Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Lingua Latina

Episode Date: April 18, 2021

“E Pluribus Unum”, “Habeus Corpus”, “Carpe Diem”, “Caveat Emptor”. All of these phrases are known by most people, yet they come from a language that has been dead for 1500 years: Latin. Latin is on our money, serves as mottos for universities, and is the foundation for our entire naming system in biology. Many concepts from law and logic are all described by Latin phrases. Learn more about Lingua Latina, the Latin Language on this episode of Totum Ubique Cotidie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

E. Pluribus Unum, habeas corpus, carpe diem, caveat emtor. All of these are phrases known by most people, yet they come from a language that's been dead for 1500 years. Latin. Latin is on our money, serves as mottoes for our universities, and is the foundation for our entire naming system in biology. Many concepts from law and logic are all described by Latin phrases. Learn more about lingua Latina, the Latin language, and how it's still used in our world today on this episode of Totem Ubiquet Quotidier. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may

have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by Skillshare. I've spoken before about how Skillshare has hundreds of videos to help teach you almost anything you want to learn, from music to art and practical skills to help you out in life. Well, they can also help you learn languages.

They have videos available to help you learn French, Hindi, German, Italian, and even American Sign Language, just to name a few. With Skillshare premium, you can have unlimited access to everything for as low as 825 per month. Go to everything-dash-everywhere.com slash Skillshare to get a free two-week trial of skillshers. You'll share premium membership, or just click on the link in the show notes. The Latin language was one of several italic languages, which arose on the Italian peninsula. The name Latin comes from the Latini tribe, which existed around modern-day Rome, about 3,000 years ago. That area was known as Latium.

No one knows exactly how or when the people we call Romans began speaking Latin. As with other languages, Latin developed over time. The language spoken during the founding of the city is known as Old Latin, and he here I'll reference my episode explaining the history of Rome and the kingdom, Republican, imperial periods. The development of the language was similar in how English and French had both Old English and Old French as progenitor languages. By the time of the birth of Julius Caesar, the language had evolved into what we would call classical Latin. Almost all of the surviving literature which we have from ancient Rome comes from the classical Latin period

which lasted until the third century. This was the period that gave us Caesar's commentaries, the works of Cicero, Livy, Catullus, Seneca, and many others. These classical Latin works have been the basis of classical Latin scholarship for centuries. Today, Latin is basically synonymous with classical Latin. Classical Latin was a very precise, rules-based language. It was spoken by the nobility, and it was the form taught in schools. However, it was not the same as what was spoken in the streets. The spoken Latin was given the label in the 18th century as vulgar Latin.

The term vulgar doesn't have the same connotation that we have today. It didn't mean that it was pottymouth, just that it was the language of the common people. Over time, as the empire fell and different parts of the empire became separated, vulgar Latin evolved into the romance languages we know today. The Slavic invasion of the Balkans cut off the Latin speakers in the east from the rest of the Latin speaking regions, and that developed into Romanian. Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Catalan are all offshoots of vulgar Latin, as are other smaller romance languages, including Sardinian, Octian, and Romange.

There were other romance languages that have subsequently become extinct, such as Dalmatian. Of the current languages which exist, the one which is considered to be the closest to Latin is Sardinian, and possibly Romanian, depending on how you look at it. The language which has moved furthest away from Latin is unquestionably French. However, all the current romance languages have more in common with each other than they do with classical Latin. So what makes Latin so different from these other languages? Well, there are a whole bunch of things. For starters, there are no articles in Latin.

There is no equivalent to the word the or a that you would put before nouns in English. The only way you can tell if something is referring to a horse or the horse, for example, is context. The fact that every romance language has articles indicates that this was a development of vulgar Latin and then it spread from there. Likewise, there are no straightforward words in Latin for yes or no. The word eta would sometimes be used as a type of yes, but it really translates more to it is so. Likewise, the word sick, which means thus, became the basis of the word yes in Spanish and Italian, which is C.

To say something like no, you could use minima, which means not at all, or noly, which means don't, and that word later became the basis of the word no. The real thing about Latin, and the problem it has given students of the language for centuries, is that it's what's called a highly inflected language. By comparison, English is only a slightly inflected language. This means that the whole key to learning Latin has to do with word endings. Word endings mean everything, and a word's function in a sentence will depend on the ending which is used. This is true for both nouns and verbs.

Take the case of the verb to love, which is often given. as the example verb in Latin. In English, the word love mostly stays the same regardless of how it's used. For example, I love, you love, he she it loves, we love, you plural love, and they love. The only time we change the word is for the third person singular when we add an S. In Latin, it's much more confusing. I love is Amo. You love is Amas. He she it loves is Amat. We love is Amamus. You all love is Amatis, and they love is Amant. These are just the six most commonly used endings. It gets way more complicated depending on if it's active or passive, subjunctive or indicative,

present, future, perfect, imperfect, pluperfect, or imperative. That's why translating Latin isn't just as simple as finding a word in a dictionary and plugging in whatever the Latin equivalent is. Likewise, nouns have many different endings as well. A noun will have a different ending depending on if it's the subject of the sentence, the object, indirect object, possessive, or the object of a proposition. As a result, word order doesn't really matter so much in Latin as it does in other languages. For example, if I said, the boy saw the girl, it has a totally different meaning

