Where did this term come from? What should we say instead?
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#latin #vulgarlatin #rant
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Intro and outro music: Overture of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) by Mozart
00:00 Intro
02:58 diglossia?
04:50 Textbook vs Real Latin
05:32 Sources of Latin today
07:30 Vulgar Latin may mean Informal Latin
09:30 JN Adams
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Intro and outro music: Overture of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) by Mozart
so can you make a video about the differentiation of rustic latin and latin?
My duo sestersci. It seems reasonable that a "different" Latin was used in different settings. Formal English in a legal document, a thesis or even an email by a professional is very different from spoken English at home, a bar or a football match These differences would be hugely magnified in a society with limited education outside the ruling class. However, any bespectacled nerd who says they aren't the same language should be severely punished (is throwing people to the lions still legal?). 😎
I disagree that no-one can learn Vulgar Latin. You should have seen my Latin teacher back in the early 80s. He was always losing his temper, swearing at us and hitting us over the head. He was an expert at Vulgar Latin 😎.
@Mr. Rich B.O.B I know but i am more interested into the different dialects of rustic latin etc and the main differentiation. for example different case endings or vocabulary. the only thing he consitently mentioned is the switch form /ae/ to /e/ or /ä/
in your video 'Latin Lives! Latin is an Ancient Living Language' you mention another video you did around why to learn Latin and how, what is the title of that video or do you have a link?
I had no idea people thought Vulgar Latin was a totally different language. I've always understood it to mean "colloquial Latin"
Me, too.
I was about to comment this, then I decided to go looking for someone who wrote the same thing and like that instead, then while scrolling I was wondering how no one thought it was this way, then finally I found your comment. An emotional rollercoaster.
It means "creole Latin" with very specific features (notably loss of all declensions in favor of prepositions) from which ALL Romances evolved rather than from declensional ("classical" or "core") Latin.
@@LuisAldamiz creole? LoL
@@SchmulKrieger - Creole or, as the Anglos say: "pidgin". A language that loses some of its grammatical features as it's simplified by a large number of new users who learn it in adulthood (and thus poorly), it also usually incorporates new vocabulry from substrate languages. All those features are salient in Vulgar Latin.
When I was an undergrad, I was taking second year Italian, second year French, second year Latin, and Latin composition all at the same time. (Tip: don’t do this.). One time I accidentally substituted an Italian word for a Latin word in a composition. My classmates were puzzled, however the professor said, “Oh, she’s just being vulgar!”
That is beautiful. I sometimes do this when speaking German and most people just think I am being colloquial when it is an English word slipping in or dialect when it is a Dutch word. It works similarly when I speak English and other languages slip in, but not so much when I speak Dutch and something slips in, unless it is English.
This is so true! Just like we're all actually speaking "Vulgar English", and every English speaker has spoken only this variety for all these centuries
Just like legalese..nobody talks like that but it is still English 🙂
"Dutch" or "Deutsch", if you will, even means "vulgar speech" by the word, from PGmc *þeudō "the people" + *-iskaz "ish"
Yes, but some people are more vulgar than others! :D
I mean English diglossias do exist though because the English forced their language on so many people. English diglossias even exist in Northern England
I can be pretty vulgar with my English
People talk about "vulgar latin" as something that was a solid block even in the supposed era it existed, like someone in Gaul speaking the so-called vulgar latin would be the same as someone in Hispania, because hey, everyone spoke "vulgar latin", right? It's frustrating when people fail to grasp a concept like "the latin spoken in Gaul evolved differently from the latin spoken in Hispania", thanks to distance, different influences, features that stuck in some regions and disappeared in others, etc.
If that were true, you would expect French and Spanish to be totally different languages by now. Oh, wait....
I will say, this is a bit of a misunderstanding. We know that a variety which differed to a fair extent from Classical Latin (i.e. a descendant of Late Vulgar Latin, Proto-Romance) was the direct ancestor of all the Romance languages. The title of this video is frankly misleading clickbait that, despite the various small-text disclaimers at the bottom of the screen, manages to make a number of bad takes. We know Vulgar Latin (in the sense of "a language variety which had changed to some substantial degree from Classical Latin as we know from literature") to have existed from the time of the Late Republic based on discrepancies between our reconstruction of Proto-Romance, consistent "grammatical errors" in texts dating from that period onward that grow progressively more regionally specific, etc. etc. Indeed, French and Spanish are descendants of a language variety which may validly be named "Vulgar Latin," or more precisely "Proto-Romance." There were once very similar Late Latins spoken in Gaul and Hispania that gradually grew more different over time but were substantially different with regards to features when compared to Classical Latin.
Furthermore, it is rather misleading to claim that the linguistic situation of the Latin speaking world was without diglossia. The Latin language continuously changed for the duration of its history (like any language) despite an extremely influential literary standard having been developed and used as a template for writing the majority of texts during subsequent eras until the socio-political forces holding up that particular standard of Latin fell apart. Indeed, "Vulgar Latin" is, contrary to the statements made by polymathy, a very useful term (which is still used in linguistics, I might add; I've seen it in papers as recent as 2015) which refers to the living variety of Latin spoken after phonological and grammatical change had rendered it a substantially different set of varieties than the Classical Latin standard which was continuously being used for much of the history of Latin as a written language before the middle ages began in stride. I mean, for fucks sake, you even find examples of the neuter gender falling into the masculine as it would in nearly every other Romance language in Pompeiian graffiti!
Won't it make sense to just call them "different dialects of latin"?
But they all have a similar, non-declensional but prepositional (also loss of final consonants in -us, -um, etc.) root a unified one (most basic traits are the same) that I sometimes call Antique Italian (but is what they call Vulgar Latin). I call it "Italian" because I'm persuaded that it first evolved in Italy, which was made (by the Social War) into the metropolis of the colonial empire of Italy we call "Roman Empire".
@@user-qo5zb2vp2w put an italian, a portuguese and a spanish speaker in the same room and see the magic happens.
Latin isn't a dead language, is just evolved and split in some dialects, french is very different because of german mixing (it's tainted).
