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ABSTRACT
The development of language is a fascinating study. The ancient Chinese and Egyptians used pictographic languages
which took years for the priests and scholars to master. The common working citizen had no time for such study and
so remained powerless and able to be exploited. About 1500BC the Phoenicians developed a phonetic alphabet which
could be used by the common merchants to conduct their trading businesses. The Greeks learned it from them and
further developed it by adding vowels. This phonetic alphabet made people think differently. It encouraged analysis
and the development of a
whole written language of interchangeable components.
All the languages that developed from the Latin and Greek root vocabularies function like that. If we don’t teach the
root meaning of those components, we burden ourselves with the task of learning thousands of individual English
words as wholes. By studying Latin can master the components of many languages, including English.
KEYWORDS
Latin language, Romance languages, Roman Empire, Catholic Church, the spread of Christianity, Latin influence, the
language of the Normans, the European syntax.
Research Article
WHY LATIN LANGUAGE IS FUNDAMENTAL IN STUDYING EUROPEAN
LANGUAGES
Submission Date:
December 08, 2023,
Accepted Date:
December 13, 2023,
Published Date:
December 18, 2023
Crossref doi:
https://doi.org/10.37547/ajps/Volume03Issue12-16
Safina Farida Axatovna
Teacher Of German Language, The Faculty Of Foreign Languages At Jizzakh State Pedagogical University
(Uzbekistan)
Baymatov Abduaziz Abdujabbarovich
Teacher Of German Language, The Faculty Of Foreign Languages At Jizzakh State Pedagogical University
(Uzbekistan)
Journal
Website:
https://theusajournals.
com/index.php/ajps
Copyright:
Original
content from this work
may be used under the
terms of the creative
commons
attributes
4.0 licence.
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INTRODUCTION
Latin language, Latin -lingua -Latina, Indo-European
language in the Italic group and ancestral to the
modern Romance languages. Originally spoken by
small groups of people living along the lower Tiber
River, Latin spread with the increase of Roman political
power, first throughout Italy, and then
throughout most of western and southern Europe and
the central and western Mediterranean coastal regions
of Africa. The modern Romance languages developed
from the spoken Latin of various parts of the Roman
Empire. During the Middle Ages and until
comparatively recent times, Latin was the language
most widely used in the West for scholarly and literary
purposes. Until the latter part of the 20th century its
use was required in the liturgy of the Roman Catholic
Church.
Latin is a language which has been the most widely
used in the entire world’s history. More than any other
language, it has influenced the languages of Europe
and the Americas. Since Latin was the official language
of the government of the Roman Empire, its
knowledge and use meant promotion and social
prominence; it thus became the common language of
culture as the Empire spread.
The spread of Christianity throughout the Roman
Empire greatly influenced Latin. Christianity was a
religion for all men, rich or poor, and evangelizing went
hand-in-hand with translating. In 390AD, St. Jerome
translated the Bible into the Latin Vulgate (spoken
Latin). Now the Vulgar (spoken by the people) Latin
became united with the written language and gave
Latin the strength to survive the collapse of the
Empire.
For 400 years the Romans ruled Britain and found it
necessary to build many military camps, which
developed into towns. A form of the Latin word for
camp, castra, can be found in a number of town names:
Chester, Manchester, Worcester, Lancaster.
A very important period of influence was after the
Norman conquest of England in 1066. The language of
the Normans was an old form of French, itself
descended from Latin. In the course of a few centuries,
the English language underwent striking changes and
adopted many French (Latin) words.
Because Latin for many years had been the language of
learned men, it
became the basis of vocabulary of the sciences and
law.
Latin has been the reference language of western
Europe for centuries, serving as the source for
recurrent waves of direct or indirect influence on the
syntax, morphology and lexicon of many national
languages. Solodow (2010) addresses the influence of
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Latin on the lexicon and the morphology, but does not
pay due attention to the role of Latin syntactic patterns
in shaping European syntax. More than half a century
after Blatt’s (1957) seminal paper on “Latin influence
on
European syntax“, an in
- depth typology of the
various Latinization strategies has yet to be proposed.
This article aims to take a step in that direction,
identifying and explaining different types of contact
between Latin syntax and the syntax of the western
European languages from an historical and
geographical perspective. Special attention will be paid
to the type of contact and the level of linguistic
analysis, the periodization of Latin influence and the
role of translation, the actualization of new Latin-
based constructions, the question whether the SAE
Sprachbund is influenced or determined by Latin-
based features, and the repercussions of the study of
Latin loan syntax for functionalist explanations of
language change.
Contact with Latin manifests itself in several ways. On
the one hand, Latin constructions can be directly
calqued in the modern languages, with additional
morpho-syntactic changes ensuing (Timofeeva 2010;
Drinka 2015; Cornillie & Octavio de Toledo 2015). On the
other hand, syntactic innovation can also be the result
of indirect Latin influence. Certain syntactic
alternatives available in the vernacular languages are
then favored due to the prestige of the Latin forms
(Van de Pol 2012; Castillo Lluch & López Izquierdo
2010). In this case, there is convergence between
vernacular structures and the syntactic patterns of
Latin. Alternatively, it can be claimed that the syntactic
structures of a given European language, although
similar/parallel to the Latin ones, conform to the
linguistic tradition of Europe, and, hence, are not
contact-induced. Such views
are based on the notion of natural communicative
strategies (Kuhn 1972), or on corpus studies of periods
preceding the times of heavy Latinization (Axel 2007).
