Talk:History of Latin

Deleted merge request

No justification was given where I could find it. If someone has good reasons for the merge, please leave them on the talk page linked in the template. UnDeadGoat 20:34, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

palmer?

An article on the history of Latin without citing Palmer? Egads! i'll be back!--Ioshus^(talk) 06:28, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Oh Josh! That was two years ago. Where are you?Dave (talk) 16:22, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Dave!!! Oh my God, that was 4 years ago. Do you want me to get Josh for you? 189.5.154.236 (talk) 12:19, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

immigration?

"Latin was first brought to the Italian peninsula in the 9th or 8th century BC by migrants from the north, who settled in the Latium region, specifically around the River Tiber, where the Roman civilization first developed."

The Italics immigrated that late, but there was no folk memory of this immigration? While there was a folk memory of the Trojan?/Lemnian?Etruscan? migration from ca. 1180 BC? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.160.1.74 (talk) 16:19, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Absolutely right-on doubts. No one has any historical inkling of when Latin got to Latium. The entire process whenever and whatever it was, was entirely prehistoric archaeologically speaking and totally pre-literate. You might want to look under Latial culture. What is in this article is obviously either someone's theory (most likely I think) which the editor thought too solid to reference, or the editor's ad libbing it. As such it has to go. I tagged it to give anyone a chance to support it but if someone does I would expect to see such language as "the origin of the Latins remains unknown, but in the theory of bla-bla-bla they came from bla-bla-bla in the bla-bla-bla; on the other hand so-and-so hypothesizes blat-blat-blat." (ample references). I'm not doing this article right at the moment but at some point I will be on it. What a pleasant surprise it would be if someone who knows what they are talking about had already taken a guiding hand.Dave (talk) 16:17, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

I couldn't resist, I gave it a quick edit to remove some of the most flagrent baloney; otherwise, the whole thing should have been tagged original research. It still needs a lot of work, but then so do all the other Latin articles in which this editor or these editors at one tome took a leading role. They need updating now, in out method of successive revision.Dave (talk) 08:06, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Renaissance Latin et al.

I noticed the recent changes to my expansion of the article. OK, fine. What I look for is whether it says the same thing; that is, makes the points I wanted to make, whether it is factually correct and whether the writing is worse. It seems to pass the test OK. Stet. Now, for Renaissance Latin, that has its good points and bad points. For the good it is well written. We can't keep it though; it is entirely duplicated word for word in the Renaissance Latin article. Why do that? Moreover, the article just mentioned is tagged for no sources. It shouldn't be too hard to find sources for that good stuff. What do you say, hey? A third disadvantage is that, alas, it looks too good to be true. Wikipedia editors aren't that good; they are freshman, high school students or eight-graders posing as adults. It has to be given the Internet test for plagiarism. Logically I would get to this section after I look carefully at Renaissance Latin but if you want to correct something, correct it, hey? Or is it only me you are interested in correcting? Many times things are not as seems and something that can look good can be 100% baloney. Look at sales writing.Dave (talk) 17:22, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

Flibjib changes

This is a copy of a note I left on User:Flibjib8's talk page. I'm concerned about a number of changes (s)he made. If I don't get a response fairly soon I may revert.

Benwing (talk) 01:20, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

Your changes to History of Latin

Hello. Just noticed that you changed a whole lot of things in History of Latin. I appreciate you taking the time to work on and help clean up this rather technical page.

