Friday, August 22, 2014

Latin: A (Linguistic) History - Part I

The Latin taught in classes today is the same Latin that famous Romans such as Julius Caesar and Cicero spoke and wrote. What happened to Latin? Many people say Latin died out, but that's not entirely true. Rather, it branched out and changed into many of the languages spoken today. We call these languages the Romance languages, named after Rome.

You can clearly see the influence of Latin by looking at the Romance languages' grammar systems and their vocabulary. For instance, the Latin word for earth was terra. The diagram below shows some Romance languages' words for earth.

These words (the French terre, Italian and Portuguese terra, and Spanish tierra) are considered derivatives of the Latin word terra.

There are some languages that are not derived from Latin that have similar words. Let's look at the Ancient Celtic family and their words for earth.
The Celtic tir/tìr/tír is very similar to the Latin word terra. The Celtic languages are not, however, derived from Latin, nor is Latin of the Celtic family. Thus, the Celtic family and the Romance family had to have a common root. Words sharing a root, such as Latin terra and Welsh tir, are thought to be cognate. Other families such as the Gothic, Greek, and Sanskrit families are also thought to come from the same root language as the Celtic and Romance families. Linguists call this root language Proto-Indo-European. While Proto-Indo-European has never been found in a written form, linguists are putting together words they think could have been the roots of words in more recent languages. For instance, terra and tir are thought to have eventually come from the Proto-Indo-European root ters-, meaning dry, as in dry land. Other words supposed to have come from the root ters- include the Ancient Greek word τέρσομαι (tersomai), which means to dry up, as well as the Old English word þurst which means thirst--your throat is dry.

To summarize, Latin is the source from which the Romance languages, which include (but are not limited to) French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, are derived. This Romance family is just one in a list of many linguistic families, which all have cognate words. These families are all thought to have been derived from one language, known for the time being as Proto-Indo-European.

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