89-688: British Latin or British Vulgar Latin was the Vulgar Latin spoken in Great Britain in the Roman and sub-Roman periods. While Britain formed part of the Roman Empire , Latin became the principal language of the elite and in the urban areas of the more romanised south and east of the island. In the less romanised north and west it never substantially replaced the Brittonic language of
178-471: A (elision of -l- is a common feature of Portuguese) and Italian il , lo and la . Sardinian went its own way here also, forming its article from ipse , ipsa an intensive adjective ( su, sa ); some Catalan and Occitan dialects have articles from the same source. While most of the Romance languages put the article before the noun, Romanian has its own way, by putting the article after
267-469: A Romano-British culture . Particularly in the lowland zone, Latin became the language of most of the townspeople, of administration and the ruling class, the army and, following the introduction of Christianity, the church. Brittonic remained the language of the peasantry, which was the bulk of the population; members of the rural elite were probably bilingual. In the highland zone, there were only limited attempts at Romanisation, and Brittonic always remained
356-778: A collaboration between Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents at University of Oxford , the British Museum , and the Archaeological Computing Research Group at University of Southampton , used polynomial texture mapping on several hundreds of the original tablets for detailed recording and edge detection. The images, at a resolution suitable for web page display, and text of the tablets from Tab. Vindol. II were published on-line. Tablets from both Tab. Vindol. II and Tab. Vindol. III were published in 2010. The tablets are held at
445-500: A companion of sin"), in a context that suggests that the word meant little more than an article. The need to translate sacred texts that were originally in Koine Greek , which had a definite article, may have given Christian Latin an incentive to choose a substitute. Aetheria uses ipse similarly: per mediam vallem ipsam ("through the middle of the valley"), suggesting that it too was weakening in force. Another indication of
534-399: A conservative, hypercorrect "school" Latin with a "sound-system [which] was very archaic by ordinary Continental standards". In recent years, research into British Latin has led to modification of Jackson's fundamental assumptions. In particular, his identification of 12 distinctive criteria for upper-class British Latin has been severely criticised. Nevertheless, although British Vulgar Latin
623-478: A consonant and before another vowel) became [j], which palatalized preceding consonants. /w/ (except after /k/) and intervocalic /b/ merge as the bilabial fricative /β/. The system of phonemic vowel length collapsed by the fifth century AD, leaving quality differences as the distinguishing factor between vowels; the paradigm thus changed from /ī ĭ ē ĕ ā ă ŏ ō ŭ ū/ to /i ɪ e ɛ a ɔ o ʊ u/. Concurrently, stressed vowels in open syllables lengthened . Towards
712-638: A continuing tradition of spoken Latin, and then only in Church contexts and among the educated. Alaric Hall has speculated that Bede ’s 8th century Ecclesiastical History of the English People may contain indications that spoken British Latin had survived as a vernacular in some form to Bede’s time. The evidence relied on is the use of a word with a possible preserved British vulgar Latin spelling ( Garmani for Germani ) as well as onomastic references. Before Roman rule ended, Brittonic had remained
801-587: A great extent a separate language, that was more or less distinct from the written form. To Meyer-Lübke, the spoken Vulgar form was the genuine and continuous form, while Classical Latin was a kind of artificial idealised language imposed upon it; thus Romance languages were derived from the "real" Vulgar form, which had to be reconstructed from remaining evidence. Others that followed this approach divided Vulgar from Classical Latin by education or class. Other views of "Vulgar Latin" include defining it as uneducated speech, slang, or in effect, Proto-Romance . The result
890-418: A great many lines, dots and other dark marks which may or may not be writing. Consequently, the published transcriptions have often had to be interpreted subjectively in deciding which marks should be regarded as writing. The tablets contain various letters of correspondence. For instance, the cavalry decurion Masculus wrote a letter to prefect Flavius Cerialis inquiring about the instructions for his men for
979-409: A long time and in many places. Scholars have differed in opinion as to the extent of the differences, and whether Vulgar Latin was in some sense a different language. This was developed as a theory in the nineteenth century by Raynouard . At its extreme, the theory suggested that the written register formed an elite language distinct from common speech, but this is now rejected. The current consensus
