I know throughout the Roman Empire different dialects of Vulgar Latin existed, separate from Classical Latin, that the common people spoke. But had the Roman Empire survived to his day would there be any resemblance to French in Gaul or Italian in Italy?
Would romance languages exist if Rome never fell?
- Thread starter burgoynewulfe
- Start date
They would certainly be different, but probably still quite recognizable in the general outline. French, which had a significant Frankish influx, would likely be among the most divergent varieties.
Something vaguely resembling Italian may exist, but probably it won't spread beyond Tuscany.
Something vaguely resembling Italian may exist, but probably it won't spread beyond Tuscany.
The provincial breakaways were more political than social, that's not to say provinces were identical, there were more similarities between them but just for sheer distance and ease of travel they were never a part of a monolithic culture to begin with. Largely insular pieces of land would remain insular until institutions and communications catch up to the territorial sprawl. That depends very little on the political divisions because it doesn't matter much in regards to language whether the Emperor is in Milan or Trier.
That being said, were the provinces to actually form their own semi-independent polities with their own court and assemblies eventually the vernacular would probably drift into the administration but that's literally centuries ahead into the future before the latin used in administration differs enough from the common speech to warrant that sort of Heraclian shift, but only after the government gets involved in the linguistic drift would you see the sort of fragmentation that the Roman world experienced OTL.
Maybe it would resemble Chinese where the classical language remains relatively unchanged, while the vernacular languages diverge based on region, migration trends, trade routes, social structures, and so on.
Eventually, when *nationalism emerges, a vernacularized version of Latin (or a Latinized version of the vernacular dialect of a prestigious city) becomes established as a standard tongue.
Eventually, when *nationalism emerges, a vernacularized version of Latin (or a Latinized version of the vernacular dialect of a prestigious city) becomes established as a standard tongue.
If Rome as an entity lasts long enough to be united, I imagine that the center of power in the Roman Empire wherever it might be would be inclined to enforce their preferred variant of modern Latin over the other provinces and assuming a stable Empire with a deep sense of legitimacy, likely succeed.
As a linguist, I approve of the above responses.
Of course, no imperial collapse likely means the Germanic component in Romance languages would be greatly reduced. For example, the word for "white" would still be based on albus (as it is in modern Romanian) rather than blancus, a Germanic borrowing (or alternatively, candidus could have become the general word for "white"). Bellum for "war" may still drop out to avoid homonymy with the general word for "beautiful", but guerra would not be its replacement; maybe lucta would incorporate its meaning instead.
All languages change, however, so the modern-day *Latin and *Romance languages would be broadly similar to OTL's, but with many many differences in detail, at all levels (vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, spelling, etc.)
Of course, no imperial collapse likely means the Germanic component in Romance languages would be greatly reduced. For example, the word for "white" would still be based on albus (as it is in modern Romanian) rather than blancus, a Germanic borrowing (or alternatively, candidus could have become the general word for "white"). Bellum for "war" may still drop out to avoid homonymy with the general word for "beautiful", but guerra would not be its replacement; maybe lucta would incorporate its meaning instead.
All languages change, however, so the modern-day *Latin and *Romance languages would be broadly similar to OTL's, but with many many differences in detail, at all levels (vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, spelling, etc.)
A surviving Roman Empire doesn't mean no Germanic invasion. If we take the Chinese example further, there will be plenty of dynasties founded by outside invaders who always find a need to appropriate the symbols of the ancient civilization. And that will inevitably influence the language.
The OTL Romance language least likely to exist in such a TL would be French, since that is rather strongly influenced by Frankish, and the mass settlement of Franks in Lower Germania and Belgica seems far from a given in a Surviving-Roman-Empire TL.
Look at the ERE. Byzantine greek evolved slowly, from Classical Greek, but it was still recognizably the same language. The pronunciation changed a lot, but the spelling and grammar didn't nearly as much.