From a methodological point of view, the identification
of Latinate syntax deserves our attention. We can
speak of Latin loan syntax: whenever modern
constructions can only be explained by a Latin model
because of their special character, e.g. parenthetical
that is / esto es / id est; when a construction appears
under specific circumstances, e.g. comme (Fr.) or como
(esp.), from the Latin cum + subjunctive, which do not
appear before the 15th century; when a construction is
frequent in translations or learned texts but rare in pre-
contact literature, e.g. sentence-final position of the
verb; or when the usage of a construction supposed to
be of Latin origin is widened (from limited use to
extended use), e.g. participles.
A further question concerns the level of analysis
needed for the Latin syntax itself. Blatt (1957) gives
numerous examples of how the structure of the clause
of most written European languages goes back to the
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Latin complex sentence (period), with a focus on
complementizers and conjunctions. It is to be expected
that lower-scale linguistic expressions such as specific
auxiliaries and the organization of the noun phrase
display a much greater variation across languages,
although striking similarities among languages may
appear.
Given that Latin has been present in Christian writings
and the church hierarchy since their very beginnings,
the question arises as to the timing of Latin-based
syntactic innovations. Religious respect towards the
Latin model was extremely strong in early periods,
even in the face of resistance by the Church to the work
of the translators as a consequence. Paradoxically, the
focus on good Latin gave rise to the development of
new vernacular languages (cf. the role of the Cluny
network in Wright 1982, legal discourse in Kabatek
2005, etc.). Later bible translations into the national
languages played an important role in the spread of
Latinate constructions, but it is crucial to look also at
literary, legal, and official documents. Of special
interest is how writers, judges, and administrators tend
to apply Latin syntactic constructs to their respective
native languages. And so is the crucial impact that this
influence had on the later development of
standardized national languages in the Renaissance
era.
The societal status of Latin forms varies through time
(cf. Carolingian revolution in Drinka 2013; 2015), and the
rise of new forms in the vernacular languages is often
found in periods of growing prestige of both Latin and
the vernacular language, which indicates the
importance of the social and cultural dynamics in
language change. The social pressure of the elites to
distinguish themselves cannot be ignored, but the
creativity of the authors adapting Latin calques is also
an important point of attention (cf. syntactic
elaboration. Kloss 1967, Cornillie 2014). Thus, it is
necessary to identify whether borrowings are literal or
functional.
Many Latinate constructions that show up at a certain
point in the history of a language are lost at a later
stage, e.g. the Accusativus/Nominativus cum Infinitivo
(Rabelais: Ils demandoient les cloches leur estre
rendues) or the sentence-final position of the verb in
subordinate clauses. By contrast, many other
constructions survived. For instance, the present-day
organization of the sentence by means of discourse
markers such as English therefore, then, however, and
but, or French donc, mais and or can be attributed to
discourse strategies in Latin: at, ergo, autem. The
correlation of clauses has also survived the centuries:
plus l’âme est divine… plus ella a besoin. Happy the
man whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound
(cf. Latin beatus ille qui procul negotiis), or Der nehst
kumet/, der darnach nehst kumet (cf. Latin proxime
venturus, proxime subsequens). The very frequent
parentheti
cal remarks such as that is to say, c’est à dire,
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dass heisst, det vil sige go back to Latin id est. So as to
explain the survival of these forms, special attention
has to be paid to the syntactic forms that secure their
position in the system of the language. Due attention
should be paid to the possible distributional
differences between the source expression in Latin
and its counterparts in the European languages.
Hence, questions like the following arise: what does it
take for a new form to be considered part of the
linguistic system? By means of which linguistic
mechanisms does the actualization of a new form
proceed? Is this process related to similar processes of
standardization elsewhere?
Research on ‘exotic’ languages has shown that large
European languages have idiosyncratic features as well
and that Europe itself is a linguistic Sprachbund (cf.
EUROTYP
project).
European
languages
are
converging in many respects, with Standard Average
European (SAE) crossing language family borders (Hall
1944; Haspelmath 1998, 2001; Van der Auwera 1998;
Heine & Kuteva 2006). The core of the SAE is found in
French, German and Dutch, but the non-Indo-European
languages of Europe also share a number of features.
For instance, Old Hungarian did not have noun-clause
complementizers such as quod, che, dass, that or que,
but modern Hungarian has hogy (hallá, hogy meghal
‘he heard that he should die’). Likewise Basque did not
have a native perfect form, but developed a
periphrastic version on the pattern of the surrounding
Romance languages (Haase 1992).
The Latin varieties evolved so differently from each
other they became new languages. That’s how the
languages we know as the Romance languages came
to exist. The big five, as they are known, are French,
Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian. Great
evidence reveals their relation; if you learn one,
learning one of the others is fairly easy.
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