AHC Languages

Bringing back ancient Latin requires a conscious effort akin to modern Hebrew or katharevousa (artificially ancient) Greek, both of which began due to nationalism. I guess if the Risorgimento was substantially different (maybe the movement is virulently anti-Tuscan and therefore it is anti-Tuscan dialects) you could see an attempt to revive Latin in Italy, but like katharevousa it would struggle to supplant local dialects. France has its own Gallic identity that it has cultivated since the Hundred Years' War, it doesn't need the prestige of an ancient language to support its nationalism.
Not going to happen. Tuscan was already "Italian" and widely recognized as such. Indeed, it was the basis of Italian national identity, though the majority could not speak it.
 
Ok, so without audio recordings there is no way to completely stop the drift.
Even with audio recordings linguistic evolution is continuing as ever. Assuming you're American, Canadian raising and the Northern Cities Vowel Shift are some ongoing changes in American English that you might be familiar with.

This means no syntax changes
Grammar actually changed quite a lot in the history of the Greek language too. For understanding the gist of the written language, I'd wager that orthography is actually more important. To give you an example, I speak Korean and English fluently. 1817 Korean and 2017 Korean are much more similar, in phonology and grammar, than 1617 English and 2017 English. But I can understand the KJB while I have big trouble with any Korean text before the late 19th century. The main difference is that Korean orthography changed far, far more in those two hundred years (with a huge number of consonant clusters and entire letters being discarded) than English did in four centuries.

How about making so that Modern Italians reading Latin scripts using modern pronunciation rules is completely understandable?
Completely understandable is impossible, but as @cmakk1012 said, Latin could be more intelligible to an Italian speaker with a much less phonetic orthography and huge changes in nationalist movements and how the history of Latin/Italian is viewed. Of course this would entail having huge political PODs that could jeopardize the existence of a mutually intelligible English.
 
Also impossible. I mean, we can't read Beowulf. Hell, we can barely read the Canterbury Tales, and that was written 800 years ago.

As for Italians, there are already difference between the Florentine of the Baroque period and modern Italian, let alone the drift between that and Dante's Italian. And again, that's 800 years of linguistic drift between it and the modern day, and 1200 between the Latin of Cicero and it. And even in Cicero's day there were already Italian dialects drifting from the norm.
Well, the difference between Dante's Italian and modern Italian is not so marked. The drift is noticeable, but Medieval Florentine is roughly understandable to contemporary speakers (compare Old Norse and modern Icelandic), and phonology and basic grammar are more or less the same. Not the case with either Castilian, English or French, incidentally.
The conservativeness of Standard Italian is due to its having been a literary written language (spoken Tuscan did undergo significant phonological shifts that separate it from the standard in the meantime).
 
Well, the difference between Dante's Italian and modern Italian is not so marked. The drift is noticeable, but Medieval Florentine is roughly understandable to contemporary speakers (compare Old Norse and modern Icelandic), and phonology and basic grammar are more or less the same. Not the case with either Castilian, English or French, incidentally.
The conservativeness of Standard Italian is due to its having been a literary written language (spoken Tuscan did undergo significant phonological shifts that separate it from the standard in the meantime).

Yeah, that's what I'm going for. Keep the drift from Latin to Italian around Medieval Florentine vs Modern Italian. And make THAT version of "Latin" (I guess not Latin) occupy those areas. Also, I re watched the thing about Greek, apparently it (probably) changed less from Ancient to Modern compared to 1500 to 2000 Italian. I say probably, because these guys are trying to gestimate language drift based on text alone. So, it wouldn't surprise me if they were wrong.
 
Completely understandable is impossible, but as @cmakk1012 said, Latin could be more intelligible to an Italian speaker with a much less phonetic orthography and huge changes in nationalist movements and how the history of Latin/Italian is viewed. Of course this would entail having huge political PODs that could jeopardize the existence of a mutually intelligible English.

I'd disagree. Grammatical structures changed too much. It takes to Italians specific training to make sense of a Latin sentence beyond the most basic stuff. The case and tense/mood morphological markers of Latin are very, very different from what you have in Italian, with major consequences on word order and basic syntax. A more conservative ortography would make Italian look like Latin a lot more, but it would not make it much easier to actually master Latin: French ortography is very conservative, but this does not mean a modern French speaker can read Chrétien de Troyes unaided.
 
