Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin

To add a third cultural mixer, consider the word CARRICVM, unknown to Latin literature, but evidently universal in spoken Latin, since echoes of it are found in every modern Romance language (French charge, Spanish cargo, Rumanian cârcă, Catalan carreg, Italian carico…) as well as English carry. At the start, it evidently meant a wagonload, such as a CARRVS (a word borrowed from Gaulish, to mean four-wheeled cart) could hold. CARRVS has had a major career of its own (e.g., car, chariot, career), but CARRICVM is another example of a word borrowed into Latin that there found a new and extended life, first as the replacement for the ancient Latin word ONVS ‘burden, load’, later with a rich metaphorical life, ranging over duties, pick-a-back rides (in Romanian at least), accusations, attacks, and (much later) ammunition for firearms, and then explosives generally. Gaulish may have been the language of choice for words for wheeled vehicles, but Latin gave an opportunity for transfusion into Europe’s future world-mind.

Languages create worlds to live in, not just in the minds of their speakers, but in their lives, and their descendants’ lives, where those ideas become real. The world that Latin created is today called Europe. And as Latin formed Europe, it also inspired the Americas. Latin has in fact been the constant in the cultural history of the West, extending over two millennia. In a way, it has been too central to be noticed: like the air Europe breathed, it has pervaded everything.

It was the Empire that gave Latin its overarching status. But, like the Roman arches put up with the support of a wooden scaffold, the language was to prove far more enduring than its creator. As the common language of Europe, spoken and written unchanged by courtiers, clerics, and international merchants, its active use lasted three times as long as Rome’s dominion. Even now, its use echoes on in the law codes of half the world, in the terminologies of biology and medicine, and until forty years ago in the liturgy of the Catholic Church, the most populous form of Christianity on earth. And through these last fifteen hundred years, Europe has remained a single arena, largely independent of outsiders, even as parts of it have sought to dominate the rest of the world.

Yet after the collapse of Rome’s empire, Europe itself was never again to be organized as a single state. The Latin language, never forgotten, was left as a tantalizing symbol of Europe’s lost unity. “Once upon a time the whole world spoke Latin.” This mythical sense remained behind Europe, and its proud civilization. And so, more than Christianity, freedom, or the rule of law, it has in practice been the sense of a once-shared language, a language of great antiquity but straightforward clarity, that has bound Europe together.

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_b02b9a42-f869-5a65-9f96-6a25f2af332e)

Fons et origo—Latin’s Kin

MAIORES NOSTRI…VIRVM BONVM CVM LAVDABANT, ITA LAVDABANT, BONVM AGRICOLAM BONVMQVE COLONVM. AMPLISSIME LAVDARI EXISTIMABATVR, QVI ITA LAVDABATVR.

Our ancestors … when they singled out a good man for praise, used these words: “a good farmer and a good settler.” Someone so praised was thought to have received the highest esteem.

Cato, On the Country Life

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LATIN OWES ITS NAME to its home region of Latium in west-central Italy, the southern half of modern Lazio. With hindsight, it certainly looks a good starting point for a future Italian, and then Mediterranean, power. Its position is central in Italy, and it controls the ford on the river Tiber (modern Tevere), which is the main divider of Italy’s western coastal plains. Italy, in turn, is central within the northern sector of the Mediterranean, equidistant from Spain in the west and Asia Minor (modern Turkey) in the east.

The first question that naturally arises is why the language is not known as “Roman,” for the power that spread the language far and wide was not Latium, but the city-state of Rome, and the result was the Roman, not the Latin, Empire. But the Romans’ influence was usually decisive, even with outsiders, in setting the names of their institutions; and the Romans always referred to their language as lingua Latīna, or sermō Latīnus. It shows that the language is older, and its area, originally at least, wider than the Roman state.

Languages of ancient Italy. Until the third century BC, Latin was just one among many Italic languages.

Looking as far back as we can to the origins of Latin, we do not have the convenience (as we do for English) of being able to give it a place and a period. But it is discernibly an Indo-European language, a member of a highly diverse family of related languages whose borders were set, before recorded history, between Bengal and Donegal (and indeed between Iberia and the edge of Siberia). Its speakers will have reached Latium along with the forerunners of most of the other language communities that largely surrounded Latin when we read their first traces in the written record. They are called Italic languages and included Faliscan, Umbrian, and Venetic to the north, Oscan to the south.

(#litres_trial_promo) Sadly, there is no agreement on when these languages would have come to Italy (sometime between the sixth and the second millennia BC, but all as a group, or in separate events?), on what allowed their speakers to spread (prowess at farming? Copper, Bronze, or Iron Age weaponry?), or even on what their route would have been (over the sea from the Balkans? down the Adriatic or the Tyrrhenian coasts?). We can only say where in the Italian peninsula the Italic languages ended up, and what sort of languages they were.

As to where in Italy they settled, it is clear that there were two major groups or subfamilies: Latin-Faliscan-Venetic settled the north, whereas Oscan and the rest, usually known as the Sabellian languages, occupied most of the south of Italy. The main exception to this pattern is Umbrian, a dialect which is more similar to Oscan than northern Italic; so its position in north-central Italy suggests that the Umbrians migrated later from the south up into the Apennines. It is also significant that the very similar Latin and Faliscan—a dialect best known for its drinker’s motto FOIED VINO PIPAFO CRA CAREFO “Today I shall drink wine; tomorrow I shall go without.”

