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.
The language of the small city of Rome similarly developed on the spot, so to speak. But it was not completely different from the languages nearby. Quite a few other languages had features in common with Latin. The most important of these were Oscan and Umbrian. Umbrian was spoken in that region of Italy which is still called Umbria,to the north and east of Latium. Oscan was used in large parts of southern Italy. Both were written languages, and a considerable number of inscriptions, which can for the most part be deciphered, have survived.These show that Oscan, Umbrian, and Latin are quite similar in terms of grammar and vocabulary, but not so close that they were mutually comprehensible. The differences must have been about as great as between, say, Swedish and German, or Italian and Spanish, and perhaps even as great as between English and German or between French and Italian. Oscan, Umbrian, and Latin, together with a few other minor languages, make up what linguists call the Italic languages, and it is generally assumed that the reason for the similarities lies in the fact that there once existed a common Italic language, though it is by no means certain that this was the case.
What is certain is that the Italic languages made up a group within a much larger group of languages, all of which must in some way have had a shared historical origin since they have a number of words and grammatical phenomena in common.This larger group is called Indo-European and includes most modern European languages, together with many of the languages of India, Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. Within Indo-European, English belongs to the subgroup of so-called Germanic languages, which also includes German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages. This in turn means that English and Latin are related within the same large language family, just as English and Persian or English and Hindi are. It is generally thought that the likenesses among all these languages are due to the existence of a very early common Indo-European language, which, at least in part, many scholars have tried to reconstruct.
However, there are very few words in English and Latin which are similar because they come directly from the same Indo-European source. One example is Latin mus ‘mouse’ and English mouse, which has related forms also in Sanskrit, Avestan, Armenian, and Greek. The consonants of this word are the same but the vowels are different as a result of sound changes. (Interestingly, the modern pronunciation in many Scottish dialects is nearer to that of Latin because they did not undergo the same vowel changes as the dialects south of the border.) Another set which are related are mother, father, brother beside their Latin equivalents mater, pater, frater, although here the changes have affected consonants and vowels, and made the similarity less apparent. Much closer to the Latin forms, of course, are the English adjectives maternal, paternal, and fraternal, but that is because the English words are borrowings direct from Latin rather than the result of shared inheritance from the ancient Indo-European ancestor language.
In fact, it is surprising that such words are even partially similar after more than 5,000 years of separate independent development. Latin and English share only a handful of words as a result of their common ancestry, and often they no longer have any sounds which are the same. For instance, the Latin pronoun ego and English I come from the same source, but it takes specialist knowledge to reveal the connection. The trick is to look for systematic patterns of sound correspondence. One such is that an English f often corresponds to a Latin p, as in English father beside Latin pater, or English fish beside Latin piscis. That one is fairly straightforward, but there are more surprising ones that can still be shown to be valid. For example, Latin qu sometimes corresponds to English f, sometimes to v, so that English five can be proved to be connected with Latin quinque. If there has been a meaning change as well, the connection may be even harder to see. English quick and Latin vivo ‘live’ can be linked by applying the above rule of correspondence to both consonants in the word, though the original meaning ‘live’ is only found in English in such fixed expressions as the quick and the dead or quicksilver. It is striking how in this way comparative linguistic research can reveal ancient links that go back to before the beginning of recorded history.
From smal town to great power
The small state of Rome with its own small language had several neighbours. Half a millennium before Christ there were many small states in the Italian peninsula.North of the Romans lived the Etruscans, whom we have already mentioned, not in one state but in a number of separate city states. The Etruscans spoke their own language, which did not belong to the Indo-European family and which is not related to any other language which has been preserved. They used their own alphabet,and many inscriptions in Etruscan have survived.For several hundred years the Romans were very dependent on the Etruscans, both politically and economically, and they took over a great deal from them, including their alphabet. The letters in the Roman alphabet represent a slight modification of the symbols used by the Etruscans, who had in their turn borrowed the idea of writing with letters from the Greeks.As a result of the great influence of Latin, all the languages of western Europe have inherited the Roman alphabet, in some cases with additions such as the English and German use of w, the French ç (called c cedilla),Swedish and German ä and ö,Danish ø and so on.Two letters that are now widely used in European alphabets, v and j, have a different history, which we will come to later.