Look, Latin vs Italian while less than Latin vs French, is still a big change. The try is to shrink that change. We do have examples of smaller language drift. If pronunciation is inevitably going to change, we can at least make Italian LOOK very much like Latin
 
Yeah, that's what I'm going for. Keep the drift from Latin to Italian around Medieval Florentine vs Modern Italian. And make THAT version of "Latin" (I guess not Latin) occupy those areas. Also, I re watched the thing about Greek, apparently it (probably) changed less from Ancient to Modern compared to 1500 to 2000 Italian. I say probably, because these guys are trying to gestimate language drift based on text alone. So, it wouldn't surprise me if they were wrong.
So you are asking Late Imperial Vulgar Latin not to change for 1500 years, more or less. I doubt it is possible.
 
Yeah, that's what I'm going for. Keep the drift from Latin to Italian around Medieval Florentine vs Modern Italian. And make THAT version of "Latin" (I guess not Latin) occupy those areas. Also, I re watched the thing about Greek, apparently it (probably) changed less from Ancient to Modern compared to 1500 to 2000 Italian. I say probably, because these guys are trying to gestimate language drift based on text alone. So, it wouldn't surprise me if they were wrong.

If the Roman Empire in the West survives, maybe. Even then, spelling and grammar reforms are inevitable.
 
Look, Latin vs Italian while less than Latin vs French, is still a big change. The try is to shrink that change. We do have examples of smaller language drift. If pronunciation is inevitably going to change, we can at least make Italian LOOK very much like Latin

So do you want rentention of a case system? Synthetic perfect and future? No conditional mood? SOV word order?
 
So do you want rentention of a case system? Synthetic perfect and future? No conditional mood? SOV word order?

Not the case system. We can let Italiens use that. I mean, an English speaker will understand someone who writes in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS EVEN THOUGH ITS ANNOYING TO READ. What do you mean by synthetic perfect? I don't actually understand Latin myself so... I'm making a shot in the dark
 
I mean, an English speaker will understand someone who writes in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS EVEN THOUGH ITS ANNOYING TO READ.

By case system, he probably means the declensions. As in mensa mensa mensam mensae mensae mensa mensae mensae mensas mensarum mensis mensis.
 
Bringing back ancient Latin requires a conscious effort akin to modern Hebrew or katharevousa (artificially ancient) Greek, both of which began due to nationalism. I guess if the Risorgimento was substantially different (maybe the movement is virulently anti-Tuscan and therefore it is anti-Tuscan dialects) you could see an attempt to revive Latin in Italy, but like katharevousa it would struggle to supplant local dialects. France has its own Gallic identity that it has cultivated since the Hundred Years' War, it doesn't need the prestige of an ancient language to support its nationalism.

And Tunisia/North Africa doing that with Latin just seems ridiculous. If you're a nationalist speaker of a Romance language in North Africa, why would you want to make your language more Latin considering the whole Carthage thing? Especially when Carthage is likely to be a major city in North Africa. We can tell from 4th century texts in North Africa that local soldiers (amongst others) had a very deviant form of Latin which was influenced by the Punic which was their native language.

Having Arabs/Muslims speak Latin was mentioned earlier. This would have to be in the 12th century or so when African Romance and Punic were finally extinct and the region was essentially purely Arab. But assuming you can enforce on the Arabs to speak Latin (why--if they have to be Christian, why make them speak Latin, or even for any other reason, why make them speak Latin?), they'd have their own pronunciations. As we can see with English pronunciations of Latin and other regional pronunciations, it would not be like the Latin of the Roman Empire. And in a few hundred years, that pronunciation of Latin would evolve into something different from what it was, as well as even further from the original Latin.
 
And Tunisia/North Africa doing that with Latin just seems ridiculous. If you're a nationalist speaker of a Romance language in North Africa, why would you want to make your language more Latin considering the whole Carthage thing? Especially when Carthage is likely to be a major city in North Africa. We can tell from 4th century texts in North Africa that local soldiers (amongst others) had a very deviant form of Latin which was influenced by the Punic which was their native language.

Having Arabs/Muslims speak Latin was mentioned earlier. This would have to be in the 12th century or so when African Romance and Punic were finally extinct and the region was essentially purely Arab. But assuming you can enforce on the Arabs to speak Latin (why--if they have to be Christian, why make them speak Latin, or even for any other reason, why make them speak Latin?), they'd have their own pronunciations. As we can see with English pronunciations of Latin and other regional pronunciations, it would not be like the Latin of the Roman Empire. And in a few hundred years, that pronunciation of Latin would evolve into something different from what it was, as well as even further from the original Latin.

OTL 4th century North Africa spoke a dialect of Latin, but based on records, it was probably mutually intelligible with the canonical Italia form since they didn't do what they did in Britannia (which was use translators when dealing with locals who went into the Roman faction and were legally Roman, but kept their old language)

Well the, obviously the Arabs in TTL need to be given the eviction notice so that you know... the people in modern day Tunisia aren't speaking Arabic.