It's pretty much the same situation with Sanskrit and Prakrit: you can hear many people asserting that "modern Indian languages come from Prakrit, not Sanskrit", even though the term Prakrit just means 'common tongue' and it's used as a catch-all name for all the idioms and dialects spoken along Sanskrit, which was just the standardised version of the language used for sacred texts and official writings.
Unochepassava Yeah.
Almost but not quite, because there existed distinctly identifiable Prakrits across different regions of India, such as Magadhi in the east, Maharashtri in the south, shauraseni in the north, etc. That you see clearly evolving over time into Old bengali, marathi, Hindi etc. To the modern languages today. And these Prakrits had their own well established literary traditions that can used to be trace their differences with Sanskrit, which was essentially just a strait-jacketed form of a North-western Prakrit. So no, Prakrits can't be compared to the catch-all Vulgar latin terms that is being refuted here as they always had their own identities and descendants
@@shantanutilak9195 Can you not also say that there existed distinct regional "Vulgar Latins", which evolved into the various different Romance languages? The question of whether Prakrit and Sanskrit are the same langauge or not is one thing, but, either way, "Prakrit" was not a single language or dialect, just like "Vulgar Latin" wasn't.
Granted, people usually don't talk about the Prakrits as if they were a single language, at least not as I see nowadays, but rather as if they were a few distinct languages. (I suspect that is also inaccurate and that it was probably more of a dialect continuum, but I'm basing that on practically no evidence.) In that way they are more like the early (or perhaps even medieval or modern) Romance languages, than their supposed common ancestor "Vulgar Latin". Maybe that's your point.
@@Mr.Nichan Indeed 🎯.
Except that Sanskrit has linguistic innovations not found in modern Indo-Aryan languages, so can't be their direct linguistic ancestor. The word literally means "refined language".
To call all Old Indo-Aryan dialects "Vedic Sanskrit" is a choice people make in casual conversation, but they are not wrong if they insist on calling them "Prakrits".
This seems to be a common issue with studying historical languages. If you’re trying to learn Greek, there’s biblical Koine, Attic, Homeric, just to name a few. Modern Tibetan is already pluricentric, and it was used classically over such a huge stretch of time that the language of any given period will need to be studied separately. I believe Hebrew has a similar situation. It can be hard to grasp just how long these languages were in use and how much they changed over those periods.
Hebrew needs a lot of deconstruction. There are so many errors regarding it's pronunciation and accents.
@@jeremiasvonsiebner5540 What are some common problems. I don't want to make mistakes without knowing.
@@jeremiasvonsiebner5540 to be fair, that’s because there’s a lot of speculation on how it should be pronounced in the first place. Biblical Hebrew’s pronunciation has always been something of tense debate because it’s impossible to know exactly, or with even a comfortable degree of certainty, just how it was to be spoken by virtue of its writing system.
This isn’t even an issue exclusive to Hebrew. Classical Chinese is a subject of intense debate as well in terms of phonology, for obvious reason. A language with no phonetic system doesn’t give you so much to work with. Although Classical Chinese can be easily read due to its nature as an ideographic system, when spoken aloud using modern pronunciation it is completely incomprehensible. Attempts to reconstruct something similar to original pronunciation have had limited success but are still in their infancy. We may never truly know just how it would’ve sounded in its own time, which is a shame as that means a big part of Classical Chinese poetry, it’s sound and musicality, will forever be lost to us.
@@flutterwind7686 generally, assuming any one group's pronunciation is entirely correct. The most accurate seems to be the Askenazi Lithuanian pronunciation, with the Iranian accent and the Greek "Rimmel" for the accented Gamma, as well as a 'th' for the unaccented delta.
@@Glassandcandy yes there is a way. Through foreign words that are transliterated into Hebrew, we can get about a 97% authentic sound. It uses the Ashkenazi Lithuanian pronunciation with the Iranian accent and the accented Gamma being a rolled "r" and the unaccented delta being an "eth".
I think the difference between classical Latin and "vulgar Latin", is the same as the difference between standard English and street English. Every English dialect has its own quirks, expressions, slang words and regionalisms depending on geography. So if we were to lazily apply the term "Vulgar English" to all these numerous and vastly different dialects, of course it's going to be a meaningless umbrella term. The truth is we have to determine which type of "vulgar Latin" we are talking about in order to have a meaningful conversation about vulgar Latin.
Yes slang. We would be more careful say in times of higher education. Where as when we are with our peers we would speak slang
I guess a much better example would be modern Norwegian.
@@Stoirelius Nah it's not, most english speakers know next to nothing about Norwegian
@@antonco2 I’m pretty sure that @SergioAlex92 meant that Norwegian is a language, where the dichotomy works better (between bokmål and nynorsk). For this; whether English-speakers know it, or not; is completely irrelevant.
@@PC_SimoCan confirm as a Norwegian.
I always thought “vulgar latin” was just a catch-all term for Latin post-roman empire that was mixed with whatever local cultures tongue.
Indeed. One among many definitions
No, it's not: it's a core reconstructed language (or dialect if you wish) from where all Romances evolved. That language is not literary or "classical" Latin because it has lost declensions in favor of prepositions very radically (among other less important changes).
@@LuisAldamiz So as I get it : either you did not watch the video, or you disagree with it. Which one is it ?
@@TheMangeGrain - I disagree, see my separate comment.
Vulgar Latin wasn't Latin with no declensions. Even late the spoken dialects still had a minimal noun declension system as evidenced by old French and Romanian today.
Folks tend to have a pretty hard time appreciating just how much a language changes over time, it's not something that's easy to illustrate without specialised knowledge. Hence why I really appreciate the fact that you emphasise how Classical pronunciation was founded in literary tradition and does not necessarily insinuate that the spoken language was completely static for a period of 300 years or so. To suggest that of any language is kind of crazy to me.
Luke gets as frustrated when speaking about Latin as I do when I hear people speak about history. Certain things have been so obvious for so long to the specialist esp. if he loves his work, that reappearing misconceptions and misleading notions drive us crazy. Luke is a legend.