However, I'm not convinced that all of your changes are for the better; some of them seem to make things worse. Also, some of them are stylistic, and generally Wikipedia does not favor changing the existing style of a page without discussion and agreement. So I'm wondering if you can justify why you changed them. Some issues in particular:

• Changes to the comparative example words. Many of these changes seem for the worse:
  • You deleted "Vedic" and "Rig-Vedic". The forms cited are not accurate as just "Sanskrit" normally refers to the classical language.
  • You deleted many of the Gothic examples. I also see Old Irish deleted and sometimes others. Sometimes modern Irish or English is substituted, which doesn't help because of the increased distance.
• You changed proto-notation. Formerly there was consistent use of *y and *w in both PIE and Proto-Italic. Now there's inconsistent use variously of i̯/i/j/y and u̯/u/w. It appears you were trying to use i̯ and u̯ for PIE and j and w for Proto-Italic, but I don't really see the point, and it leads to weird things like *PIE *su̯éḱuros > *swekuros which is as much about change of notation as anything else. My use of *y and *w is consistent with Sihler (1995), which is where most of the examples come from.
• You also changed some of the proto-forms in ways that may not be correct. E.g. kaikos, koselinos, oinos are the forms in Sihler, not kh₂ei-kos, kosolinos, h₁oi-nos. Most researchers today are not willing to arbitrarily add laryngeals simply to fit a theory demanding no *a and no vowel-initial words (contra Beekes); rather, they want actual evidence of the laryngeals. I think we need to follow this. (Other problematic cases: your *ǵʰh₂ens, *louk-s-neh₂, disagreeing with Sihler's *ǵʰans, *leuk-s-neh₂. There may be others.)
• Change of cf to vs: Not all of the vs examples actually make sense because some aren't contrasting anything (e.g. congerō vs. gerō).

An example with many issues:

Old:

PIE *bher- "to carry" > ferō (cf. Greek pherō, English bear < Old English beran, Vedic Sanskrit bhárati)

New:

PIE *bʰére "carry" > ferō (cf. Old Irish beirim "I bear", English bear, Sanskrit bhárati)

• *bʰére > ferō doesn't make sense; the first is imperative, the second 1st sing pres indic. I think your purpose here was to indicate the accent, although for verbal forms that varies depending on the particular present-tense form, so it should be indicated explicitly e.g. *bʰéroh₂ and/or *bʰéreti.
• Why delete Greek and Old English? Modern English "bear" makes the original vowel much less clear. Old Irish is more obscure than Greek (and doesn't indicate b vs. bh).
• "Sanskrit bhárati" doesn't make sense because Classical Sanskrit didn't have phonemic accent. That's why "Vedic" is there.

Another example:

Old:

• PIE gʷʰen- "to strike, kill" > dē-fendō (cf. English bane < Old English bana "murderer", Greek theínō "I kill", Vedic Sanskrit hánti "(he) strikes, kills")

New:

• PIE *gʷʰen-dʰ- "to strike, kill" > *χʷ(e)nð- > fendō (cf. Welsh gwanu "to stab", Old High German gundo "battle", Sanskrit hánti "(he) strikes, kills")

• fendō is not a word in Latin.
• Sihler believes that the -nd- in Latin comes from PIE *-ny-, not -ndʰ-.
• You seem to have more or less randomly deleted Greek and English and substituted Welsh and OHG, both more obscure languages from a comparative standpoint. Note also that Old High German gundo is from Proto-Germanic *gunþō (Old English gūþ) and hence cannot reflect -dʰ-.
• Same issue as above with (Vedic) Sanskrit.

Benwing (talk) 00:40, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

Answers on my talkpage. And I'm a "he". Flibjib8 (talk) 02:17, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Split to Latin vowel reduction

I think the vowel reduction of Latin is notable in its own right, because it's a major and obvious change that many students of Latin will notice. Having a dedicated article will also allow us to go into more details, regarding dating, attested examples, exceptions and so on. CodeCat (talk) 16:59, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Are you talking about the reduction of noninitial vowels between Proto-Italic and Latin, or the reduction in the number of vowels between Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin? Aɴɢʀ (talk) 17:15, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

The former. I don't know if enough can be said about the latter to dedicate an article to it, because it's a much simpler process. CodeCat (talk) 23:20, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

I'd say an article for all the phonological changes would be better, not just for vowel reduction. Basically make all of Chapter 11 (Phonology) its own article and expand it, if possible. – Dyolf87 (talk) 12:00, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

