Challenge: make the "-us" and "-um" endings stay

Why can't it be kept simple then? :D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JhuOicPFZY



Maybe we could make Latin a more conservative language, where Italian doesn't evolve to have so much difference from Latin.
And maybe limit the sound changes to the palatalization of C, G and SC, and try to halt or slow down other language changes.

A Roman Empire surviving in Italy longer, keeping the peninsula united and Latin as the official language, would do well for this. Some degree of palatalization is probably unavoidable in the long run, but it can still be reversed by Modern Era scholarship.

An Italian scholar suggested a simplified Latin as international language of science as late as the first half of last century, and the idea had some followers.

Consider that classical Latin was best preserved where it was never spoken, namely in Ireland (and to a lesser extent Northumbria). It was also extensively used in Poland, Hungary and especially Lithuania all along Early Modern times, to the point that people at times actually SPOKE it. Still today, many Latin case endings are used in Polish for words of Latin origin.
If you kill Alcuin, you can have a very different development since the heritage preserved in the British Isles by monks will not make its return to the Continent (and a little later it is going to be destroyed by Viking raiders that pillaged Iona and Lindisfarne).
 

Sang

Banned
A Roman Empire surviving in Italy longer, keeping the peninsula united and Latin as the official language, would do well for this. Some degree of palatalization is probably unavoidable in the long run, but it can still be reversed by Modern Era scholarship.

I don't mind palatalization at all. I'd like to hear Latin with Italian pronunciation/accent anyway.

An Italian scholar suggested a simplified Latin as international language of science as late as the first half of last century, and the idea had some followers.

Wow... I didn't know about that.

If you kill Alcuin, you can have a very different development since the heritage preserved in the British Isles by monks will not make its return to the Continent (and a little later it is going to be destroyed by Viking raiders that pillaged Iona and Lindisfarne).

I don't think that destroying Latin outside Italy would help Latin to be preserved in Italy at all.
Why not just make the Italian Latin language somehow more conservative?

The break-up of Vulgar Latin into the Romance languages was most probably a consequence of the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
However, the role of the Germanic tribes is overestimated in the fall of the Roman Empire.
Rome was invaded and sacked by Gauls in 376 BC.
Rome was invaded by Carthagians during the Second Punic War.
There was the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD.

Most historians agree that even without the Germanic invasions, Rome would have collapsed on it's own: religious unrest, civil wars, plagues, changing climate causing agricultural failures ultimately causing food shortages, population decline, corruption, poor taxation system, decline of slavery, etc.
Rome actually collapsed on it's own.
The Germanic tribes just proved that Rome failed.

However, the Romans could have kept Italy, if they were somewhat smarter.
Then we could have saw Latin remaining as the language of Italian, instead of evolving into modern-day OTL Italian.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgFz9FP5tDY
 
I don't mind palatalization at all. I'd like to hear Latin with Italian pronunciation/accent anyway.



Wow... I didn't know about that.



I don't think that destroying Latin outside Italy would help Latin to be preserved in Italy at all.
Why not just make the Italian Latin language somehow more conservative?

The break-up of Vulgar Latin into the Romance languages was most probably a consequence of the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
However, the role of the Germanic tribes is overestimated in the fall of the Roman Empire.
Rome was invaded and sacked by Gauls in 376 BC.
Rome was invaded by Carthagians during the Second Punic War.
There was the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD.

Most historians agree that even without the Germanic invasions, Rome would have collapsed on it's own: religious unrest, civil wars, plagues, changing climate causing agricultural failures ultimately causing food shortages, population decline, corruption, poor taxation system, decline of slavery, etc.
Rome actually collapsed on it's own.
The Germanic tribes just proved that Rome failed.

However, the Romans could have kept Italy, if they were somewhat smarter.
Then we could have saw Latin remaining as the language of Italian, instead of evolving into modern-day OTL Italian.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgFz9FP5tDY

In a sense, Italian is nothing else than a form MODERN LATIN spoken in Italy. Or, as my Latin teacher put it, Latin is Ancient Italian.
Of course, things are a lot more complicated. Most of the most important changes that Latin underwent while becoming Italian, French, Occitan, Spanish and so on, are alfready attested in late Imperial Era; the (then) analytic future and past perfect, the reduction of case system, and palatalization all appear as early as the second century AD, though not uniformly across the Latin-speaking world; and in any case, documentation is rather scant.
Eliminating the classical forms preserved in the Isles would help, because there would not be the divorce between a Classicizing written form and a bunch of spoken ones (already mutually unitelligible in Caroline times); so linguistic change would be slowed a little.
In Italian schools, Latin is usually pronounced according the so called "ecclesiastical" tradition, that means something close to Italian ortography and pronounciation, while in universities Classical prnounciation is normally used. The result tends to be a little messy; to my mind, the best would pronoucing Latin according to the use of the time, so that St. Thomas and Cicero would be spelled almost the same, while being pronounced in a completely different way. The problem with this is that we actually know little about how the real pronounciation was in St. Thomas times, and probably it varied from place to place anyway. So that there is no univocal way to anser the question "how to pronounce Latin".
 