Haha thanks. This comment of yours is also legendary
If it's any consolation to you guys: it's like this in every profession. Sometimes it's innocent mistakes, sometimes misremembering, sometimes a myth that was created for a long forgotten effect in an unimportant story. All you can do is to correct people on the bigger mistakes and forgive the little ones - they'll never have the same passion for the subject when they have other interests.
Remember: Every geek screams inside when uncle Bob declares he knows everything about his new computer. Every doctor is desperately trying not to count all the deadly trauma that the hero is suffering in an action movie and still miraculously lives. And musicians die a little inside when you call that classic symphony a "song"....
@@KonradTheWizzard precisely.
"There is a public misconception about the nature of so-called Vulgar Latin" and "Vulgar Latin is not a thing" can and ought to be different statements
This is so damned interesting. I didn't know any of it.
I’m delighted you like it
Didn't except LetThemTalkTV to be watching this sort of videos(with this I don't mean that they're not terrific,on the contrary).
It totally took me aback the fact that someone so knowledgeable, from whom I've truly learnt so much English and made me love the language twice as much as I did before,is still learning and acquiring knowledge is a proof that we never stop learning new things.
Keep up the good work!
I wish you the best from Spain.
@@juanpedrosanchezgonzalez1066 English isn’t your first language? I honestly wouldn’t have been able to tell. Hablas inglés muy bien amigo. Espero que un día podré hablar español tan bien que hablas inglés 👍🏾👍🏾
@@aviator2117 Practice makes perfect! Lee y habla bastante.
When I first saw the title, my brain just automatically thought “The Romans didn’t have swear words??”😂
In fact that term "Vulgar" today takes on a negative meaning, someone not quite elegant in speaking. But in fact it was originally a term that had only to do with the people. We Italians if today we say .... "quanto sei volgare !” (how vulgar you are!), is not really a compliment. 😉
I'm gonna be honest I've never actually heard it used in this context. I've only ever heard it used as a way to describe the early stages of the local varieties that would later become the romance languages we know today. But I'm willing to bet you speak to more academics than me.
Same
Same
Asking if someone speaks vulgar Latin or classical language is like asking if you speak informal or formal english. And then you can also rant "nobody speaks formal english as a mother tongue. It is merely an artificial language"
Yup
The things we say when we don't know what we're talking about.
@Wind Rose - if you are joking then your joke is very poorly executed and falls flat. in case you're being serious then you have made the classic mistake of not defining what 'formal English' actually means. your example is too extreme to add to the discussion.
@Reino de Hiperbórea - exactly
@Wind Rose - you're still doing it! define 'formal' - is greeting your boss REALLY 'formal'? i think not but some (you) might. it's all a movable feast really, all too subjective. anyway take care
So it is like the difference in the English that you speak with your friends and family and the English that you write your high school English essay in?
Exactly. It’s just English.
@@polyMATHY_Luke I'd be a bit careful about going that far. Some "dialects" of English are so substantially different from what is written down (phonologically, grammatically, etc.) that I'd say they're about as far as the various Scandinavian languages from one another. Any statement about the dialect or language status of a language variety runs the risk of being arbitrary and meaningless, or at worst, insulting. My own variety of English (Appalachian Southern, particularly the variety spoken in the Piedmont region of the Carolinas by those of a low socioeconomic origin) is notorious for even being as far as damn near unintelligible for speakers of a number of varieties of English, even within the same country. That said, don't even get me started on the Hoi Toiders. Their language isn't even intelligible to us.
No. Apparently the situation was similar to the modern English, and Spanish situation. The languages are evolving clear differences. Especially with the less well educated. The "Posh" English is almost an entirely different language from poor folk living in inner city USA, the poor, less well educated peoples' language doesn't observe the same rules of the proper "English" language, but it's what they are using in their millions. There is an underestimating of class stratification here. The Romans were extremely class conscious. Patrician and Plebian at first, then, it went Senatorial class, Equestrian, common non slave, common slave parentage, non citizen, Slave. They limited the type of interaction these classes could have with each other. They were big proponents of segregation in the USA's "Jim Crow", and South Africa's "Apartheid" concepts, they just weren't based on race. When you segregate groups of people, they begin to diverge in culture, language, even genetically, if it's thorough enough. It's not that "Vulgar Latin" isn't a thing, it's just that it's probably not a single unified language all of the common people across the Empire were using, but it better describes the situation of common people incapable of operating with fully correct "Classical Latin", due to limited education, so the language they were using everywhere was not proper "Classical Latin". They were creating simpler, easier for semi literate people to learn version of "Classical Latin". However, is a language the same when one starts changing the rules, the word order, the sentence structure, pronunciation, and spelling of the very words themselves? The obvious answer is NO. It's clearly changing into a similar, but different language.
No, it's the difference between declined German and prepositional English. I'm exaggerating a bit here but that's the core difference between core Latin and Vulgar Latin: declensions vs prepositions and all Romances derive from a language (or dialect) that did not use declensions at all anymore.
@@LuisAldamiz Careful there. Proto-Romance did indeed have declension, but there's good evidence that it had already fused the genitive and dative. The older varieties of all the modern Romance languages had some kind of case inflection.
Next video should be “can Italians understand spoken Italian”
Can French people understand spoken French
Hearing the polyMATHY theme always puts a smile on my face : ). I always enjoy these videos.
Thanks! Yes, I love Mozart's operas a lot so it also makes me happy to hear
@@polyMATHY_Luke Just a single note and so recognizable! Die Zauberflöte's ouverture :)
Is it me or is this guy's pronunciation and voice soothing af??
It is! I have not heard so clear and unambiguous American English in a while. He even distinguishes w from wh in words like "WHat" , "WHere" - as a non-native, I really appreciate that
In general, people have trouble understanding small changes over long periods of time leading to a diverse group of languages. It's quite similar to how evolution in biology is not well understood by a lot of people, it isn't very "obvious" at first glance
Interesting. I wonder if there any romance languages whose speakers called their language "Latin" until quite late....i.e. their language was definitely no longer Latin but they kept on calling it that.
