Old Roman Language?

[Rameses the Great]

I guess my question is, what did the Romans used to speak? Latin or some form of a new Italian. I know at their infancy stage the educated class spoke Greek. Also the Romans were Celts, from my understanding, could they have spoken like Celts?

 

I mean, England's Brits used to speak Galic before they spoke English. The Romans had to speak something before Italian. The Greeks invented Latin, did the Romans speak that?

 

Am I posting a good question, or am I just blindly asking a stupid question. I just want to know, for you language guys out there.

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Andrew

[Q Valerius Scerio]

The earliest Romans were Latins. Not far from them, though, were the Etruscans. No Roman spoke Celtic until the Celtic invasion in 387, and then they seemed to have only borrowed a few words. Greek was a common tongue around the area as well, but I don't think you can call the Greek's in the area "Roman".

[docoflove1974]

Sorry I didn't see this earlier.

 

There are various stages of Latin, but the 'oldest' (Old Latin) was very similar to what we have as Classical Latin. Classical was in fact spoken, but was not the 'language of the people' for nearly as long as it was written. That is to say: Classical Latin is more of a written 'register' than spoken. What we have of Old Latin is limited, mostly to tombstones/inscriptions. It seems that it was the language of the people of Latium (the general area of where Rome is), with the city of Rome becoming more prominent and their dialect becoming the standard--leading up to what we know as (Old, then Classical) Latin.

 

Two closely-related members of the Italic branch of Indo-European was Oscan and Umbrian, spoken by the peoples of the same names. It is mostly through those two languages that we know about Old Latin, albeit there were differences in morphological markings. They were spoken more to the east, much of where the regions of Umbria and Le Marche are now.

 

The Etruscans were a different group of people, with a different language. As of right now, there is no difinitive proof that it is an Indo-European language; there have been attempts to link Basque with Etruscan, but I don't believe that they have been successful in that endeavor.

 

Much of the southern heel of the Peninsula, including the island of Sicily, was under Greek rule, and had Greek speakers there. I'm not sure what is known of any indigenous languages...but I'm sure someone on here has more info on those.

[Q Valerius Scerio]

There are various stages of Latin, but the 'oldest' (Old Latin) was very similar to what we have as Classical Latin. Classical was in fact spoken, but was not the 'language of the people' for nearly as long as it was written. That is to say: Classical Latin is more of a written 'register' than spoken. What we have of Old Latin is limited, mostly to tombstones/inscriptions. It seems that it was the language of the people of Latium (the general area of where Rome is), with the city of Rome becoming more prominent and their dialect becoming the standard--leading up to what we know as (Old, then Classical) Latin.

I disagree. Plautus shares many similarities with Vulgar Latin of the later ages. Classical Latin, i.e. what you find in Cicero or Vergil, was an artificial style modeled after the practices of rhethoric. It's like a miixture of Shakespeare, legalese, and politalk. Sure, technically legalese is spoken, but you can hardly count it as a living language.

 

The Etruscans were a different group of people, with a different language. As of right now, there is no difinitive proof that it is an Indo-European language; there have been attempts to link Basque with Etruscan, but I don't believe that they have been successful in that endeavor.

The Basque-Etruscan linking has failed miserably. However, Etruscan as a Ilyro-Thracian language has merit. Check out The Etruscans Begin to Speak by Zacharie Mayani.

[docoflove1974]

I disagree. Plautus shares many similarities with Vulgar Latin of the later ages. Classical Latin, i.e. what you find in Cicero or Vergil, was an artificial style modeled after the practices of rhethoric. It's like a miixture of Shakespeare, legalese, and politalk. Sure, technically legalese is spoken, but you can hardly count it as a living language.

 

Vulgar Latin is considered to 'start' around the time of Plautus...~200BCE, perhaps earlier. As Jozsef Hermann (2000) states in his book on the subject, the term 'Vulgar Latin':

 

is used to refer to the set of all those innovations and trends that turned up in the usage, particularly butn ot exclusively spoke, of the Latin-speaking population who were little or not at all influenced by school education and by literary models. (p. 7)

 

He later notes on that same page that the most of what we have comes from the first century CE--Pompeii, Petronius. But as far as we know, 'Vulgar Latin' existed earlier, but was not recorded.

 

Old Latin, by contrast, was a totally different version of the language, and was in use much before the Republic era even existed. Completely different from VLat.

 

The Basque-Etruscan linking has failed miserably. However, Etruscan as a Ilyro-Thracian language has merit. Check out The Etruscans Begin to Speak by Zacharie Mayani.

 

Ooooooh...another reference to check out later...thanks!

[phil25]

Is there not quite an ancient script on the "black stone" found beneath the pavement of the Forum Romanum just in front of the Curia Julia? I always thought that was supposed to go back to the BC700-500 period.

 

I remember asking my classics master at school in the 60s whether ordinary Roman spoke what seemed to m to be the incredibly complex and formal latin we were learning - mentally declining verbs and construing sentences. I was told that graffiti and so on indicated that the plebs soke a simplified form of the language. Anyone able to expend on that?

 

As for Britain - I don't think anyone really knows what was spoken before the Romans came. A celtic lnguage, I suppose, but whether a form of gaelic I don't know. That was certainly the case come the end of Roman rule c400AD as we see words surviving from that source.

 

Lay over that, however, Germanic tongues (Saxon etc) and for the Danelaw, Scandanavian; and later Norman-French (still surviving in fragments, as in the wording of the royal assent to Acts of Parliament).

 

En passant - did you know that the animals are called cattle, sheep and pigs; while the meat that comes from them is respectively beef, mutton and pork? And that this mis-match relates to the fact that the animals were kept by Anglo-Saxon peasants, but the meat was consumed by their Norman (French-speaking) masters - hnce beouf, mouton, porc...

 

Isn't language fascinating.

 

Phil

[docoflove1974]

I remember asking my classics master at school in the 60s whether ordinary Roman spoke what seemed to m to be the incredibly complex and formal latin we were learning - mentally declining verbs and construing sentences. I was told that graffiti and so on indicated that the plebs soke a simplified form of the language. Anyone able to expend on that?

 

This is Vulgar Latin...the spoken register. See my previous posts for a clearer description.

[docoflove1974]

While waltzing around the library today (it really did feel like that), I had to pick up Antoine Meillet' s 1966 Esquisse d'une histoire de la langue latine. While there are other, more modern, tomes on the topic, it is still a good discussion on the topic of the origins of the Italic branch of Indo-European, as well as the various stages of Latin. If you have at least a reading knowledge of French (which is about where I'm at), and a modicum of linguistic knowledge, then this is one for you to look at. There are several editions, with Amazon.com showing one from as late as 1977, but I'd say anything post-1960 is fine.

Edited May 16, 2006 by docoflove1974