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#17327719897161068-463: A modern postcard). They were scored down the middle and folded to form diptychs with ink writing on the inner faces, the ink being carbon, gum arabic and water. Nearly 500 tablets were excavated in the 1970s and 1980s. First discovered in March 1973, the tablets were initially thought to be wood shavings until one of the excavators found two stuck together and peeled them apart to discover writing on
1157-673: A most immoral gladiator"). This suggests that unus was beginning to supplant quidam in the meaning of "a certain" or "some" by the 1st century BC. The three grammatical genders of Classical Latin were replaced by a two-gender system in most Romance languages. The neuter gender of classical Latin was in most cases identical with the masculine both syntactically and morphologically. The confusion had already started in Pompeian graffiti, e.g. cadaver mortuus for cadaver mortuum ("dead body"), and hoc locum for hunc locum ("this place"). The morphological confusion shows primarily in
1246-525: A number of other sites throughout southern England from the 1990s onwards. Kenneth Jackson argued for a form of British Vulgar Latin, distinctive from continental Vulgar Latin. In fact, he identified two forms of British Latin: a lower-class variety of the language not significantly different from Continental Vulgar Latin and a distinctive upper-class Vulgar Latin. This latter variety, Jackson believed, could be distinguished from Continental Vulgar Latin by 12 distinct criteria. In particular, he characterised it as
1335-421: A prepositional case, displacing many instances of the ablative . Towards the end of the imperial period, the accusative came to be used more and more as a general oblique case. Despite increasing case mergers, nominative and accusative forms seem to have remained distinct for much longer, since they are rarely confused in inscriptions. Even though Gaulish texts from the 7th century rarely confuse both forms, it
1424-642: A result of the untenability of the noun case system after these phonetic changes, Vulgar Latin shifted from a markedly synthetic language to a more analytic one . The genitive case died out around the 3rd century AD, according to Meyer-Lübke , and began to be replaced by "de" + noun (which originally meant "about/concerning", weakened to "of") as early as the 2nd century BC. Exceptions of remaining genitive forms are some pronouns, certain fossilized expressions and some proper names. For example, French jeudi ("Thursday") < Old French juesdi < Vulgar Latin " jovis diēs "; Spanish es menester ("it
1513-555: A shift in meaning. Some notable cases are civitas ('citizenry' → 'city', replacing urbs ); focus ('hearth' → 'fire', replacing ignis ); manducare ('chew' → 'eat', replacing edere ); causa ('subject matter' → 'thing', competing with res ); mittere ('send' → 'put', competing with ponere ); necare ('murder' → 'drown', competing with submergere ); pacare ('placate' → 'pay', competing with solvere ), and totus ('whole' → 'all, every', competing with omnis ). Front vowels in hiatus (after
1602-421: A three-way contrast is also made with the definite articles el , la , and lo . The last is used with nouns denoting abstract categories: lo bueno , literally "that which is good", from bueno : good. The Vulgar Latin vowel shifts caused the merger of several case endings in the nominal and adjectival declensions. Some of the causes include: the loss of final m , the merger of ă with ā , and
1691-408: A variety of views as to when exactly it died out as a vernacular. The question has been described as "one of the most vexing problems of the languages of early Britain." In most of what was to become England , Anglo-Saxon settlement and the consequent introduction of Old English appear to have caused the extinction of Vulgar Latin as a vernacular. The Anglo-Saxons spread westward across Britain in
1780-414: A woman. There are two handwriting styles in the tablet, with the majority of the text written in a professional hand (thought to be the household scribe) and with closing greetings personally added by Claudia Severa (on the lower right hand side of the tablet). There are only scant references to the indigenous Celtic Britons . Until the discovery of the tablets, historians could only speculate on whether
1869-868: Is a borrowing from French); the same for lignum ("wood stick"), plural ligna , that originated the Catalan feminine singular noun (la) llenya , Portuguese (a) lenha , Spanish (la) leña and Italian (la) legna . Some Romance languages still have a special form derived from the ancient neuter plural which is treated grammatically as feminine: e.g., BRACCHIUM : BRACCHIA "arm(s)" → Italian (il) braccio : (le) braccia , Romanian braț(ul) : brațe(le) . Cf. also Merovingian Latin ipsa animalia aliquas mortas fuerant . Alternations in Italian heteroclitic nouns such as l'uovo fresco ("the fresh egg") / le uova fresche ("the fresh eggs") are usually analysed as masculine in
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#17327719897161958-521: Is a useless and dangerously misleading term ... To abandon it once and for all can only benefit scholarship. Lloyd called to replace the use of "Vulgar Latin" with a series of more precise definitions, such as the spoken Latin of a particular time and place. Research in the twentieth century has in any case shifted the view to consider the differences between written and spoken Latin in more moderate terms. Just as in modern languages, speech patterns are different from written forms, and vary with education,