Ok, we get it Latin is going to change. At least keep the drift to a smaller level than OTL.
 
OTL 4th century North Africa spoke a dialect of Latin, but based on records, it was probably mutually intelligible with the canonical Italia form since they didn't do what they did in Britannia (which was use translators when dealing with locals who went into the Roman faction and were legally Roman, but kept their old language)

A dialect yes, but if you took a street urchin from Carthage and had them speak to a street urchin in Lutetia or Rome, how much would they be able to understand each other? Soldiers in North Africa, when they weren't writing from templates (of proper Latin of course), would end up writing highly questionable Latin, in a way which shows the Punic background of the speakers. Then there were people writing Punic poetry on the side of their jobs as soldiers of the Late Roman Empire which wasn't out of place compared to the poetry which is found in "Bible times" i.e. the Ancient Near East. That's ground zero for African Romance--a highly Punic influenced form of Latin which evolves into a language as distinct as French or Spanish.
 
Zero ground? I'm giving a possible POD from AD 79 to as late as you can make it. Thousands of socioeconomic changes can be made, depending on the POD.
 
Zero ground? I'm giving a possible POD from AD 79 to as late as you can make it. Thousands of socioeconomic changes can be made, depending on the POD.

Yes, Latin spoken in Carthage in 79 was more like that in Rome in 79. But as noted by others, Carthage Latin (the Latin of African soldiers in the 4th century is not Carthage Latin but from the rural areas of Roman Africa) will not be the same as classical Latin and will be its own language. Even if North Africa is closer to Rome than Spain or France, that doesn't necessarily mean the Romance language will stay closer to Latin. Especially since we know that Punic was very strong right into the era the Vandals invaded, and we know the Berbers (the ones who didn't assimilate into speaking Punic as many did in the Roman era) were also on the move and powerful. The end result of Roman Africa would probably have been (from Tripolitania to Mauretania) a collage of African Romance dialects/languages, of which all very different from Latin.

It doesn't seem logical to expect linguistic conservatism in a region like North Africa where the dominant languages are various Berber languages and Punic. We do know that some North Africans continued to speak and use proper Latin after the fall of Western Rome (i.e. Corippus), but their language is an anachronism to what their countrymen would have spoken. Vulgar Latin in North Africa was spoken by mainly merchants, coastal peoples, and those associated with the Roman Empire, and we can assume the most elite would know proper Latin.

By ground zero I mean we can identify the mistakes and other "errors" in the Latin of these African soldiers as what would become African Romance had the language not been snuffed out early on by the expansion of Islam and the Arabic language sphere. I believe we can see similar things looking at other regional forms of Vulgar Latin in Late Antiquity.
 
Italian is already far, far more conservative than French (Italian is the most conservative national language, while French is actually the most divergent of the Romance languages and has the most Germanic influence). Sardinian is the most conservative, and it's already pretty close to Italy. So a few small PODs could make Italian even closer to Latin.

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This is correct but it should be clarified: all of the Romance languages are closer to each other than any is to Latin. There was clearly a lot of linguistic evolution in the early Middle Ages as Vulgar Latin was becoming proto-Romance, because all of the modern Romance languages have some traits in common that Latin does not possess.

For a Romance speaker today, the vocabulary of Latin can seem quite familiar (this is more true for Italian than French, as French words have undergone more modification) but the grammar and word order are very different.
 
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Not the case system. We can let Italiens use that. I mean, an English speaker will understand someone who writes in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS EVEN THOUGH ITS ANNOYING TO READ. What do you mean by synthetic perfect? I don't actually understand Latin myself so... I'm making a shot in the dark
"case system" does not refer to capital letters. It refers to word endings marking syntactical functions. Synthetic perfect means that, in Latin, specific verbal endings mark the verb when it refers to a finished action (different for if the action is relative to past, present, or future, roughly; and with further distinctions for mood; Italian and most Romance langauges changed this system somewhat, introducing more auxiliary verbs).
 
Ah... well, is there anyway to maintain synthetic perfect and the case system in "Modern Latin" (The Challenge Timeline Italian)?
 
Ah... well, is there anyway to maintain synthetic perfect and the case system in "Modern Latin" (The Challenge Timeline Italian)?
Hard. Very hard. A surviving WRE would help, which would cancel anything resembling "English" out of existence. Another way would be keeping sort of post-Roman Italian that is as deeply committed to Latin as the ERE was to classical Greek - not preventing the rise of some linguistic form resembling Italian, but preventing it ever becoming a standard literary language. It is a lot harder to avoid the same in Gaul.
 
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