@@perthdude21 I can only think of Ladino, which is essentially a Romance language, but with a large Hebrew vocabulary
@@perthdude21 Italian was named "vulgari eloquentia" which means "vulgar latin" until 1300 (Dante wrote a book about this topic titled "de vulgari eloquentia"). And Ladino is today a romance language spoken on the Alps (italian - austrian border) as well as the romance language of the sephardic hebrew (two different languages, same name).
@@perthdude21 there is Ladin, a Rhaeto-Romance language spoken in Trentino-Alto Adige (Northeastern Italy), it is the closest language to the Romansh spoken in Switzerland.
@@malarobo Vulgari eloquentia just means “eloquence in vernacular” or something. Neither word means “Latin”.
Thinking of Italian Spanish French etc. as modern Vulgar Latin variants makes learning them feel so much more rewarding. Sometimes when I speak Italian I feel like I’m speaking Latin. And then if I switch over to speaking Spanish I notice how similar they are and how connected the languages really are.
Yeah its part of the reason why i love them, other than the fact that they sound nice. Its why im learning Spanish, thats the one i chose to go with.
0:08 The Snobbish Centurion John Cleese persona is strong with this one.
BUT THIS IS MOTION TOWARDS, ISN'T IT, BOY???
My fweind Biggus Dickus speaks excewent Vuwgah Watin!
@@thereaction18 Childish clown!
Really cool video overall! I still don't think that "vulgar latin" is a completely useless term, however. I think you're completely right that that people overuse it to describe a bunch of different things, but there is still use for "vulgar latin" as an evolutionary idea. The fact that aspects of Latin evolved in certain ways from Portugal to Romania is too much to be coincidence or independent changes. There's still a lot to learn about this process, but I think it's still important to know how certain registers of Latin experienced different amounts of change over time. I don't think you can get the answer from looking at a single text like the Satyricon, later texts like the Peregrinatio Egeriae, or even mishmashes of Classic / Medieval Latin and Old French like the Strasbourg Address, but it's really interesting to look at each individual piece to see what sort of larger phonological / grammatical trends were happening.
So yeah, it's not a useless term, just way overused :/
I think the term "vernacular Latin" would be more appropriate in this case
@@paolob.5667 I like to call spanish "standardized Vernacular Castilian Latin" sometimes
@@weirdlanguageguy
Mexicans might object to that.
I think vulgar Latin refers to the spoken language of the romance people after the classical period, as the spoken form gradually drift away from the literary form. Certainly the literary form would be later borrow influences from the spoken form, but they remain as distinct dialects if not languages. It was the spoken form of vulgar latin the developed into modern Romance languages, while literary latin remains largely fossilized.
this. as a linguist I've never heard of VL in the context of informal Latin spoken during the classical period, but rather always in the context of transitional (usually pre-1000) dialects (plural) between medieval or Late Latin and Spanish/French/Catalan/etc..
It must have "drifted away" rather suddenly. It's unthinkable that all the Empire experienced the same process unless it all emanates from a single root, this root (Vulgar Latin) I'd call "Ancient Italian" as well because it must have evolved in the only half-Latinized Italy after the early rapid expansion of Rome over many non-Latin populations (Samnites, Etruscans, etc.) who almost certainly developed Vulgar Latin then by simplifying the annoying Latin grammar (otherwise Vulgar Latin is Latin but it's clearly a creole Latin with loss of important core grammatical features).
That's what I thought at first, but then Vulgar Latin is basically synonymous with proto-Romance, which supports the idea that the former term is - if not exactly meaningless - unnecessary.
Good thing you talked about this. Recently, I bought a Brazilian book teaching about Romance Linguistics and it made me quite confused because we still use this useless terminology. I agree with you, it's better to follow what you said here, since it makes the language feel more real since any language has informal and formal versions of it for various different contexts and avoids many misconceptions, such as the one you cited about a diglossia being what happened in the classical period, one misconception I had even quite recently.
So, basically, "vulgar" Latin is just colloquial speech, but renaissance scholars couldn't see past their own experience with reconstructed Latin (i.e. it being a language they'd use for formal communication but not for everyday conversation), and assumed that this class division between Latin and some other vernacular language was the same in the classical Latin period as it was for them in the Renaissance (doubly-so for English and German scholars). Is that on the right track?
Speaking of, wasn't it the fashion for a time in or before the classical Latin period for the upper-class Roman people to use Greek rather than Latin, having become infatuated with Greek philosophy, or is that too a myth?
good questions!
Well, the common people Latin was actually different from the language of the elite due to education differences. Only the well educated were operating with fully Classical Latin, the common people were operating with "informal"= "Vulgar" Latin. It's a different language as modern English professor at Cambridge, speaks a different English from a poorly educated person living in ghetto Detroit, Michigan. It's simply not identical.
@@jonathancummings6400 it's a diferent register not a different language
@@Vitorruy1 Well, are you sure? They use different sentence structure, they use different words, even include made up, "slang" words, using them in place of already establish English words they happen to not know about, they even use a different pronunciation of identical words. I would find interesting a conversation between an inner city USA person and a Cockney speaker from inner city London and see if they could actually communicate properly. If they can't, they aren't operating with the same language anymore. The whole point of language is for people to be able to effectively communicate with each other. The experiment of Latin with Italian speakers was interesting. The Italians could only make words out here and there, he only communicate with them because he's also fluent in Italian, and couldn't keep from communicating nonverbally when they seemed to get close to what he was trying to tell them. Someone who didn't understand Italian, and only knew "Classical Latin" would have been in a hopeless position. Too much has changed, from the words, to the grammar, to the pronunciation. That is the process that is happening from "The King's English", and Cockney, and USA inner city English. In 100 years, unless something changes, they will be completely different, though similar, like Portuguese and Spanish, languages.
@@jonathancummings6400 You're literally describing what a dialect is. If you gave both of the people you're imagining an English passage to read, they'd both do so fluently and understand it the same.
In fact, the phenomenon you're imagining is very much a thing in China, where there is one prestige dialect that is used and recognized as official by the government alongside dozens of other region-specific dialects with their own pronunciation conventions, vocabulary, and so on. I agree the line separating languages gets blurrier and blurrier until you arrive at something like Mandarin vs. Cantonese, but it's the in-between stops that are pertinent here.