2047-485: Is an entrepreneur dealing in wheat, hides and sinews, but this does not prove him to be a civilian. The tablets are written in forms of Roman cursive script, considered to be the forerunner of joined-up writing, which varies in style by author. With few exceptions, they have been classified as old Roman cursive. The cursive writing from Vindolanda differs greatly from the Latin capitals used for inscriptions. The script
2136-510: Is believed that both cases began to merge in Africa by the end of the empire, and a bit later in parts of Italy and Iberia. Nowadays, Romanian maintains a two-case system, while Old French and Old Occitan had a two-case subject-oblique system. This Old French system was based largely on whether or not the Latin case ending contained an "s" or not, with the "s" being retained but all vowels in
2225-859: Is considered regular as it is more common than in Italian. Thus, a relict neuter gender can arguably be said to persist in Italian and Romanian. In Portuguese, traces of the neuter plural can be found in collective formations and words meant to inform a bigger size or sturdiness. Thus, one can use ovo (s) ("egg(s)") and ova (s) ("roe", "collection(s) of eggs"), bordo (s) ("section(s) of an edge") and borda (s ) ("edge(s)"), saco (s) ("bag(s)") and saca (s ) ("sack(s)"), manto (s) ("cloak(s)") and manta (s) ("blanket(s)"). Other times, it resulted in words whose gender may be changed more or less arbitrarily, like fruto / fruta ("fruit"), caldo / calda ("broth"), etc. These formations were especially common when they could be used to avoid irregular forms. In Latin,
2314-465: Is derived from the capital writing of the late 1st century BC and the 1st century AD. The text rarely shows the unusual or distorted letter forms or the extravagant ligatures to be found in Greek papyri of the same period. Additional challenges for transcription are the use of abbreviations such as " h " for homines (men) or " cos " for consularis (consular), and the arbitrary division of words at
2403-408: Is necessary") < "est ministeri "; and Italian terremoto ("earthquake") < " terrae motu " as well as names like Paoli , Pieri . The dative case lasted longer than the genitive, even though Plautus , in the 2nd century BC, already shows some instances of substitution by the construction "ad" + accusative. For example, "ad carnuficem dabo". The accusative case developed as
2492-409: Is not possible to give a definitive answer. The anaerobic conditions found at Vindolanda are not unique, and identical deposits have been found in parts of London. One possibility, given the fragile condition of the tablets found at Vindolanda, is that archaeologists excavating other Roman sites have overlooked evidence of writing in ink. In 1973, the tablets were photographed by Susan M. Blackshaw in
2581-510: Is that as an extinct spoken language form, no source provides a direct account of it. Reliance is on indirect sources of evidence such as "errors" in written texts and regional inscriptions. They are held to be reflective of the everyday spoken language. Of particular linguistic value are private inscriptions made by ordinary people, such as epitaphs and votive offerings , and " curse tablets " (small metal sheets used in popular magic to curse people). In relation to Vulgar Latin specifically as it
2670-575: Is that in Britain there was a greater collapse in Roman institutions and infrastructure, leading to a much greater reduction in the status and prestige of the indigenous romanised culture; and so the indigenous people were more likely to abandon their languages in favour of the higher-status language of the Anglo-Saxons. On the other hand, Richard Coates believes that the linguistic evidence points to
2759-420: Is that the term "Vulgar Latin" is regarded by some modern philologists as an essentially meaningless, but unfortunately very persistent term: the continued use of "Vulgar Latin" is not only no aid to thought, but is, on the contrary, a positive barrier to a clear understanding of Latin and Romance. ... I wish it were possible to hope the term might fall out of use. Many scholars have stated that "Vulgar Latin"
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2848-487: Is that the written and spoken languages formed a continuity much as they do in modern languages, with speech tending to evolve faster than the written language, and the written, formalised language exerting pressure back on speech. Vulgar Latin is itself often viewed as vague and unhelpful, and it is used in very different ways by different scholars, applying it to mean spoken Latin of differing types, or from different social classes and time periods. Nevertheless, interest in