Vowel reduction

CodeCat, a note on your recent edit. You wrote that gēns and such forms once had the ending -is, then underwent syncope of the i and other sound changes. If so, it needs explaining how the nominative singular (gēns) ended up being different from the genitive singular (gentis), and how on the other hand words like cīvis (with nominative singular and genitive singular having the same form) did not undergo syncope as gēns did. Personally, I had thought gēns and such words simply had the ending -s, requiring no vowel reduction, since that is the nominative singular ending for most masculine and feminine third declension nouns in both Latin and Greek, and that would solve this difficulty entirely. But on the other hand the form of gentium shows that the stem of the word ends in i, because otherwise it would be gentum, and therefore the nominative singular must have had i at some point as well. I'm not quite sure what to make of this. — Eru·tuon 16:53, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

There was originally a much clearer distinction between consonant stems and i-stems. The "third declension" is a specific Latin invention, and didn't originally exist clearly in Proto-Italic, nor is it clearly a single unified declension in other Italic languages like Oscan. Most of the -s, -tis nouns can be traced to PIE nouns with a nominative in -tis, which was a very common and productive suffix in PIE and the Latin words often have cognates in other languages as well (Ancient Greek genesis, Germanic kundiz for example). So I don't think there's much dispute that somewhere along the way, Latin simplified -tis to -s in the nominative of these nouns. The genitive wasn't originally gentis, but genteis, the ending of which is still seen in Oscan. The Latin third declension genitive ending -is comes from -es through vowel reduction, which originally belonged to the consonant stems, but was later extended to i-stems as part of a larger process of merging these two types into one declension (the reverse happened in Oscan, where -es was replaced by -eis). So we can tell that the simplification of gentis to gēns happened while the genitive was still genteis or maybe gentes, and was therefore not affected by the change. CodeCat (talk) 17:13, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Dubious

"4. All short vowels apparently merge into -e in absolute final position." What about -a in 1st decl. vocative singular? Cf. Greek, and Slavic N. gora : V. goro. 46.186.34.99 (talk) 22:36, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Why would that vowel have to have been short -a immediately before the change? CodeCat (talk) 00:01, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

It's reconstructed as PIE eh₂ > Proto-Italic ā > Latin a. Charlotte Aryanne (talk) 00:29, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

Greek loanwords in Latin

Greek Loanwords in Nautical Latin, Loan-Words In Latin by Edward Ross Wharton. Thought this might be help. Komitsuki (talk) 13:28, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

Phonological influence from Etruscan

It appears that Etruscan had widespread vowel reduction, and Latin's vowel reduction developed through language contact with Etruscan. There's precious little evidence possible on this subject, but does anyone know of a reputable scholar on language contact or historical phonology who has remarked on this?

Language contact and Sprachbund may provide explanations for several divergences in the Indo-European languages. For instance, the Germanic languages and the Uralic languages both have initial stress and assimilatory vowel changes (umlaut and vowel harmony); Sanskrit and the Dravidian languages have retroflex consonants; Spanish and the Celtic languages both have lenition. The sharing of vowel reduction between Latin and Etruscan looks like the same type of influence. However, to simply mention it would perhaps be WP:OR. — Eru·tuon 04:58, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Interesting idea, but there are so many types of vowel reduction; are these actually the same?

• Etruscan: "The language shows phonetic change over time, with the loss and then re-establishment of word-internal vowels due to the effect of Etruscan's strong word-initial stress."
• Latin: "Vowels reduced in different ways depending on the phonological environment. For instance, in most cases they reduced to /i/. Before l pinguis, an /l/ not followed by /i iː l/, they became Old Latin /o/ and Classical Latin /u/. Before /r/ and some consonant clusters, they became /e/." — Sebastian 02:39, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

There are certainly many types of vowel reduction. Some languages have a seven-vowel system in stressed syllables and a five-vowel system in unstressed syllables (Valencian and Italian), some have a three-vowel system in unstressed syllables (forms of Old Norse), and others have centralized vowels (English and Russian). I'm not sure which category Etruscan falls into; maybe another category, in which unstressed vowels are completely lost, or in which they are lost and then replaced by a central vowel.

