In our timeline, after the fall of the Roman Empire, the divergence between the latin spoken by the people and the one written and used by the Church. While the first turned into different languages, the later fossilized into a tongue no one uses daily.
However, what if Western Rome had never fallen, or maybe was renowned, and thus the romance continuum in the west remained united under the same state and bureaucracy? Maybe then the official latin spelling slowly evolve to accommodate the changes that IOTL happened in the Italo-Western Romance languages, like the lost of the case system, of the future tenses and of the neuter gender. The writing language could be more conservative than the actual pronunciation, but still change significantly.
This is an example for what the language could look like. I based it mostly on portuguese, my native language, so it might seem more fitting for a dialect that evolves in Iberia and southern France than Italy, but it might still be interesting:
"Totos los esseres humanos/homines sunt natos liberis et aequales in dignitatem et directus. Dotatos de rationem et conscientia, debent agere unos cum los alteris en spiritum de fraternitatem."
Most/all of the spelling is based on the accusative case, which IOTL prevailed over the other cases in Latin.
What do you think?
However, what if Western Rome had never fallen, or maybe was renowned, and thus the romance continuum in the west remained united under the same state and bureaucracy? Maybe then the official latin spelling slowly evolve to accommodate the changes that IOTL happened in the Italo-Western Romance languages, like the lost of the case system, of the future tenses and of the neuter gender. The writing language could be more conservative than the actual pronunciation, but still change significantly.
This is an example for what the language could look like. I based it mostly on portuguese, my native language, so it might seem more fitting for a dialect that evolves in Iberia and southern France than Italy, but it might still be interesting:
"Totos los esseres humanos/homines sunt natos liberis et aequales in dignitatem et directus. Dotatos de rationem et conscientia, debent agere unos cum los alteris en spiritum de fraternitatem."
Most/all of the spelling is based on the accusative case, which IOTL prevailed over the other cases in Latin.
What do you think?