Latin evolving (or "devolving," depending who you ask) until it becomes a Romance language seems like a similar situation to me. The continual abandonment of the Classical (dialect) features doesn't inherently create many new bastardized languages along the way; rather, it slowly changed as all languages do until certain groups of people incorporated it into a new way of speaking (granted, they all did it based on this one root language).
Thank you so much, Luke.
Your contents are flawless and useful.
Few people study, know, speak and love Latin as you do; among several people there is a general ignorance on such matters which manifests itself in unpleasant comments that make these videos necessary
Thank you for this video. The misconception that there was some kind of severe diglossia in the Roman Empire akin to the arab world today always seemed extreme to me.
Actually, It might have been so. There was a big difference between the classes. Think of the difference between "Cockney" English, and "Posh" English. There almost certainly had to be such a great difference between educated elite like Caesar and Cicero, and the masses of uneducated, or indereducated common folk. Latin requires a lot to learn it properly, good material, practice, very good instruction. Something a poor Roman couldn't afford. They declension and verb form systems alone are extremely complex, no one who was illiterate could ever hope to master such, they would simply speak as their relatives and acquaintances spoke, with the limited vocabulary and sentence structure they used. They would never learn 100% proper "Classical Latin" if those people weren't already operating with perfect grammar, and pronunciation,
@@jonathancummings6400 it's the same language.
@@bloodyhell8201 Really? It doesn't sound the same and the people have difficulty understanding each other. They are clearly evolving into different languages, the way Middle German split centuries ago. It's why Dutch and German aren't the same language. People start pronouncing words differently, using a different vocabulary, using different words to express similar ideas and feelings, and identical objects.
sto amando FORTISSIMO tutto, soprattutto l'imitazione di chi dice 'you shoud speak vulgar Latin!' ahahah sei un grande, ti adoro
Grazie mille
You are the best latin teacher man. Thank you a lot ❤️
I came here by accident but your voice is so smooth and you speak so clearly and beautifully both in English and Latin 😍 I can almost see how beautiful the words are rolling out of your tongue that my sense of aesthetic is tingling 😜 it's so refreshing to hear somebody on yt speak that way ❤️❤️❤️
Well and truly spoken, Sir, in just the right register, neither too formal nor too vulgar for the purposes of your teaching! Not only that, but your careful speaking makes us sit up and pay attention! (from one language teacher to another!)
I'd love to watch you and language coach Eric Singer have lunch and knock back a few together! Keep up the good work!
Appreciate you mentioned Romanian as well, greetings from a Romanian guy, I enjoy your videos and I am looking forward for more!
My friend...I am here to say thank you, your videos were big motive for me.. How? by reading bible in 2 translations ! english and latin... verse vs verse ! it helped me so much ! especially for people who know the bible too well...sometimes now I can read full sentence in latin ! I even understood one of your videos where you do a challenge with italian,brazilian,spanish to understand latin ! and I could answer the questions between me and myself even that My original language is arabic.. + english as 2nd language!
I will remember for all my life that you were a motive that encouraged me to study latin! gratias tibi ago !
You have been doing a great job! I am really impressed by your knowledge of Latin
Thank you so much for the clarification! I always had this doubt.
This would all be so much easier if people understood the concept of "linguistic register".
dude. i am DIGGIN' your more recent edgier, slightly angry vids. you've always been so sweet and polite to everyone... i fully support the releasing of the Kraken! BRAVO!
😆 🦑
@Shimmy Shai Aye my sir, I am with you.
Thank you for the excellent explanation of this common misconception. Could you please make a video on genuinely 'vulgar' Latin words? I remember studying Catullus's Liber at high school and I was amazed by his repertory of offensive epithets.
I have watched this video probably 10 times now and it’s still just as interesting and intriguing as the first time. I absolutely adore your personalities which you display in your videos. You’ve influenced me to the point that on my 18th birthday on Sunday I got a tattoo of Veni vidi vici with the Roman leaves symbol, and so did my mom when I told her what it meant. Keep it up, Luke! You’re doing amazing!!!
Thanks for a wonderful video! So terminology aside, how did Cicero speak on a daily basis? Was it structured according to the high grammar of his speeches, or was it something looser? Formal Arabic, for instance, includes cases, yet in spoken daily Arabic the cases are not pronounced.
The idea that Cicero’s speeches is complex comes from our perspective as speakers of Western European languages where the syntax is different. His letters are yet simpler and demonstrate a fairly normal way of thinking and writing as anyone today would do.
In terms of grammar, Cicero's Latin in his letters is the same as in his speeches. What makes his speeches more literary are a multitude of rhetorical devices, including very elaborate sentences for special effects. His letters were not intended for publication, so he was more informal in them. But the difference, at least for Cicero, is not in grammar.
My Latin professor said we would often find the term "vulgar Latin" when studying the origin of our romance languages and we should understand it as informal Latin, just like we will use informal Portuguese when talking among ourselves and formal Portuguese when trying to get a higher grade with the professor.
Ottimo come sempre. Mi hai chiarito molti aspetti che erano un po' confusi.
Sono contento! Grazie
You have in the past made some pretty good comparisons between versions of Latin, like Ecclesiastical and national variants and so on. But aside from the 'good Latin' episode about Romulus, you haven't really dealt much with Old Latin, or proto-Latin (or have I missed that entirely?). Now the latter makes sense as there really isn't much to go on, but Old Latin, the language of Cato the Elder, that should be pretty fine, right?
So would an episode dealing with the specific changes from Old to Classical, or even from Older to Old, be something you would care to do? I have this weird fascination with origins that we can either readily infer or actually see.
Absolutely! It’s a fascinating topic
@@polyMATHY_Luke Well, that brought a smile to my face.
Tl;dw
Latin was a single language that changed slowly and is divided into periods that share similar features.
At each stage there was a "vulgar" colloquial way of speaking appropriate to the period, which was not separate from Latin.
Yup
Very informative Video, and a good discussion in the comments.
You did not only "forget" Catalan, but Corsu as well. 😁 And Raethian.
And Ladin.
