Linguistic development if Roman Empire survives

Titus_Pullo

Banned
If the western Roman Empire had survived atleast as long as the Eastern Roman Empire in otl, how might Latin have developed? Would it still have evolved into modern Italian as we know it?
 

Abhakhazia

Banned
If the western Roman Empire had survived atleast as long as the Eastern Roman Empire in otl, how might Latin have developed? Would it still have evolved into modern Italian as we know it?

Or something similar to it, yeah. It depends on how you want it to survive, like are there still Germanic incursions into Brittania and Gaul? Arab invasion of Africa, Mauretania, Sicilia and Hispania?
 

Titus_Pullo

Banned
Or something similar to it, yeah. It depends on how you want it to survive, like are there still Germanic incursions into Brittania and Gaul? Arab invasion of Africa, Mauretania, Sicilia and Hispania?


Yes, the Roman Empire will experience simillar ressurgence, invasions, decline, recovery, decline recovery again, shrinking and finally fall in the 15th century mirroring the eastern empire.
 

Abhakhazia

Banned
Yes, the Roman Empire will experience simillar ressurgence, invasions, decline, recovery, decline recovery again, shrinking and finally fall in the 15th century mirroring the eastern empire.

You'll end up with a slightly varied Italian then. Maybe some more Arabic and Greek loan words.
 
If the western Roman Empire had survived atleast as long as the Eastern Roman Empire in otl, how might Latin have developed? Would it still have evolved into modern Italian as we know it?

Definitely not. I would imagine it being different, a lot different from what modern Italian came out to be and we would still have divergent Romance languages developing, even in a surviving Roman Empire. I can't tell much on the details since I'm no linguist and I don't pretend to be one.
 
Literary Latin, the language that the Empire was governed in, will develop far more slowly than it did IOTL without a literate governing class to hold it together. In a surviving Roman West, I see no reason why the literate classes wouldn't continue to read, write, and speak like Cicero and Virgil, as they did IOTL in the Late Antique Empire.
 
Literary Latin, the language that the Empire was governed in, will develop far more slowly than it did IOTL without a literate governing class to hold it together. In a surviving Roman West, I see no reason why the literate classes wouldn't continue to read, write, and speak like Cicero and Virgil, as they did IOTL in the Late Antique Empire.

O, agreed. The language of governance and the ruling class will stay pretty pure. Although even there speech and writing will diverge. It might well follow the course of the easterners greek, fairly static in writing, slightly more fluid in formal speech, and massively divergent in the streets and fields.

Latin will diverge grammatically, it has to. By the late empire 'vocabo' i will call and 'vocavo' i have called are identical in pronunciation. But aside from that, there might not be a lot of change.

There will, of course, be increasing numbers of loan words, and some of those will vary from place to place. But the practice of moving troops around will help keep even the spoken tongue from diverging as far as otls french, say.

My guess is that the language spoken on the streets might well be a lot like modern italian, which is rather closer to latin than the other romance languages. Well, except for sardinian.

Remember that otl it took until the Serment de Strassbourg in ?840? For french to be recognised as more than really, really bad latin. And thats french, which moved furthest and fastest away from classical latin.
 
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