The 'advantage' of an empire with people moving from one end to the other, especially one with a state religion and long established literature, is that there is a LOT of impetus for a common, shared dialect of administration, and what better one to use than the classical language the empire was built on.
So... I'd say that a surviving WRE would keep a Latin that Cicero could read - even if it sounded really odd.
A couple of comments, though, as to why Latin would change more than Greek.
Latin, even in early Imperial times, as I understand it, was already slurring endings, a process which resulted in all '-us' and '-um' endings sounding like '-o' (which is why masculine nouns in Italian end in '-o'). That means that a lot of grammar which relies on distinction among cases will make heavier use of prepositions (so de + noun instead of a genitive, say).
Similarly, the simple past and simple future (e.g. vocavo I called and vocabo I will call) are phonetically identical in Vulgar Latin, so you will get more auxiliary verbs to help express tense).
However, if the Empire survives, people will still be moving around. Soldiers, traders, administrators, and thus the local dialects will have pretty strong pressure to remain close enough to 'standard' for mutual comprehensibility.
Again, the use of Latin in the Church (which seems even more likely to remain) is going to support that.
So, no, I'd say that differences are far more likely to remain at the dialect level than the language level.
The 'advantage' of an empire with people moving from one end to the other, especially one with a state religion and long established literature, is that there is a LOT of impetus for a common, shared dialect of administration, and what better one to use than the classical language the empire was built on.
So... I'd say that a surviving WRE would keep a Latin that Cicero could read - even if it sounded really odd.
A couple of comments, though, as to why Latin would change more than Greek.
Latin, even in early Imperial times, as I understand it, was already slurring endings, a process which resulted in all '-us' and '-um' endings sounding like '-o' (which is why masculine nouns in Italian end in '-o'). That means that a lot of grammar which relies on distinction among cases will make heavier use of prepositions (so de + noun instead of a genitive, say).
Similarly, the simple past and simple future (e.g. vocavo I called and vocabo I will call) are phonetically identical in Vulgar Latin, so you will get more auxiliary verbs to help express tense).
However, if the Empire survives, people will still be moving around. Soldiers, traders, administrators, and thus the local dialects will have pretty strong pressure to remain close enough to 'standard' for mutual comprehensibility.
Again, the use of Latin in the Church (which seems even more likely to remain) is going to support that.
So, no, I'd say that differences are far more likely to remain at the dialect level than the language level.
"So, no, I'd say that differences are far more likely to remain at the dialect level than the language level."
*cough* China *cough*
*cough* China *cough*
The difference is that Greek doesn't have the same tendency toward dropping final vowels that Latin has (and Latin doesn't have as strong a tendency as Germanic languages). In the Romance languages, the blurring of final vowels and the loss of final consonants came about as a result of the Latin stress accent; Ancient Greek did not have stress accent but pitch accent, and in the other direction Germanic languages had a stronger stress accent, earlier in the word.
Tellingly, there was convergent grammatical evolution in the Western Romance languages: two genders, no case distinctions except in pronouns, a move from Latin's subject-object-verb word order to SVO, the development of definite and indefinite articles. These happened at a time of limited communication across the Romance-speaking world - though not zero, as seen by the fact that where communication actually was zero, as between Romania and the Western Romance world, the differences are more extensive.
I doubt it. Occitan still shares some features it got from French. Although the biggest changes from Latin to the Romance languages would have happened regardless, many innovations began in northern France and spread from there in waves, influencing Occitan, Catalan, Spanish, and Gallo-Italian. The development of the front rounded vowels /ø y/ is a French innovation that spread to Occitan and Gallo-Italian (and probably also to Dutch, which underwent a French-like /u/ -> /y/ change in addition to Germanic umlaut). The loss of intervocalic /b d g/, which affected Spanish, started from French as well. The lenition /k/ -> /ts/ (eventually /s/) before /e i/, as in the pronunciation of the letter C in English, originated in French, and is atypical; usually, if /k/ weakens before front vowels, it's to /tʃ/ or something similar, as happened in Italian and many non-Romance languages (Sanskrit, English, Swedish, Mandarin).