(#litres_trial_promo)—were separated from their cousin Venetic by a large, and totally unrelated, Etruscan-speaking population. The geography suggests that the Etruscans moved in from the west, splitting the two wings of northern Italic apart.

The Italic languages were not mutually intelligible, at least not across their full range. An idea of how different they could be may be gained from looking at some very short texts in the two best known and farthest flung (Venetic and Oscan) with a word-for-word translation into Latin. (For comprehensibility, none of the languages is shown in its actual alphabet.)

First a Venetic inscription on a bronze nail, found at Este:

mego zontasto sainatei reitiai egeotora aimoi ke louzerobos [Venetic]

me dōnāvit sanātricī reitiae egetora aemō līberīsque [Latin]

i.e., word for word in English:

“me gave to-healer to-Reitia Egetora for Aemus and children”

or more clearly:

“Egetora gave me to Reitia the healer for Aemus and his children.”

And then a clause of a Roman magistrate’s arbitration (183 BC) between Nola and Avellino, written on a boundary stone:

avt púst feihúís pús fisnam amfret, eíseí tereí nep abellanús nep nuvlanús pídum tríbarakattins [Oscan]

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autem pōst murōs quī fānum ambiunt, in eā terrā neque avellānī neque nōlānī quicquam aedificāverint [Latin]

i.e., word for word in English:

“but behind walls which temple they-surround, on that land neither Avellani nor Nolani anything they-shall-have-built”

or more clearly:

“but behind the walls which surround the temple, on that land neither the Avellani nor the Nolani may build anything.”

Nevertheless, there are striking similarities among them, and features, from the most specific to the most general, that set Italic languages apart from the other Indo-European languages.

First of all, a distinctive sound in Italic is the consonant f. It is extremely common, cropping up mostly in words where the Indo-European parent language had once had either b

or d

. In Latin, the sound is mostly restricted to the beginning of words, but in Oscan and Umbrian it often occurs too in the middle: Latin fūmus, facit, forēs, fingit; Oscan feihús, mefiú; Umbrian rufru—meaning ‘smoke, does, doors, makes’; ‘walls, middle’; ‘red’.

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With respect to meanings, the verb form ‘I am’ is sum or esom, with a vowel (o or u) in the middle and none at the end; there is no sign of such a vowel in Greek eimí, Sanskrit asmi, Gothic im, Hittite ešmi. There are also some distinctive nuances of words in the Italic vocabulary (asterisks show that forms are historical reconstructions): the common Indo-European root

deikmeans ‘say’ here (Latin dīcere, Oscan deíkum), not ‘show’ as it does in the other languages (Greek deíknumi, Sanskrit diśati, English token); also, the root

dhē- means ‘do’ or ‘make’ (Latin facere, Oscan fakiiad, Umbrian façia, Venetic vhagsto ‘made’) and not ‘put’ as it does in the other languages (Greek -thēke, Sanskrit -dhā-).

The pattern of verb forms is simplified and regularized from Indo-European in a distinctive way. As every schoolboy once knew, Latin had four different classes of verbs, each with slightly different endings, known as conjugations. The different sets of endings corresponded to the vowel that closes the stem and preceded the endings (as amā- ‘love’, monē- ‘warn’, regĭ- ‘rule’, audī-‘hear’). This vowel then largely determined the precise forms of all the verb’s endings, 106 choices in all.

(#litres_trial_promo) Something similar is seen in Oscan and Venetic verbs. This is complex by comparison with English, but is in fact rather simpler than the fuller, differently organized systems seen in such distantly related languages as Greek, Sanskrit, or Gothic, where one can find more persons (dual as well as singular and plural), an extra tense (aorist), voice (middle), and moods (optative, benedictive).

The nouns, on the other hand, followed five patterns (declensions), choosing a set of endings on the basis of their stem vowel (-a, -o, none, or -i, -u, -e): the endings marked whether a noun was singular or plural (here too, in Italic languages, dual was not an option), and which case it was in, i.e., what its function was in the sentence; the cases were nominative (for subject), accusative (for object), genitive (for a noun dependent on another noun), dative (for a recipient), ablative (for a source), locative (for a place), and vocative (for an addressee), though the last two had become marginal in Latin. Hence analogously to a Latin noun like hortus ‘garden’, which had a pattern of endings

Sing. N. hortus, Ac. hortum, G. hortī, D. hortō, Ab. hortō, L. (hortō), V. horte Plur. N. hortī, Ac. hortōs, G. hortōrum, D., Ab., L. hortīs

we find in Oscan (remembering that ú was probably pronounced just like ō)

Sing. N. húrz, Ac. húrtúm, G.*húrteis, D. húrtúí, Ab. *húrtúd, L. *húrtei, V. ? Plur. N. *húrtús, Ac. *húrtúss, G. *húrtúm, D., Ab., L. *húrtúís.

On this kind of evidence, one can say that Latin and Oscan in the second century BC were about as similar as Spanish and Portuguese are today.

Consciousness of Latin as a language with its own identity began in the words of the poet Gnaeus Naevius, one of the very first in the Latin canon, writing from 235 to 204 BC. He wrote his own epitaph, showing either a concern that the language was in danger of decay, or an inordinate pride in his own literary worth!

Naevius is the earliest Latin poet whose works have survived. (He was actually a man of Campania and so probably grew up speaking Oscan.) But when these words were written, at the end of the third century BC, Rome already had three centuries of forthrightly independent existence behind her, and we know that Latin had been a written language for all of that time. Our earliest surviving inscriptions are from the sixth century BC.