2937-624: Is the replacement of the highly irregular ( suppletive ) verb ferre , meaning 'to carry', with the entirely regular portare . Similarly, the verb loqui , meaning 'to speak', was replaced by a variety of alternatives such as the native fabulari and narrare or the Greek borrowing parabolare . Classical Latin particles fared poorly, with all of the following vanishing in the course of its development to Romance: an , at , autem , donec , enim , etiam , haud , igitur , ita , nam , postquam , quidem , quin , quoad , quoque , sed , sive , utrum , vel . Many words experienced
3026-682: The Bloomberg tablets ). They are a rich source of information about life on the northern frontier of Roman Britain . Written on fragments of thin, postcard-sized wooden leaf-tablets with carbon-based ink, the tablets date to the 1st and 2nd centuries AD (roughly contemporary with Hadrian's Wall ). Although similar records on papyrus were known from elsewhere in the Roman Empire , wooden tablets with ink text had not been recovered until 1973, when archaeologist Robin Birley , his attention being drawn by student excavator Keith Liddell, discovered some at
3115-404: The British Museum , but arrangements have been made for some to be displayed at Vindolanda. As of 2023, more than 1,700 tablets have been discovered. The wooden tablets found at Vindolanda were the first known surviving examples of the use of ink letters in the Roman period. The use of ink tablets was documented in contemporary records; Herodian in the 3rd century describes "a writing-tablet of
3204-596: The 1980s, Colin Smith used stone inscriptions in particular in this way, although much of what Smith has written has become out of date as a result of the large number of Latin inscriptions found in Britain in recent years. The best known of these are the Vindolanda tablets , the last two volumes of which were published in 1994 and 2003, but also include the Bath curse tablets , published in 1988, and other curse tablets found at
3293-437: The 20th century. It is not known when Vulgar Latin ceased to be spoken in Britain, but it is likely that it continued to be widely spoken in various parts of Britain into the 5th century. In the lowland zone, Vulgar Latin was replaced by Old English during the course of the 5th and the 6th centuries, but in the highland zone, it gave way to Brittonic languages such as Primitive Welsh and Cornish . However, scholars have had
3382-500: The 5th century to the 7th century, leaving only Cornwall and Wales in the southern part of the country and the Hen Ogledd in the north under British rule. The demise of Vulgar Latin in the face of Anglo-Saxon settlement is very different from the fate of the language in other areas of Western Europe that were subject to Germanic migration , like France, Italy and Spain, where Latin and the Romance languages continued. One theory
3471-597: The Anglo-Saxon conquest of the lowland zone may have indirectly ensured that Vulgar Latin would not survive in the highland zone either. Vulgar Latin Vulgar Latin , also known as Popular or Colloquial Latin , is the range of non-formal registers of Latin spoken from the Late Roman Republic onward. Vulgar Latin as a term is both controversial and imprecise. Spoken Latin existed for
3560-489: The British Museum, using infrared sensitive cameras and, more comprehensively, in 1990 at Vindolanda, by Alison Rutherford. The tablets were scanned again using improved techniques in 2000–2001 with a Kodak Wratten 87C infra-red filter . The photographs are taken in infrared to enhance the faded ink against the wood of the tablets, or to distinguish between ink and dirt, to make the writing more visible. In 2002,
3649-506: The British Museum, where a selection of them is on display in its Roman Britain gallery (Room 49). The tablets featured in the list of British archaeological finds selected by experts at the British Museum for the 2003 BBC Television documentary Our Top Ten Treasures . Viewers were invited to vote for their favourite, and the tablets came top of the poll. The Vindolanda Museum, run by the Vindolanda Trust, has funding so that
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3738-517: The Latin nominative/accusative nomen , rather than the oblique stem form * nomin- (which nevertheless produced Spanish nombre ). Most neuter nouns had plural forms ending in -A or -IA ; some of these were reanalysed as feminine singulars, such as gaudium ("joy"), plural gaudia ; the plural form lies at the root of the French feminine singular (la) joie , as well as of Catalan and Occitan (la) joia (Italian la gioia
3827-699: The Romance vernaculars as to their actual use: in Romanian, the articles are suffixed to the noun (or an adjective preceding it), as in other languages of the Balkan sprachbund and the North Germanic languages . The numeral unus , una (one) supplies the indefinite article in all cases (again, this is a common semantic development across Europe). This is anticipated in Classical Latin; Cicero writes cum uno gladiatore nequissimo ("with
3916-636: The Romans had a nickname for the Britons. Brittunculi (diminutive of Britto ; hence 'little Britons'), found on one of the Vindolanda tablets, is now known to be a derogatory, or patronising, term used by the Roman garrisons that were based in Northern Britain to describe the locals. Wooden tablets have been found at 20 Roman settlements in Britain. However, most of those sites did not yield