Besides the letters, the Romans acquired quite a lot else from the Etruscans, including some words which have gone on to be adopted by other languages such as caerimónia ‘ceremony’ and fenestra ‘window’ (whence French fenêtre and German Fenster). The meanings of these words tell us something about what the Romans learnt from their neighbours in the north. They imported many religious practices and ceremonies and the firm belief that the will of the gods could be read in the flight of birds or the entrails of animals that had been sacrificed. The Romans also got the idea of theatre from the Etruscans; the modern word person comes from the Etruscan loanword in Latin persona, which originally meant a theatrical mask — hence a role in a play and so finally ‘person’. They also learnt how to build houses instead of windowless huts.
In other respects the Romans could not boast of any cultural achievements in our sense of the word for several centuries. They were first and foremost farmers. But the Romans would not agree that there was a lack of culture. In Latin farming is called agricultura, a word which is made up of ager ‘field’ and cultura, which originally meant the growing of crops but which gradually acquired the sense of spiritual growth or culture. The Latin word cultura is formed from the verb cólere ‘grow’ just as the English word growth is derived from grow.
Their other principal activity was military service, milítia. The Romans were excellent soldiers, and during the fifth and fourth centuries and the first half of the third century bc they fought war after war with their neighbouring states. Things did not always go well, but bit by bit the Romans conquered the whole of the Italian peninsula. Slowly but surely they also spread the Latin language over the territory they had conquered. One of the ways they did this was by giving out parcels of the land they had won to soldiers who had completed their military service. The soldiers naturally spoke Latin, and they and their families brought with them the language of the victors to the homelands of the vanquished, where they continued their main activity,farming.In this way islands of Latin emerged in all the other language areas. At the same time Latin was the language of the people who held power, so most people quickly learnt a bit of Latin, and after a few generations Latin had completely taken over.
A soldier, miles in Latin, could soon become a colónus or grower. A group of such coloni formed a colónia, a number of Romans living together in a conquered country.The English word colony clearly comes from this word.
Not everyone was a simple farmer even in early Rome; there were also rich and powerful people such as those who sat in the Senate, held military command or became consuls.Very early on there was a political distinction between the leaders, who were patres ‘fathers’, a common term for senators, and who were therefore called patrícii ‘patricians’, and those who belonged to the ordinary people or plebs, and who were therefore called plebéii ‘plebeians’. In Rome these terms became outdated after a couple of hundred years, but they have survived to this day as ways of referring to people’s social status.
By about 270 bce their many wars and colonizations had made the Romans masters of the whole of the Italian peninsula, and they began to look with interest at the countries across the sea. On the north coast of Africa, in present-day Tunisia, there was a very successful city called Carthage. The Carthaginians were merchants and seafarers, and they controlled much of the trade and the coast in the western Mediterranean, including for example most of Sicily, an island which the Romans also had their eyes on.
The Romans fought three great wars against the Carthaginians, whom they called poeni ‘Punic (people)’.You can read in the history books about these three Punic wars, which lasted altogether for more than a hundred years. In the end the Romans were victorious and destroyed the city of Carthage, but for a long time the outcome was uncertain. The most spectacular moment during these campaigns was when the Carthaginian general Hannibal entered Italy from what is now France by crossing the Alps with an army which included elephants, the tanks of the ancient world.
For ever after the Romans were inordinately proud of having defeated Hannibal and the Carthaginians, and it was this victory which made them a superpower in the Mediterranean. Yet when it came to writing, education and ideas, science, art, and music the early Romans did not produce much compared to many other peoples. In particular they lagged far behind their neighbours to the east, the Greeks.
By Tore Janson (translated and adapted into English by Merethe Damsgard Sorensen and Nigel Vincent) in "A Natural History of Latin", Oxford University Press, 2004, excerpts p.9-14. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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