And..... 😀
Still
👍
Put your videos on Spotify in the podcast section! Such interesting content and you’re an excellent presenter of information!
I looked up Ancient Chinese and found you and I'm not mad about it at all. Subbed!!
I love that you can just listen to how he’s talking about this and just tell he’s kind of pissed off about it lol
But... But... what about the graffiti written on the walls of Pompey? They liked endowed jokes too!
I discuss that in the video
Salve, Luke! I enjoyed this video very much
Awesome video,Very informative!
Could you do a video about the latin grammar and its differences in the three ages you mentioned? Classical , post classical and medieval?
SALUDOS!
The accusative plus infinitive thing I mentioned is essentially the only really noticeable difference
Great video! Unfortunately, sometimes I hear people saying that "no! Modern romance languages don't come from latin, but from VULGAR latin!", as if they were two different languages... now I will show them this video
Thanks!
@@polyMATHY_Luke non c'è di che, grazie a te per aver sfatato questo mito!
Que emoción ver una notificación de polýmathy :)
fantastic and lucid explanation! thank you.
Besides the quality of the video I am also here to comment/compliment on this man's beard and mustache. Exquisite elegance - definitely suits you!
Camões did not study portuguese to write Os Lusíadas, the poem that "inaugurated" our language, instead he studied latin like everyone else that time and built portuguese based on that and gave a structure to the language.
Mais um video excelente, parabéns!
@Bob el Silencioso Yes, that's why I used the quotes ".". What Camões really did was give structure to portuguese through Latin, his works formalize it as a national language. For everyday use, the grammatical rules in portuguese were determined by him, ask any grammarian today why such a rule works like this in portuguese and in the end he will probably answer that "Camões used it like that".
"Entre Espanha e o Oceano, o Oceano!" (that's Camões, right?, a late friend of mine loved that quote).
Anyhow, what Camões did was to offer a written reference on how to standardize Portuguese, he did not invent Portuguese, just provide a literary guideline.
The point is well made that modern European languages were all formed or re-formed and "corrected" in the Renaissance era according to classical models. This is one of the influences of written, "classical" Latin on the modern romance languages and even on English.
This is interesting. I actually learned in school (I remember this clearly) that Romanian was formed out of Vulgar Latin, but then this term wasn't very well explained.
Reminder that we get taught in school Ecclesiastical Latin pronounciation, without mention of Reconstructed Classical Latin, because it's closer to present-day Romanian. We also get taught that Romanian has 5 cases, despite it clearly having 3, because that is closer to the 6 that Latin has.
Most of what we get taught about Latin in Romania has little to do with teaching us the language, but with propagandising the idea that Romanian is indeed very close to Latin, and not a Slavic language or something else.
This approach made sense in the 19th century, when some historians and linguists were still sometimes doubting the classification of Romanian as a Romance language. But nowadays it's just a bit of Romeabooism (?) from the education system, and detrimental to actual knowledge.
What I'm trying to say is, take what the Romanian school system told you about history, language, and other such things with a heap of salt.
If you take that to mean it came from spoken instead of written Latin, it'd be fine. In my opinion, "vulgar" is often used as stand-in for "spoken"with no ill intent.
@@iuriepripa3171 wait, Romanian only have 3 cases? Serbian have 7 damn cases...and it doesnt have anything with romance languages...
You forgot Catalan AND Occitan! And, well, others, as it's very difficult to list them all. Jokes aside, very good video! I recently went to a conference on that exact topic, and you explained it very well and in simple terms. Well done :)
Thank you for a great video and a superb channel.
Thanks!
As a native Romanian speaker, I'd like to thank you for this eye-opening presentation. Vulgar Latin is a misnomer. I'm proud of the "vulgar Latin" I speak and was taught in school as lingua franca.
Romanian and Latin have to have the same root language. If the conquest theory were true, you would be speaking Greek like the Romans south and East of you did. And it would have taken longer than 70 years for the whole population to learn and adopt, even though the whole territory was not wven ever conquered.
@@tipr8739 you're touching upon a subject that we've been writing about and speculating on for centuries. And you're on point. We're not sure what happened here. My best guess is that a veritable large number of Romans stayed behind for us all to adopt the language after such a short period of known assimilation in the empire.
@@tipr8739 170.
Luke you missed the opportunity to clarify what is rustic latin
I talked about it in other videos
Thank you for the video!
I find the subject of the “colloquial” or late Latin absolutely fascinating.
Is there actually any discord served for Latin speakers ?
Gratias tibi ago
Hey man, I saw that you have created a playlist dedicated to the video games analyzed from the point of view of the Latin contained in them: I consider this an absolutely great idea. In this regard, I'd like you to analyze Bloodborne's background music. According to many, these music are composed in a strange Latin and, perhaps, even in an impossible Latin, however incorrect. I would like you to resolve this issue once and for all by offering a translation worthy of yours!
It's similar to what we have in Arabic between Fusha (viewed as "Classical" or "Standard" Arabic) and 'Ammiyyah (colloquial Arabic).
While yes there are certain general grammatical and vocabulary differences between the two, the reality is that there is a lot of overlap.
And actually, there are a lot of words today that are viewed as Colloquial (and thus not Classical/Standard) that can actually be found in Classical texts, or even the Quran.
And even some of the elements of grammar which may be viewed today as Colloquial can actually be found in the dialects of certain tribes well over a thousand years ago.
So ironically, Colloquial Arabic has actually preserved a number of words and even some grammatical elements that have been lost in modern Fusha used on the news, etc.
I don't think it would even be too much of a stretch to say that the Saudi dialect in general is roughly Classical Arabic but with slight differences in pronunciation and word choice, and simplified grammar.
No, it is not. There was no diglossia on Latin at that time.
@@s.fritzforkel4098 when did the diglossia start?
Diglossia in Latin came later, when the declension system had completely collapsed in the colloquial language. That began gradually. But it was clearly not yet the case in the first century AD.
and then there is ddarija in northwest africa which is just too different from othrr varieties :))
The other thing is lack of spelling change may create some apparent sharp changes or lack of, depending on focus.
One great example is the French origin word "science".