4005-414: The adoption of the nominative ending -us ( -Ø after -r ) in the o -declension. In Petronius 's work, one can find balneus for balneum ("bath"), fatus for fatum ("fate"), caelus for caelum ("heaven"), amphitheater for amphitheatrum ("amphitheatre"), vinus for vinum ("wine"), and conversely, thesaurum for thesaurus ("treasure"). Most of these forms occur in
4094-574: The articles fully developed. Definite articles evolved from demonstrative pronouns or adjectives (an analogous development is found in many Indo-European languages, including Greek , Celtic and Germanic ); compare the fate of the Latin demonstrative adjective ille , illa , illud "that", in the Romance languages , becoming French le and la (Old French li , lo , la ), Catalan and Spanish el , la and lo , Occitan lo and la , Portuguese o and
4183-408: The conquered provinces. Over time this—along with other factors that encouraged linguistic and cultural assimilation , such as political unity, frequent travel and commerce, military service, etc.—led to Latin becoming the predominant language throughout the western Mediterranean. Latin itself was subject to the same assimilatory tendencies, such that its varieties had probably become more uniform by
4272-404: The dominant language in the highland zone. However, the speakers of Vulgar Latin were significantly but temporarily boosted in the 5th century by the influx of Romano-Britons from the lowland zone who were fleeing the Anglo-Saxons. These refugees are traditionally characterised as being "upper class" and "upper middle class". Certainly, Vulgar Latin maintained a higher social status than Brittonic in
4361-538: The dominant language. Throughout much of western Europe, from Late Antiquity , the Vulgar Latin of everyday speech developed into locally distinctive varieties which ultimately became the Romance languages . However, after the end of Roman rule in Britain in the early 5th century, Vulgar Latin died out as an everyday spoken language. The timing of its demise as a vernacular in Britain, its nature and its characteristics have been points of scholarly debate in recent years. An inherent difficulty in evidencing Vulgar Latin
4450-519: The end of lines for space reasons such as " epistulas " (letters) being split between the " e " and the rest of the word. The ink is often badly faded or survives as little more than a blur, so that in some instances transcription is not possible. In most cases infrared photographs of the tablets provide a far more legible version of what was written than visual inspection. However, the photographs contain marks which appear similar to writing but which certainly are not letters; additionally, they contain
4539-551: The end of the Roman Empire /ɪ/ merged with /e/ in most regions, although not in Africa or a few peripheral areas in Italy. It is difficult to place the point in which the definite article , absent in Latin but present in all Romance languages, arose, largely because the highly colloquial speech in which it arose was seldom written down until the daughter languages had strongly diverged; most surviving texts in early Romance show
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#17327719897164628-456: The ending being lost (as with veisin below). But since this meant that it was easy to confuse the singular nominative with the plural oblique, and the plural nominative with the singular oblique, this case system ultimately collapsed as well, and Middle French adopted one case (usually the oblique) for all purposes. Vindolanda tablets The Vindolanda tablets are some of the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Britain (antedated by
4717-415: The feminine derivations (a) pereira , (la) perera . As usual, irregularities persisted longest in frequently used forms. From the fourth declension noun manus ("hand"), another feminine noun with the ending -us , Italian and Spanish derived (la) mano , Romanian mânu> mână , pl. mâini / (reg.) mâni , Catalan (la) mà , and Portuguese (a) mão , which preserve
4806-609: The feminine gender along with the masculine appearance. Except for the Italian and Romanian heteroclitic nouns, other major Romance languages have no trace of neuter nouns, but still have neuter pronouns. French celui-ci / celle-ci / ceci ("this"), Spanish éste / ésta / esto ("this"), Italian: gli / le / ci ("to him" /"to her" / "to it"), Catalan: ho , açò , això , allò ("it" / this / this-that / that over there ); Portuguese: todo / toda / tudo ("all of him" / "all of her" / "all of it"). In Spanish,
4895-406: The following day, including a polite request for more beer to be sent to the garrison (which had entirely consumed its previous stock of beer). The documents provide information about various roles performed by the men at the fort, such as a keeper of the bath-house , shoe-makers , construction workers, medical doctors , maintainers of wagons and kilns , and those put on plastering duty. One of
4984-459: The following sources: An oft-posed question is why (or when, or how) Latin “fragmented” into several different languages. Current hypotheses contrast the centralizing and homogenizing socio-economic, cultural, and political forces that characterized the Roman Empire with the centrifugal forces that prevailed afterwards. By the end of the first century CE the Romans had seized the entire Mediterranean Basin and established hundreds of colonies in
