Latin Lovers

Having arrived at Penn less than a week ago, I haven't had a chance to do much with my Portuguese. Indeed, until today, I hadn't yet fully unpacked my suitcase, and therefore had yet to take out the file cards of Portuguese words I so carefully prepared and alphabetized before leaving home. Nonetheless, I have exchanged a couple of e-mails with my Portuguese penpal and am beginning to get a feel for certain aspects of the language.

In its system of verb tenses, Portuguese bears a strong resemblance to Latin--not surprisingly, since, like other Romance languages (French, Spanish, Romanian, Italian, and Occitan/Provencal), Portuguese is a direct descendant of Latin. The resemblance was made even clearer to me when I picked up a book at a local used bookstore called The Loom of Language. Published in 1944, The Loom of Language is an attempt to make foreign language study simpler for students by explaining the linguistic connections among the Germanic (German, English, Dutch, Norwegian, etc.) languages and the Romance languages. A lot of the book strikes me as too highly technical for, and thus not of much use to, a beginning language learner with no prior exposure to any of these languages.

Nonetheless, I've had fun watching the author skewer what I call the "Latin lovers"--exteme adulators of Latin who managed to retard knowledge of linguistics for decades. One of the questions that preoccupied linguists in the early years of the discipline--in the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--was how and why the languages of Europe had declined from the supposedly "pure" and "logical" forms of Latin into the less pristine systems of modern European languages.

Latin, like many other languages, is what linguists call an inflected language. What this means is that words change form according to how they are used in a setence. In English, we do this a little bit with pronouns. A simple example:

Michael hits the ball becomes he hits the ball, when we replace Michael with a subject pronoun. If the ball hits Michael, however, we have to say The ball hits him--using an object pronoun instead of a subject pronoun. This change from he to him is called an inflection.

In modern, standard English (or as The Loom of Language likes to call it, Anglo-American), only pronouns have inflections. Most of the time, we express different relationships among words in a sentence through either word order (syntax) or with prepositions. Take, for instance, the following simple sentences:

My mother sent me a package.

I sent my mother a package.

We know who does the sending, what is sent, and who does the receiving, because of the order of the words. My mother sent me a package and I sent my mother a package do not mean the same thing in English, because the sentences have different subjects (mother, I) and different indirect objects (me, mother).

Notice an importance distinction, however; the pronouns in these sentences (I, me) change based on their role in the sentence, but the noun mother does not. In English, we do not put a special ending onto nouns to show their role in the sentence, except when we add 's to make the possessive (That is my mother's package).

Latin (and Russian, and many other languages), does, however. For many centuries, because Latin was the language of culture and scholarship in Europe, an idea arose that its system of noun-endings represented an inherently superior form of language, and that all subsequent languages had somehow declined from the "Golden Age" of Latin. Latin grammar was characterized as systematic and logical, in comparison with other languages.

The Loom of Language points out a number of facts about Latin that make hash of this idea:

1. Far from being regular and systematic, Latin's system of word-endings is in fact quite arbitrary; the same ending may be used for differing grammatical relationships, depending on the declension (roughly, a system of changes of noun-endings) the noun is in. If Latin appeared logical to scholars of a previous era, it was only because students learned each declension one at a time, and therefore didn't tend to see the confusion caused by the name ending representing diferent kinds of word relationships in different declensions.
2. Like every language, Latin underwent enormous changes over the centuries. As in English, great differences came to exist between the language of refined literature and the language of everyday speech and, as in English, the literary language was markedly more conservative than the spoken language. Over time, the language of everyday speech came to have fewer and fewer inflections and to rely more and more on prepositions to show relationships among words--so much so that, by the Fall of the Roman Empire, noun inflections had almost ceased to exist in spoken Latin.
3. Earlier forms of Latin acutally had more inflections than the Classical Latin usually studied in universities. At one time, Latin had a separate locative case (that is, a special noun ending to indicate that another noun was in that thing or place), but by the classical period this had already disappeared. So by the standards of early linguists, Classical Latin was already a "declining" or "degraded" language.

Modern linguistics, fortunately, have lost this early adulation for Latin. It is also clear, from the study of the world's languages, that languages do not always move from a system of high-inflection (like Classical Latin) to low-inflection (like English). So there has been no great "decline" in the world's tongues, but merely change.