Week 2 - Latin and it's Influences on English

 

Last week, when I started researching, I found that the old Brittonic languages didn’t really influence English in many ways. This week I looked at what I assumed would be the next historical addition to the English language. Latin. In 55 and 54 BC, Julius Caesar landed in Britain. Eventually he was pushed out and almost 100 years later, romans would once again invade. In 43 AD romans invaded again and between then and the fifth century they would come to conquer most of England, Wales, and parts of southern Scotland where the Hadrian Wall was built. More on this history can be found here. With Roman civilization came the roman language, Latin. I was always interested in roman history and I always assumed that this bringing of Latin to England was the reason why English has so many Latin-based words. I was wrong.

Original picture from here

In the early fifth century, Rome abandoned Britain. While administration was done using Latin, many of the administration was roman and so left with roman occupation. The general population at this time spoke the Britannic language and continued to speak it even throughout roman rule. Unlike other places in Europe in what is now modern-day France, Portugal, Spain, and Belgium, which were some of the earliest conquests outside of the Italian peninsula, Britain was not firmly under roman rule for long. Some words and structures were likely adopted but it wouldn’t be until later in time when Latin would merge with English.

In places like France, Portugal, Spain, and Belgium, which was under Roman rule for longer, Latin was adopted, and a form of vulgar Latin was spoken. This vulgar Latin would merge and develop with local dialects to form the romantic languages Portuguese, French and Spanish. This vulgar Latin gave them some of the key differences from English.

Where Latin had masculine, feminine and neuter forms, vulgar Latin had only the binary system of masculine and feminine. Definite articles were adopted, often by truncating Latin pronouns, these becoming articles such as French le and la, Portuguese o and a, and Spanish el and la. In vulgar Latin there was an increased need for preposition use.

“Loss of a productive noun case system meant that the syntactic purposes it formerly served now had to be performed by prepositions and other paraphrases. These particles increased in number, and many new ones were formed by compounding old ones. The descendant Romance languages are full of grammatical particles such as Spanish donde, "where", from Latin de + unde, or French dès, "since", from de + ex, while the equivalent Spanish and Portuguese desde is de + ex + de. Spanish después and Portuguese depois, "after", represent de + ex + post.”    

original text here

Ultimately, all of this is just showing that English is different from the romantic languages and does not really explain much about the inconsistencies and irregularities that are within English. What I found that was of the most use here is the idea of the copula. One of the inconsistencies (or in this case consistencies) that shows up in English is actually different form most other languages is the verb “to be.” In English we have a single verb to be. As you are all reding this in English I assume you know how and where we use the verb in all of its forms. In many other languages there are two verbs for “to be.” There is the state and the existence. Many other languages have a form of the verb for a transitionary or non-permanent state and one for the permanent state. For example, in Portuguese you can say “eu estou feliz” (I am Happy). Happy is not permanent. 10 minutes from now you can be sad. They use the verb estar for this. There is another verb for something permanent. That verb is ser. For example, you could say “eu sou um homen.” (I am a man) in English we use to be for both.    

At this time in history, Latin influences on English happened in the Germanic root on continental Europe. The Germanic tribes were often in close contact with Roman trade. Many words were adopted and used. The majority of the Latin influence came with the church. When Christianity was accepted into England the church brought with it, education in Latin. This is why you can see that many Latin words and uses are for religion or scientific topics like medicine, biology, and chemistry. You can see that depending on what topic you are discussing, more or less Latin-based words will be used. This use of two languages, one for every day use and the other for education lead to a lot of duplicate meaning words. You can find more information on this here and here.

In modern day people are generally of a higher education than back in the fifth century and you can see how the Latin educational language is incorporated into English. Watch this video here or below and you can see how you can speak English with almost no Latin-based words, but it sounds strange and foreign, maybe even a bit archaic.   

There is still some research left to do on Latin influences, but I will look into this more when I get to the conversion of England to Christianity. For now, I will continue forth next week to look at the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England and how the Germanic language influenced English and follow along the history of the English language as you can see below.