5073-547: The former must have all had some common ancestor (which he believed most closely resembled Old Occitan ) that replaced Latin some time before the year 1000. This he dubbed la langue romane or "the Romance language". The first truly modern treatise on Romance linguistics and the first to apply the comparative method was Friedrich Christian Diez 's seminal Grammar of the Romance Languages . Researchers such as Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke characterised Vulgar Latin as to
5162-745: The fragmentation of Latin into the incipient Romance languages. Until then Latin appears to have been remarkably homogeneous, as far as can be judged from its written records, although careful statistical analysis reveals regional differences in the treatment of the vowel /ĭ/, and in the frequency of the merger of (original) intervocalic /b/ and /w/, by about the fifth century CE. Over the centuries, spoken Latin lost certain words in favour of coinages ; in favour of borrowings from neighbouring languages such as Gaulish , Germanic , or Greek ; or in favour of other Latin words that had undergone semantic shift . The “lost” words often continued to enjoy some currency in literary Latin, however. A commonly-cited example
5251-491: The highland zone in the 6th century. Although Latin continued to be spoken by many of the British elite in western Britain, by about 700, it had died out. The incoming Latin-speakers from the lowland zone seem to have rapidly assimilated with the existing population and adopted Brittonic. The continued viability of British Latin may have been negatively affected by the loss to Old English of the areas where it had been strongest:
5340-467: The indigenous Britons . In recent years, scholars have debated the extent to which British Latin was distinguishable from its continental counterparts, which developed into the Romance languages . After the end of Roman rule , Latin was displaced as a spoken language by Old English in most of what became England during the Anglo-Saxon settlement of the fifth and sixth centuries. It survived in
5429-504: The informal, everyday variety of their own language as sermo plebeius or sermo vulgaris , meaning "common speech". This could simply refer to unadorned speech without the use of rhetoric, or even plain speaking. The modern usage of the term Vulgar Latin dates to the Renaissance , when Italian thinkers began to theorize that their own language originated in a sort of "corrupted" Latin that they assumed formed an entity distinct from
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#17327719897165518-411: The inside. They were taken to the epigraphist Richard Wright , but rapid oxygenation of the wood meant that they were black and unreadable by the time he was able to view them. They were sent to Alison Rutherford at Newcastle University Medical School for multi-spectrum photography, which led to infrared photographs showing the scripts for researchers for the first time. The results were disappointing as
5607-532: The kind that were made from lime-wood, cut into thin sheets and folded face-to-face by being bent". The Vindolanda tablets are made from birch, alder and oak that grew locally—in contrast to stylus tablets, another type of writing tablet used in Roman Britain, which were imported and made from non-native wood. The tablets are 0.25–3 mm (0.01–0.12 in) thick with a typical size being 20 cm × 8 cm (8 in × 3 in) (the size of
5696-956: The less formal speech, reconstructed forms suggest that the inherited Latin demonstratives were made more forceful by being compounded with ecce (originally an interjection : "behold!"), which also spawned Italian ecco through eccum , a contracted form of ecce eum . This is the origin of Old French cil (* ecce ille ), cist (* ecce iste ) and ici (* ecce hic ); Italian questo (* eccum istum ), quello (* eccum illum ) and (now mainly Tuscan) codesto (* eccum tibi istum ), as well as qui (* eccu hic ), qua (* eccum hac ); Spanish and Occitan aquel and Portuguese aquele (* eccum ille ); Spanish acá and Portuguese cá (* eccum hac ); Spanish aquí and Portuguese aqui (* eccum hic ); Portuguese acolá (* eccum illac ) and aquém (* eccum inde ); Romanian acest (* ecce iste ) and acela (* ecce ille ), and many other forms. On
5785-401: The literary Classical variety, though opinions differed greatly on the nature of this "vulgar" dialect. The early 19th-century French linguist François-Just-Marie Raynouard is often regarded as the father of modern Romance philology . Observing that the Romance languages have many features in common that are not found in Latin, at least not in "proper" or Classical Latin, he concluded that
5874-416: The majority written before 102. They were used for official notes about the Vindolanda camp business and personal affairs of the officers and households. The largest group is correspondence of Flavius Cerialis, prefect of the ninth cohort of Batavians and that of his wife, Sulpicia Lepidina . Some correspondence may relate to civilian traders and contractors; for example Octavian, the writer of Tablet 343,