Sang

Banned
I still doubt that changing the pronounciating has anything to do with grammar rules.
Thus, I'd still love to hear Classical Latin being spoken with Italian pronounciation :D

As I said already, I don't mind Julius becoming Giulius, or anything like that.
Just make the "-us" ending stay.
 
I still doubt that changing the pronounciating has anything to do with grammar rules.
Thus, I'd still love to hear Classical Latin being spoken with Italian pronounciation :D

As I said already, I don't mind Julius becoming Giulius, or anything like that.
Just make the "-us" ending stay.

To some extent, in the long run, changing pronounciation affects grammar, if you you look at it in a historical perspective. The change from Latin to Romance languages was influenced a lot by the loss of vowel length distinctiveness, for example.
But yes, Classical Latin grammar does not change no matter how do you pronounce it.
 
In the Italian language, the Latin "-us" and "-um" were replaced by "-o" endings, in OTL.
Julius became Julio.
Marius became Mario.
Marcus became Marco.
Latium became Lazzio.

So, I'd like to get this change butterflied, so that Italian continues to put "-us" endings on male names and "-um" endings on object names.

How to achieve that?

Not gonna happen, not unless the Germanic invaders are able to COMPLETELY change Italian culture somehow, many of them LOVED those endings(the Dutch still used them today, in fact!).
 

Sang

Banned
Not gonna happen, not unless the Germanic invaders are able to COMPLETELY change Italian culture somehow, many of them LOVED those endings(the Dutch still used them today, in fact!).

Why not just prevent the "-us" ending from being replaced by "-o" in the first place?
It would be much easier.
 
Actually, Italy evolved from Latin, just like all the other Romance langauges (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, Catalan, etc.).
Maybe make the Italian language more conservative?
For example... today, English is the most progressive Germanic language, as it has changed the most from proto-Germanic. Scandinavian North Germanic languages are the most conservative Germanic languages, as they remained the closest to proto-Germanic.
Maybe "progressive" in relation to proto-germanic books, but when comparing for example Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (1651) and Olof Rudbeck's Atlantica (1677), English really seems staunchly conservative. Just thought I'd throw that in.
 
Maybe "progressive" in relation to proto-germanic books, but when comparing for example Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (1651) and Olof Rudbeck's Atlantica (1677), English really seems staunchly conservative. Just thought I'd throw that in.

I don't think that many languages can change a lot in such a small span of time, especially with the relative conservativeness of the time.
In the context of the point made, a comparison between Chaucer and Luther's Bible may be more apt.
 
A Roman Empire surviving in Italy longer, keeping the peninsula united and Latin as the official language, would do well for this. Some degree of palatalization is probably unavoidable in the long run, but it can still be reversed by Modern Era scholarship.

That wouldn't do anything. Languages change over time, no matter what the political situation is like. After all, many of the major sound changes in Romance language were already underway well before the collapse of the Empire. The "Latin" spoken in this united Italy would be just as different from Classical Latin as any of the Romance languages today.
 
Actually, old Latin used -os/-om more often than -us/-um. For whatever reason, the literary dialect of classical Latin favored -us/-um, but many other dialects could have favored -os/-om.

I suspect Latin's use as an imperial language as well as a trade language required a levelling of declension differences - to deal with neighboring peoples with different declension patterns.

I suspect that if the East-Roman and Arab conquests had not been as extensive, then Celtic influence might have been less extensive.
 
In the Italian language, the Latin "-us" and "-um" were replaced by "-o" endings, in OTL.
Julius became Julio.
Marius became Mario.
Marcus became Marco.
Latium became Lazzio.

So, I'd like to get this change butterflied, so that Italian continues to put "-us" endings on male names and "-um" endings on object names.

How to achieve that?

In old Romanesco, Abruzzese and Neapolitan Lazio is Laziu and Marco is Marcu, the u/o distinction was preserved, After Rome was sacked the people from Tuscany and Umbria migrated to Lazio and changed the language there, I think Marcu and Laziu of Old Romanesco, Abruzzese and Neapolitan could be written as Marcus and Latium.

I have a thread about Romanesco not being influenced by Tuscan.
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=180424
 
However, the Romans could have kept Italy, if they were somewhat smarter.
Then we could have saw Latin remaining as the language of Italian, instead of evolving into modern-day OTL Italian.

I disagree. Italy's ressources were not sufficient in order to keep the Late-Antiquitiy Western Roman state with its bureaucracy, its military (even if only in a defensive role) and the demands of maintaining the city of Rome afloat. It demanded the rule over other regions, particularly the province of Africa and the Hispanic peninsula. The permanent loss of both these regions had proven to be more decisive factors in dooming the West-Roman chances to survive than the loss of the Rhine-border or the sacking(s) of Rome.

(I strongly refer to Peter Heather's "The Fall of the Roman Empire" here.)

A post-Roman state on Italian soil would be a different kind of thing though, e.g. the realm of Theoderic surviving longer.

However, I do not see why a political entity, Roman or not, comprising the Italian peninsula, should stop the Latin language from evolving into something more "Italian" than Latin, a development having been well underway throughout the history of Vulgar Latin for centuries.

To preserve Classical Latin, you need actually a system of schooling (and indoctrination) spreading this form of Latin from the elites out to the general populace instead of Vulgar Latin going thruogh several stages of Romance to Italian.
 
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