 Hi, this is the second video in my series of Latin videos and this one is about the history of Latin Latin like Greek has a very very long history and Latin like Greek is still spoken today Though we call it by different names and it's broken apart into What we now today consider to be different languages, but originally were just local dialects of Latin Latin like Greek and English and Russian and oh German are all Indo-European languages Latin is on the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family and it was a small language up until the Roman Republic got up and going strong in Italy and even then it wasn't The dominant language was the most important language, but it hadn't just smothered out All of the other languages being spoken in the Italian in the Italian Peninsula at the time Other languages related to Latin spoken in the Italian Peninsula would be Oskine and Umbrian those would be two other languages on the italic branch of the Indo-European Family Greek believe it or not was spoken rather widely in Sicily and southern Italy That was called mania craichia by the Latin by the Latin-speaking population in modern Tuscany and in fact Tuscany that's where Etruscan was spoken and that was a Language we don't know a whole lot about it doesn't seem to be related to any language so far as we can tell Maybe some people think it's related to Basque or maybe it's related to some ancient languages in Turkey who knows But Etruscan lent Latin many many words Latin got the word for ant for Mika from Etruscan and I can't remember the word off the top of my head who in turn had borrowed it from the Greeks, so there was a lot of cross-cultural play going on And in the early history of Latin we don't have a whole lot of written record. There's some Some of the earliest maybe their forgeries as we get later. It's more and more certain what it is but Latin literature doesn't really start until about the 200s BC with Plotus and Terence and they were both playwrights who Took Greek plays and adapted them for Roman audiences. I hesitate to use the word stall, but That's effectively what they did And they were among the earliest Latin writers The first big phase that we're interested in of Latin literature and again That's what we have left is the literature because there were no recordings of Latin speaking people And the literature didn't really though in some spots sort of it didn't really Convey how people actually spoke day-to-day in the street. That's something we're not real sure of We've got an idea But we're not dead certain what people on the street actually spoke like the first chunk of literature is Generally split into a couple of periods. There's early Latin literature. There's the golden age and there's a silver age But I would all lump that into a Heading I I tend to call classical Latin. These are the writers who Looking back From the medieval era and from the Renaissance era and from now we look back and say these are the guys who set Latin as it is If if you want to write in Latin, you've kind of got to write like these guys or else who're writing something else Among them were Virgil who wrote the Aeneid and the eclogs Cicero who Wrote everything. He was a speaker. He was a politician. He was a bit of a philosopher. He Wrote many letters to his friends that we still have Other authors in this period be Horace Julius Caesar Catullus a mix of historians Livy Salist poets Juvenile and just all sorts of things really but the the big ones that come to mind to my mind anywhere our poetry and history Maybe you can tell what I like to read and After that is silver Latin and it's considered not to be as good as gold in the age Latin, but It's still perfectly good Latin Among them plenty the younger who is an eyewitness to the Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD and later writing to a friend of his Explaining what he saw at the eruption Petronius who wrote the satiricon and Petronius is interesting because he gives us an idea of what Latin was actually spoken like I don't want to say that it's a perfect idea Because after all written language isn't spoken language, but Petronius gives us an insight So after this big classical Latin phase, I say the next important block of Latin is medieval Latin and Medieval Latin in many ways is a slightly different language But still within the bounds of classical Latin if you learn classical Latin you can then go on to read medieval Latin and in fact If you speak a Western European language Particularly one of the modern romance languages you may find Much medieval Latin to be much much easier to read the word order is simpler the sentence structure is simpler and Simpler isn't the right word It's more like what you use in your day-to-day life Examples of that would be the Gesta Romanorum collection of moral tales that priests would use in their homilies to Make a moral point without beating everyone over the head with scripture or so that they can make a moral point and then relate it over to Scripture, but that's the Gesta Romanorum many philosophers Christian philosophers are Tertullian St. Augustine many many others wrote in Latin and Falls into the category and medieval Latin is a very wide category There are people who write more like the classical standard and people who write less like the classical standard It's it's a wide mishmash and part of it part of what you're seeing in medieval Latin is the breakup of Latin is a unified language into the modern romance languages And that's what you're starting to see Then as we move on towards the Renaissance You have several authors saying well. Hey, wait a second. We're not really writing very good Latin. It sounds kind of like Whatever it is. We're speaking at home But with all the case endings and verb endings and the like Let's go back and read Cicero and the other classical authors and model our Latin on them So that we can write a purer standard of Latin. I I don't want to say that's a bad tack. It's very useful to us as Latin learners So that we can then go on and have one Latin language or nearly one It's unlike the situation in Greek in Greek There are several dialects and they can be quite different from each other whereas in Latin. There's more or less One standard all the way through you have the classical Latin It gets a little fuzzy over here in medieval Latin and then it Kind of snaps back to the standard with Renaissance Latin and there are many fine authors in Renaissance Latin the two that come to my mind are Thomas Moore and Erasmus both of whom are superb Latin writers Thomas Moore wrote his utopia in Latin So don't think that even though he was English and you've read it in English that he wrote it in English Utopia was written in Latin and again a Lot of the work a day communication among educated people was done in Latin up to about the Renaissance At that point Latin died its second death and there I don't want to say there's been nothing written in Latin since but Latin literature has not been a vital Tradition since then and again, I'm sure I'll get a lot of people saying oh no no no no it's for real it's for real but a Lot of what we have nowadays are translations of the first two Harry Potter books both very fun to read Winnie the Pooh translated into Latin green eggs and ham Ferdinand the bull and they're fun But they're modern Latin and they're very definitely modeled on classical Latin And this is all the literary Bit of Latin and I I need to emphasize it this that Latin has Two levels to it and the one that we study is the literary level And it's probably not the same as just the regular spoken Latin, which was called vulgar not because it was dirty or unpleasant or gross but because Wolgus is the word for crowd and vulgar is the Adjective that we use in English to describe something just common and vulgar Latin was spoken very widely for a very long time and Is still spoken today? However, we just know it under different names. We know it under and excuse me if you are a row romance speaking Native and I don't name your language. I'll name the big ones Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian and Romanian oh and Portuguese Portuguese is also very large Those are the modern spoken languages the modern spoken versions of vulgar Latin that survive to this day And you can still go to these people and speak Latin with them, but we just call it by different name They're Latin in the same way that the English we speak is the same English that the writer of Beowulf wrote So Latin is indeed a living language It just goes by different names these days because well, it's rather a bit Different and it fractured in different directions. So that's kind of the history of Latin. So there's two levels There's the literary level, which is what most people study and it stays relatively the same throughout history and there's the Spoken level of Latin and it changed over history from a small language spoken in central Italy to across the entire Italian Peninsula and then all of Western Europe and much of the Roman world and then it fractured after the fall of the Roman Empire became all of the modern romance languages Next up materials