The Evolution of Latin: From Indo-European to Modern Romance and English Languages, Apuntes de Idioma Inglés

¡Descarga The Evolution of Latin: From Indo-European to Modern Romance and English Languages y más Apuntes en PDF de Idioma Inglés solo en Docsity! TCMC EEII (2015-16) Tema 4. La lengua latina desde el indoeuropeo hasta hoy. Relación del latín con las lenguas romances y con el inglés. 4.1 El indoeuropeo  Joseph B. Solodow, Latin Alive, The Survival Of Latin In English And The Romance Languages, Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 9-21 (fragmentos). The Prehistory of Latin: Indo-European The story of Latin is inextricably bound up with the history of the Romans, who spread their language from a small coastal region in central Italy to the greater part of the world that was known to them. It is the story of how a world empire was created and how, in the end, that empire broke apart, its fragmentation foreshadowing and furthering the process by which Latin dissolved into the variety of modern Romance languages we find today. Roman history begins with the city’s founding, in the eighth century b.c.e. For later periods of that history much of our information comes from written sources. For the earliest periods, before writing, we have to rely heavily on archaeology, the science that uses material remains to reconstruct the lives of societies. We may wonder whether something similar is possible for the earliest phases of an immaterial matter like language. The answer is yes. The prehistoric period of Latin’s life can be reconstructed – and in remarkable detail. In Latin the word for “mother” is mater. Across the Adriatic and Ionian Seas from Italy, the Greek word for “mother,” recorded as early as about 720 b.c.e., is māter. Moving still farther east and much farther back in time, to around 1500 b.c.e., we find that in Sanskrit, an ancient language of India, the word is matar-. In Old Church Slavonic, a language used by Slavic peoples and attested in the ninth century c.e., the word is mati. In Old Irish it is mathir. Thus, over a vast area, extending from India to Ireland, and over a period of three and a half millennia, the words for “mother” in a number of languages appear quite similar to one another. Herenow are two forms of the verb “to bear,” which in all these languages means “to carry”. Not only is the stem of the word similar from one language to another, but so too are the endings of the verb, which serve to indicate who performs the action of the verb. To take the Latin forms as examples, the ending -s indicates that “you (singular) bear,” whereas -mus indicates that “we bear.” English Sanskrit Doric Greek Latin Slavonic Gothic you bear bhara-si pherei-s fer-s bere-si bairi-s we bear bhara-mas phero-mes feri-mus bere-mu baira-m That languages spoken by peoples so widely separated in time and space have such elements in common is altogether extraordinary. What can explain such extensive resemblances of vocabulary, stems, and verb endings? The Reconstruction of Indo-European When we pose such a question, we are entering a field called “comparative philology” (or “comparative linguistics”), which is the study of languages in relation to one another. The study of Latin in relation to English and the Romance languages obviously belongs to this field as well. The fact is that “certain languages present similarities among themselves which are so numerous and so precise that they cannot be attributed to chance and which are such that they cannot be explained as borrowings or as universal features” (C. Watkins, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, 2000, pp. vii–viii). The hypothesis is that such languages are related genetically, that they descend from a single earlier language. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, as Sanskrit became known to Europeans, it was proposed that those languages were derived from an earlier one of which all direct evidence had been lost. The prodigious linguistic scholarship of the nineteenth century, drawing on the known languages, did much to reconstruct the lost prehistoric original, the Indo-European. The twentieth century sharpened the picture in many significant ways, and it also identified several previously unknown languages as belonging to the Indo-European group. The term “Indo-European” defines the eastern and western boundaries of the home territory over which the vast family of descendant languages is spoken. (Not that all the languages spoken across this territory are Indo-European: Basque, Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian do not belong to the family.) The English jurist and expert in eastern languages, Sir William Jones (1746– 1794), was the first to assert the kinship of the Indo-European languages. Franz Bopp (1791–1867) brought out a comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages. The work laid down a solid foundation for both comparative philology and the study of Indo-European, which flourish to this day. Everything we know about Indo-European is based on reconstruction. The original language is lost. Nonetheless, by careful comparison of the surviving languages, scholars have developed a picture of Indo-European, both detailed and extensive. The sounds of the language (phonology) are well established, on the whole, as are the different forms that a word can take (morphology), and the rules of grammar by which words are combined to produce meaning (syntax). Similarly, Germanic and Slavic, the parent languages of their subfamilies, are not directly attested, but have been reconstructed by scholars. The Indo-European vocabulary has been thoroughly described too, and this has made it possible to draw reliable inferences about the culture of the earliest Indo- European speakers. We infer that the Indo-Europeans knew the bee and the salmon (but not the sea), birch and apple trees (but not pear), horses and copper, perhaps