If you want a model language for how Romance languages would've looked if the Western Roman Empire had survived, look to Italian, which resisted French innovations. Italian also had its own set of innovations, for example more extensive leveling of consonant clusters than the rest, and if Rome had been able to project power continuously, it's likely those would've spread more widely. In OTL, they only really spread north to the La Spezia-Rimini line, with some limited influence on Gallo-Italian (/k/ -> /tʃ/ before front vowels, and not /k/ -> /ts/).
This is especially true if Latin had truly died in Roman court use (and morphed into Italian), rather than being preserved in church use as in OTL. Spanish and French leveled a lot of consonants, but then restored them under Latin influences - for example, Old Spanish was happy to say perfeto, but then switched to perfecto under Latin influence.
Of course, the written language would remain more conservative, and I can see people try to pronounce consonants that disappeared in Italian (plano, not piano). Then again, English has undergone some massive changes in pronunciation even while maintaining a continuous centralized government with fossilized spelling. Nobody tries to pronounce the L in talk. Even obviously foreign borrowings get vowel-shifted based on English spelling pronunciations.
Thank you for the info.
I find it really interesting that for some linguists the la Spezia-Rimini line is the most prominent of all dividing lines in the Romance languages area.
If this correct, there certainly is no overall grouping of "italian dialects" vs. "all the rest".
Yes, but.
The La Spezia-Rimini line distinguishes two linguistic features of Italian versus (the rest of) Western Romance: consonant gemination, and plurals formed by vowel change (-o > -i, -a > -e) vs. by adding -s. (As Wikipedia will tell you, it doesn't consistently distinguish voicing of intervocalic consonants.)
Except that it's not completely correct, because Gallo-Italian plurals are all over. In Milanese, the masculine plurals were originally formed by vowel change; the -i suffix subsequently dropped.
It's better to view Western Romance (including Italian) as somewhat of a dialect continuum. Somewhat, because there are mountains in the way, leading to big differences between (Tuscan) Italian and Emilian, between Piedmontese and Provencal, etc. But it's still right to view Arpitan, Occitan, and Gallo-Italian as intermediate languages between French and Italian.
Wait, so if Blancus is actually a Germanic borrowing, then where does white (hwit in old English) come from?
Last edited:
It's interesting, Germanic had two words for white, similar to how Latin has albus vs. candidus (though I'm not sure if the meaning distinction "flat white" vs. "shining white" held in Germanic). The two in Proto-Germanic are reconstructed as *blankaz and *hwītaz. The latter yielded English white and similar Germanic words, while the former died out in English until we reborrowed it from French blanc as blank. French had inherited it from Vulgar Latin, which had acquired it at some point from a Germanic variety.
Both words have ancient Indo-European origins. The *blankaz root is connected to other IE words that mean "shining", "burning", "black" (black itself is related, as is bleach, and Latin flagrāre). The *hwītaz root is connected to IE words for "light", "bright", "shine", "white", including the Slavic word for "light/world" světъ and the Persian word for "white" sefid.
Wiktionary is a good, accessible source for all this
It's interesting, Germanic had two words for white, similar to how Latin has albus vs. candidus (though I'm not sure if the meaning distinction "flat white" vs. "shining white" held in Germanic). The two in Proto-Germanic are reconstructed as *blankaz and *hwītaz. The latter yielded English white and similar Germanic words, while the former died out in English until we reborrowed it from French blanc as blank. French had inherited it from Vulgar Latin, which had acquired it at some point from a Germanic variety.
Both words have ancient Indo-European origins. The *blankaz root is connected to other IE words that mean "shining", "burning", "black" (black itself is related, as is bleach, and Latin flagrāre). The *hwītaz root is connected to IE words for "light", "bright", "shine", "white", including the Slavic word for "light/world" světъ and the Persian word for "white" sefid.
Wiktionary is a good, accessible source for all this
Wow, such good linguistic knowledge!