For example the Latin word for this is obvious - "scientia", which i presume is pronounced reasonably close to:
/skientia/ or /skjentja/
when it was originally formalised. However, the IPA for the modern word is pretty deviant, to be safe i will use my English accent:
/sajənz/ or /sajəns/
At some point, the spelling very obviously would have reflected a syncope'd pronounciation from the advent of the old French period:
/sʧienʦə/ is a ɡood ɡuess i think.
What interests me about this pronounciation is that its not that far off from a "late Latin" pronounciation common with/old Italian,
perhaps such as /sʧjenʦja/
and there is stronɡ psychological crossover in spellinɡ with the duller vowel on the end. so at some point Western Romance speakers may have spoke "tsee-en-tsurɡh" but the monks wrote "scientia".
That sort of paints a bit of a disturbing picture of the late Christian Roman Empires speech to me as relative to classical!
It is "shtintsa" from "shti" that means everything you know .. and it is implied as popular cnowledge evolved by people.
"Science" is not a word most people used but "vache" (cow) was. All Romances share the /v/ (or sometimes /b/) pronunciantion for this word (Lat. vacca, which classically would be /waka/ but in Vulgar Latin is /vaka/). But the main difference is that instead of saying "vaccae" VL says "a la vacca", declensions are culled in favor of articles and prepositions and that's a dramatic shared core feature.
@@e-deternaldatabase4721 Could be same root of PIE. However you seem to have worded that in the intention that Sanskrit is the precursor language, generally it's very old and one of the very oldest, but it's problematic to say that Sanskrit is the precursor language as change goes /w/ > /v/ and frontal /k/ > /ʧ/ > /ʃ/ and almost never the other way around.
@@LuisAldamiz Succinctly said!
Salve Luke ! interesting Portuguese, Spanish and Italian are informal Latin, I had never thought of it that way... Gratias
I'm so glad you remembered catalan in the edit!
I regret I didn’t say it the first time
"Thus if you created a "Vulgar Latin" with a certain grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary you would be creating an unattested conlang"
Thanks for giving me an idea
Oh no 😆
Then we could call romance languages as many "conlangs" from vulgar latin. It' s a mess concept to me.
Which would be surprisingly similar to Italian.
@LegoGuy87 - And Vulgar Latin is unattested, hence it is a re-constructed language (a reconlang?), much like Proto-Indoeuropean, etc. It is not unreal, it's just a bit uncertain.
Very interesting! Particularly as a speaker of (one and a half kinds of) modern 'Vulgar Latin'. Am I completely off in intuitively thinking that written and/or higher-register Latin continued to evolve at a somewhat slower pace than other layers of the same language? (Which is, AFAIK, what has been happening for centuries with 'Standard Italian' with respect to other related languages of Italy, and part of the reason why it's so conservative, having been actually spoken by few people up until relatively recently)
Absolutely. The Vulgate Bible is nearly the same as Classical Latin
Chinese had a similar situation. Arabic slightly different.
I believed the "vulgar Latin" myth for a long time. This is very enlightening.
You are incredible ...seriously. Could you please make a video were you explain some of the graffiti founded in Pompei? Much love from Rome
I must say, it is the first time I hear the idea that "vulgar Latin" was a some kind of colloquial version of Latin that some Romans used. I thought it was a kind of lingua franca, a simplification of Latin, that developed among all the international folks that had to communicate with each other in Roman world at later stages of its history. Naturally, it evolved and eventually became the basis for Romance languages and English to some extent. So, it has nothing to do with colloquial or literary vocabulary. It has to do with not natives speaking the language in the course of some business with Romans or people from other provinces, without actually learning it in a proper school in Rome or something like that.
That makes sense but there must be a core root and IMO that core root is an Italian creolization of Latin by originally non-Latin other Italians (Samnites, Etruscans, etc.) in the 3rd century BCE, who were given citizenship after the Social War and spread it around in the Marian Army primarily.
@@ghenulo - Around half of English vocabulary is actually derived from Latin, mostly via Norman French. For example in the previous sentence: around, vocabulary, actually, derived, Latin and via are (Norman and French are also French-derived but have Germanic roots ultimately, not Latin ones). That's six words out of 12 (excluding the two words that are French of continental Germanic roots), and it's that way across the board.
However, on average, French/Latin words tend to sound more "erudite", while Germanic ones tend to sound more common, often they are doubled with similar but seldom identical meanings like pig and porc.
Grammar is of course Germanic but it is very simplified (creolization).
Eu sempre digo que falo latim contemporâneo da Lusitânia, variante brasileira. :-)
Holy shit go outside
O único problema é que a Lusitânia não compreendia todo o actual território português (a sua capital e cerca de metade do seu território até estava em território que hoje pertence a Espanha e o Porto, por exemplo, bem como parte do Sul de Portugal, não estavam dentro da Lusitânia). A língua falada a na Lusitânia também não era uma língua romance (de origem latina). 😅 Eu sei, que confusão...
@@tuggaboy Pode não ser uma nomenclatura muito acurada, mas serve ao propósito, no contexto. Última flor do Lácio, inculta e bela.
Thank you for using BC and AD.
Thanks a lot! I've learned something. These days, I'm rereading Roma Aeterna (Hans Ørberg) and Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Can you do a video talking to people in Latin in Sardinia. I think it’d be interesting to see if someone who speaks Sardinian can understand Latin
African latin was a bit different than the one of Rome
I never understood vulgar Latin in the way you are describing it. I always understood that Vulgar Latin was simply a name to describe when people spoke less formally, with slangs or whatever that happens in every culture with language.
I never saw it as a clean cut two languages, I mean I live in Chile! Try to understand Chilean "vulgar" Spanish and I wish you the best of lucks lol.
Now if I say that there is a more "vulgar" or popular way of speaking a language means it is a completely different language? of course not. And if anybody is trying to actually make that clear cut case, then that's kinda weird.
But just a parallel note so you understand how I view it.