With that said, it does appear that Etruscan's vowel reduction was different from Latin's. It's still possible that Latin gained vowel reduction from Etruscan. The question is how similar loaned features will be. As I understand it, languages can be influenced to greater or lesser degrees. Perhaps Latin developed vowel reduction from language contact with Etruscan, or speakers who spoke both Latin and Etruscan, but that because of Latin's tendency to preserve vowel qualities, Latin's vowel reduction was less drastic than Etruscan's. However, this is only a theory; I haven't read enough about language contact to know how it works. — Eru·tuon 03:13, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

In his Historische Laut- und Formenlehre der lateinischen Sprache (1998), Gerhard Meiser does mention (p. 67) that the syncope also occurs in Sabellic and Etruscan (where it can be dated to ca. 500 BC), but does not advance any suggestions of causality, although a Sprachbund-type influence sounds likely; it does not seem possible to point to a particular cause, or a particular language as origin. (Where did Etruscan itself get the reduction from?) It is true that a strong initial accent is often said to be responsible for such phenomena, but in view of Finnish, the correlation and causal relationship may not be as compelling as it may suggest itself at first. That is, a strong initial accent may not necessarily and inevitably lead to weakening or syncope of non-initial syllables. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 09:43, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

By the way, it is sometimes thought (I was taught it, and I agree with that; it's apparently a common development typologically) that the short medial vowels in open syllables were in a first step (in the 6th century BC?) centralised in Latin, before they were then later either lost, or rephonologised, as the central vowels developped various allophones depending on their environment; so [ɛ] (or the like), which had developped before /r/, was phonologically identified with /e/, while [ɔ], which had developped in certain velar or labial environments, was identified with the vowel phoneme /o/; [ʏ] (vel sim.), the sonus medius, was (after a period where it seems to have remained as such) eventually phonologised as either /i/ or /u/, and others as /i/.

So it is conceivable that both Etruscan and Latin (and Sabellic?) initially centralised medial vowels, and only later dropped many of them, where Etruscan dropped many more of them than Latin, which appears to have been less tolerant of consonant clusters. While sometimes vowels crop up in a different place from the original vowel, Latin medial vowels, even if changed, are usually found at the original place, which suggests that the scenario with far-reaching syncope and then replacement with a central vowel is not what happened in the case of Latin. However, it did not preserve medial vowel qualities in open syllables at all; it only seems so in part of the cases by pure chance, according to the centralisation-first scenario. So an areal connection is very much possible and even likely, and it is completely possible that the first steps were basically identical everywhere. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 10:24, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

Point of Phonological Changes

What is the point of this phonological table where you have othr languages (two Germanic) but not Latin itself?? kind of useless... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 177.40.118.48 (talk) 22:50, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

Reduction of /o/ before clusters

The chart says that medial o before a cluster ( of which the first consonant does not condition its own changes) stays unchanged and gives ad-optare as example. The text below says that o in the same environment becomes u and has its own supporting examples. So which is ultimately true? Anatol Rath (talk) 22:56, 27 May 2020 (UTC)

History of the language verses history of the development of the language

Hi there, this article, while full of useful information seems to be much more focused on the linguistic development of the language than the "history", ie the language in its social and political context. There are now a good four or five recent general histories of Latin that cover these topics and can be used to ensure a balanced view is given (all are in the Latin page sources).

If anyone has ideas about how to structure the article to accomodate these two views please do say. I'll hold off making changes for a bit as I've got a few other things going on, but I wanted to flag that I think this needs doing. Jim Killock (talk) 15:25, 15 April 2023 (UTC)