5963-400: The merger of ŭ with ō (see tables). Thus, by the 5th century, the number of case contrasts had been drastically reduced. There also seems to be a marked tendency to confuse different forms even when they had not become homophonous (like the generally more distinct plurals), which indicates that nominal declension was shaped not only by phonetic mergers, but also by structural factors. As
6052-508: The names of trees were usually feminine, but many were declined in the second declension paradigm, which was dominated by masculine or neuter nouns. Latin pirus (" pear tree"), a feminine noun with a masculine-looking ending, became masculine in Italian (il) pero and Romanian păr(ul) ; in French and Spanish it was replaced by the masculine derivations (le) poirier , (el) peral ; and in Portuguese and Catalan by
6141-701: The nominative and -Ø in the accusative in both words: murs , ciels [nominative] – mur , ciel [oblique]. For some neuter nouns of the third declension, the oblique stem was productive; for others, the nominative/accusative form, (the two were identical in Classical Latin). Evidence suggests that the neuter gender was under pressure well back into the imperial period. French (le) lait , Catalan (la) llet , Occitan (lo) lach , Spanish (la) leche , Portuguese (o) leite , Italian language (il) latte , Leonese (el) lleche and Romanian lapte (le) ("milk"), all derive from
6230-444: The non-standard but attested Latin nominative/accusative neuter lacte or accusative masculine lactem . In Spanish the word became feminine, while in French, Portuguese and Italian it became masculine (in Romanian it remained neuter, lapte / lăpturi ). Other neuter forms, however, were preserved in Romance; Catalan and French nom , Leonese, Portuguese and Italian nome , Romanian nume ("name") all preserve
6319-401: The noun, e.g. lupul ("the wolf" – from * lupum illum ) and omul ("the man" – *homo illum ), possibly a result of being within the Balkan sprachbund . This demonstrative is used in a number of contexts in some early texts in ways that suggest that the Latin demonstrative was losing its force. The Vetus Latina Bible contains a passage Est tamen ille daemon sodalis peccati ("The devil is
6408-506: The now little supported traditional view that there was a mass replacement of the population of southern and eastern England with Anglo-Saxon settlers. His view, based on place name evidence and the lack of loan words in English from Latin "with a Brittonic accent", is that this is the most convincing explanation for the extinction of Latin (or Brittonic) in the lowland zone. From the fifth century, there are only occasional evidential hints of
6497-619: The other hand, even in the Oaths of Strasbourg , dictated in Old French in AD 842, no demonstrative appears even in places where one would clearly be called for in all the later languages ( pro christian poblo – "for the Christian people"). Using the demonstratives as articles may have still been considered overly informal for a royal oath in the 9th century. Considerable variation exists in all of
6586-554: The remaining Celtic regions of western Britain. However, it also died out in those regions by about 700; it was replaced by the local Brittonic languages . At the inception of Roman rule in AD ;43, Great Britain was inhabited by the indigenous Britons , who spoke the Celtic language known as Brittonic . Roman Britain lasted for nearly four hundred years until the early fifth century. For most of its history, it encompassed what
6675-430: The same can be said of Latin. For instance, philologist József Herman agrees that the term is problematic, and therefore limits it in his work to mean the innovations and changes that turn up in spoken or written Latin that were relatively uninfluenced by educated forms of Latin. Herman states: it is completely clear from the texts during the time that Latin was a living language, there was never an unbridgeable gap between
6764-566: The scripts were initially indecipherable. However, Alan Bowman at Manchester University and David Thomas at Durham University analysed the previously unknown form of cursive script and were able to produce transcriptions. Vindolanda fort was garrisoned before the construction of Hadrian's Wall, and most of the tablets are slightly older than the wall, which was begun in 122. The original director of excavations Robin Birley identified five periods of occupation and expansion: The tablets were produced in periods 2 and 3 ( c. 92–103 ), with
6853-464: The shifts in the spoken forms remains very important to understand the transition from Latin or Late Latin through to Proto-Romance and Romance languages. To make matters more complicated, evidence for spoken forms can be found only through examination of written Classical Latin , Late Latin , or early Romance , depending on the time period. During the Classical period , Roman authors referred to