than the sentence, the girl saw the boy. I change the meaning in the sentence by changing the order of the words. In Latin, it doesn't work that way. Girl and boy would have endings that indicate if they were the subject or the object of the sentence. So if you switch the words around, the meaning doesn't change. To change the meaning in this example, you would have to change the ending of the word for both boy and girl to change the sentence, not the word order. That being said, Latin does have a word order which is sort of used by convention. It isn't 100% of the time, but it's used most of the time. In English, our word order is subject, verb, object, the boy, saw the girl. In Latin, the word order is usually subject, object, verb. This can be really frustrating

because you have no clue what is happening in a sentence until the very end. There's an old joke that a senator came to the forum after Cicero had been speaking for two hours. The senator asked the one next to him when he sat down what Cicero was talking about. The other senator replied, I don't know. He hasn't gotten to the verb yet. So, okay, Latin is different. No surprise. there. Why does it still find itself in use in certain corners of our culture? Well, after the empire fell and the various regions started to develop their own languages, Latin remained in use amongst the educated, especially amongst the clergy. The Catholic Church used Latin as their liturgical language, so priests and monks had to learn Latin. During the Middle Ages, this is where

most scholarship was conducted, so Latin was the natural language. In the 4th century, Saint Jerome wrote the Vulgate, which was a translation of the Bible in Latin, and that became the version of the Bible, which was used for over a thousand years in most of Western Europe. It also served as a universal language in Europe, as everyone began speaking different tongues. Eventually, Latin became the basis of getting an education. It was the primary subject for any educated person, and being literate basically meant knowing Latin. Also, as no one spoke Latin natively anymore, no one had the benefit of having their native language used as the universal language. It was like a linguistic neutral ground.

Many of the most important documents written in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire were all written in Latin. St. Augustine's Confessions and the City of God. Luther's 95 Theses, Newton's Principa Mathematica, René Descartes' Principles of Philosophy, and the mathematical works of Euler and Gauss were all written in Latin. Carl Linnaeus developed the modern system of biological taxonomy and developed the binomial nomenclature where each species is given two Latin names. In fact, it's been estimated that of all the original works written in Latin, only about one-half of one percent were written during the classical period in Rome. Everything else was written after the empire had fallen. Over time, the pronunciation of Latin

changed. The letter C became soft instead of hard. The same with the letter G, and V changed from being pronounced like a W. This new pronunciation was called ecclesiastical Latin. For example, in classical Latin, Caesar was pronounced Kaysar. Cicero was pronounced Kiki-Roe. Caesar's famous quote, Veni-Vidi-Vici, was originally pronounced Winnie-Widi-Wiki. The movement to a return back to classical pronunciation began with Erasmus in the 15th century. Most Latin scholarship nowadays will use this revived classical pronunciation. The use of Latin declined in the 18th century, as it was replaced by French as the universal language in Europe for diplomacy and science. It was rendered mostly as a language for classical scholars and for the Catholic liturgy. With the reforms of Vatican 2 in the

1960s, the Catholic Church removed Latin as a mandatory language, and the mass moved almost exclusively to whatever the local vernacular was. Latin probably reached its all-time low in the 70s and 80s, as there was really no use for the language anymore outside of the Latin letters office at the Vatican. Recently, however, there's been a bit of a mini revival of Latin thanks to the Internet. Speakers which would otherwise not be able to contact each other can now do so online. In Europe, they've used Latin for some of the names of the EU institutions as a neutral ground between countries. A living Latin movement has started for people to speak Latin in an immersive environment. There are immersion camps and conferences for Latin speakers.

There are Latin-speaking YouTube channels and podcasts. The recent Netflix series Barbarian has all of the Roman characters speaking a pretty good classical Latin. Duolingo, the Latin learning website, has even come out with a Latin course which is available for free. So Latin, even though no one has really spoken it as a first language for 1,500 years, has never really died, even though it's considered a dead language. Crumbs of it can be found in the Romance languages spoken all over the world, in phrases and say, things we still have, and in scientific and legal terminology. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere daily is Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please donate over at patreon.com.

There is content only available to supporters, merchandise, and even opportunities for a show producer credit. If you know someone you think would enjoy the show, please share it with them. Also remember, if you leave a five-star review, I'll read your review on the show. Eeyunt, Domus, people call Romanes, they go, the house. It says Romans go home. No, it doesn't. What's that in for Roman?

Come on, come on. Romanus? Goes light. Anus? Fogany, plural of anise is. Ani? Aunt. Aunt.

What is Aunt? Go. Conjugate the verb to go. Here, Eo, is it, it is aunt. So Aeunt is... Third person, plural, present indicative. There you go. But Romans go home is an order, so you must use the...

Imperative. Which is? Um... Um... How many Romans? Plah, blah, blah. It's... Eite.

E. Te. ... Domit. Go home. This is motion towards, isn't it, boy? Datives. Oh! The natives, not the natives.

The date is. Domain. Except that promise takes me. The locker d'i, sir! Which is! Dumbum! Dome! Understand?

Yes, sir. Now, write out hundred times. Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Hail Caesar, sir. Hail Caesar.