I have lived in Chile and the US for a long time and some people do not know how to properly speak their language, do not know how to write it and so on (I mean in English and Spanish you have full on dictionaries for these words and terms), and they end up developing a different kind of English and Spanish, Sometimes in the form of a dialect, and in some cases the differences are so big that you can not understand absolutely anything they are saying as if it is a different language. Search "Flaite Chileno" or search the DOBLAO video about the word "WEON"...
Now I am not saying that something that extreme happened with Latin but without being an expert I can see how in any language a formal way of speaking it and writing it is developed and pretty soon you will have regular people speaking a slightly different version of that.
BTW Vulgar in Spanish means popular, or what is more abundant, less refined or without education.
Cool video! I especially liked the new grammatical changes found in the Vulgate! Any sources I could go to to learn more on this? I bet that's not the only grammatical difference between Classical Latin and the Latin of the Vulgate. Or is it? :)
My sources in the description
Luke, thanks for this video! Do we have any traces from this common proto-romance language at the source of the wester european new-latin languages? And: if I, being in Rome, or in Madrid, traveled 1500 years back in time and spoke the language we are now speaking in these cities, what would be the odds that our ancestors could actually understand me? Could two men born in these places as many years ago fairly understand each other the way we do now if Spaniards and Italians spoke slowly? Than... Grazie!
Great analysis! I think you explained it perfectly.
More than once I saw you saying how classical latin pronounciation came naturally to romance speakers. I think you specially mentioned it on the analysis of the latin from the Barbarians series.
Wouldn´t be interesting to put that to the test??
Get like 2 speakers each of different romance languages, German, English and maybe even a non indo European language.
Give them some brief explanation of some latin pronounciation rules (like C always being K, etc)
Then give them some words... and then some sentences to speak.
See how they would fare.
Yeah, not TAHT scientific. But fun enough for TH-cam :)
Thanks for sharing
That may be the most mellifluous and restrained rant I've ever listened to.
I always thought vulgar latin was just a way to refer to early romance and all the ways latin had been evolving after the fall of the empire
...al fin un profesor que sabe lo que dice y de quien da gusto aprender. Gracias Luke! Estas clases son un lujo para guardar.
@Reino de Hiperbórea yes, save it and watch again.
@Reino de Hiperbórea Entiendo. Es uno de sus "usos" por estos lados. Saludos.
@Reino de Hiperbórea yo lo uso asi. no es raro para mi. (Cuba)
Highly interesting video. I didn't know that. As a Portuguese speaker I have always been told that the language developed from Vulgar Latin.
I thoroughly enjoy the content of this channel. It is very interesting.
Optime! Gratias tibi, Luci! Salve de Sicago :)
In Spanish and Portuguese we still have formal and informal ways of speaking.
True
Tu/usted and vosotros/ustedes came immediately to my mind
This was very cool video! Do you have or plan to have a video about the Latin dialects spoken across the empire and differences among them?
Thanks. There were almost no dialectic differences during the Empire; see the JN Adams book
@@polyMATHY_Luke a read an interesting article somewhere about later latin dialects and how the historical linguists tried to reconstruct them (by indentifying the characteristic misspelings on the scripts made by locals at that time ie on walls or on graves).
It is fascinating that this debate already happened during the 15th century. Humanist Flavio Biondo wrote his De verbis Romanae locutionis in 1435, based on the debate he had with his colleagyes in Florence. You should check that out.
Thank you! My Latin teacher used to go nuts if someone said "vulgar Latin" she spoke of "formal and informal" This video makes it easier for me to explain this to people instead of just striking them 🤣
One could say Catullus is "vulgar Latin" but for a whole different set of reasons.
“Not Vulgar Latin, Informal Latin”, you could not explain it better. The same goes for all languages, tbh. Love it when you mimic the smart-ass who doesn’t even speak Latin but knows better “You should speak Vulagr Latin, because they would understand you bettah!” 🤣🤣🤣 Love the way you speak, Luke, double thumb-up to you 👍👍
Hahaha thanks! Yeah I like to have fun with that silly character
Hello, occasional viewer here. I discovered your channels from the Ancient Greek subreddit a while back. I'm still learning Latin, I'm terrible at it, but I like your videos. I don't know if you're aware of a book, 'Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages' by Roger Wright. It's about Latin metalinguistic awareness and it tackles the issue of Latin diglossia.
I appreciate the recommendation! I actually cite that book rather frequently in these videos. Thanks! It’s a great text.
I believe I read once that Cicero explained that 3 languages were spoken in Rome; Latin, another language, and a third invented language that was created, as some sort of mixture of the two languages, so that the two different linguistic groups could communicate with each other. The "other language" presumably was a sort of creole language, derived from Latin, and with a simpler grammar, and spoken by the lower classes. And some people think that the Romance languages were derived from this presumably creole offshoot of Latin. So, in which case, it could be said that the Romance languages were derived from "Vulgar Latin".
You did not ever read anything like that, no. I can't tell you what it is that you did read which gave you that impression, but none of what you wrote corresponds to anything that ever existed, or was ever written about by any ancient roman.
I had kind of wondered why you never mention Vulgar Latin since I thought it really was a thing, and that it was the basis of the Romance languages. Now I understand. It all makes sense. Thanks for dispelling the myth!
Thank you! I get annoyed when textbooks say Latin was never spoken and is a constructed language. It ignores the history and evolution of the language. I also take issue with texts that say Latin was only spoken by "educated" people and not the regular dumb poor people. I think you have to be educated to know how to be a merchant or how to be a builder or sculptor. There were people who just weren't taught how to read and write. Doesn't mean they were uneducated and they indeed had knowledge of how to speak their language.
Ans thank you for your comment. Agreed.
@@ghenulo I've seen it a few places, but i forget which books. Like, somehow Latin was an ancient conlang that people spoke when they didn't want the working class to understand. I guess we've learned a lot recently about how languages evolve and stratify and how humans code switch.
Idk if you'll see this but I've been learning Latin a little bit using some of your videos (fantastic work btw!) and I was curious about names. If I were to write my name in a Latin text or essay, would I "latinize" my name or keep it the way it is with a Latin pronunciation? Probably a silly question but this language is fascinating me and I wanna learn more. ^_^
Most would latinize their names. That has been the custom for the last thousand years or so, at least.