6942-409: The singular and feminine in the plural, with an irregular plural in -a . However, it is also consistent with their historical development to say that uovo is simply a regular neuter noun ( ovum , plural ova ) and that the characteristic ending for words agreeing with these nouns is -o in the singular and -e in the plural. The same alternation in gender exists in certain Romanian nouns, but
7031-436: The site of Vindolanda , a Roman fort in northern England. The documents record official military matters as well as personal messages to and from members of the garrison of Vindolanda, their families, and their slaves. Highlights of the tablets include an invitation to a birthday party held in about 100, which is perhaps the oldest surviving document written in Latin by a woman. The excavated tablets are nearly all held at
7120-593: The speech of one man: Trimalchion, an uneducated Greek (i.e. foreign) freedman . In modern Romance languages, the nominative s -ending has been largely abandoned, and all substantives of the o -declension have an ending derived from -um : -u , -o , or -Ø . E.g., masculine murus ("wall"), and neuter caelum ("sky") have evolved to: Italian muro , cielo ; Portuguese muro , céu ; Spanish muro , cielo , Catalan mur , cel ; Romanian mur , cieru> cer ; French mur , ciel . However, Old French still had -s in
7209-455: The tablet images were used as part of a research programme to extend the use of the GRAVA iterative computer vision system, to aid the transcription of the Vindolanda tablets through a series of processes modelled on the best practice of papyrologists, and to provide the images in an XML marked up format, identifying the likely placement of characters and words with their transcription. In 2010,
7298-411: The tablets confirms that Roman soldiers wore underpants ( subligaculum ), and also testifies to a high degree of literacy in the Roman army . The best-known document is perhaps Tablet 291, written around 100 by Claudia Severa , the wife of the commander of a nearby fort, to Sulpicia Lepidina, inviting her to a birthday party. The invitation is one of the earliest known examples of writing in Latin by
7387-558: The time the Empire fell than they had been before it. That is not to say that the language had been static for all those years, but rather that ongoing changes tended to spread to all regions. The rise of the first Arab caliphate in the seventh century marked the definitive end of Roman dominance over the Mediterranean. It is from approximately that century onward that regional differences proliferate in Latin documents, indicating
7476-421: The type of tablet found at Vindolanda, but rather "stylus tablets", marked with pointed metal styli . A significant number of ink tablets have been identified at Carlisle (also on Hadrian's Wall). The fact that letters were sent to and from places on Hadrian's Wall and further afield ( Catterick , York , and London) raises the question of why more letters have been found at Vindolanda than other sites, but it
7565-517: The weakening of the demonstratives can be inferred from the fact that at this time, legal and similar texts begin to swarm with praedictus , supradictus , and so forth (all meaning, essentially, "aforesaid"), which seem to mean little more than "this" or "that". Gregory of Tours writes, Erat autem... beatissimus Anianus in supradicta civitate episcopus ("Blessed Anianus was bishop in that city.") The original Latin demonstrative adjectives were no longer felt to be strong or specific enough. In
7654-414: The written and spoken, nor between the language of the social elites and that of the middle, lower, or disadvantaged groups of the same society. Herman also makes it clear that Vulgar Latin, in this view, is a varied and unstable phenomenon, crossing many centuries of usage where any generalisations are bound to cover up variations and differences. Evidence for the features of non-literary Latin comes from
7743-693: Was probably not substantially different from the Vulgar Latin of Gaul , over a period of 400 years of Roman rule, British Latin would almost certainly have developed distinctive traits. That and the likely impact of the Brittonic substrate both mean that a specific British Vulgar Latin variety most probably developed. However, if it did exist as a distinct dialect group, it has not survived extensively enough for diagnostic features to be detected, despite much new subliterary Latin being discovered in England in
7832-523: Was spoken in Britain, Kenneth H. Jackson put forward in the 1950s what became the established view, which has only relatively recently been challenged. Jackson drew conclusions about the nature of British Latin from examining Latin loanwords that had passed into the British Celtic languages. From the 1970s John Mann, Eric P. Hamp and others used what Mann called "the sub-literary tradition" in inscriptions to identify spoken British Latin usage. In
7921-474: Was to become England and Wales as far north as Hadrian’s Wall , but with the addition, for shorter periods, of territories further north up to, but not including, the Scottish Highlands . Historians often refer to Roman Britain as comprising a "highland zone" to the north and west of the country and a "lowland zone" in the south and east, with the latter being more thoroughly romanised and having
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