Latin Surviving as Major Language

[sahaidak]

Nowadays, all Arabs have one standard language, despite speaking very different (and sometimes mutually unintelligible) dialects. Similarly, all Chinese read (and often can speak) Mandarin Chinese, while speaking different Sinitic languages in everyday situations.
Modern Romance languages (and especially Italo-Western group of these) are more similar to each other than are Sinitic languages and at least as similar as Arab dialects. Moreover, there was through centuries one standard language for all Romance-speaking peoples, i.e., Latin.
What if: Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes and so forth did not write in popular languages; kings and dukes did not introduce French, Spanish and Italian as languages of administration; Church retained Tridentine Latine mass,
and, consequently, Latin remains to this day language of state, school, literature and Church in all Romance-speaking countries - from Rio Grande to Cape Horn, from Quebec to Bruxelles, from Angola to Timor.
First thought is that English wouldn't be as preeminent in that ATL, as it is in OTL. For example, Latin obviously would be principal language of the European Union. Classics would remain major subject at schools worldwide, because of obvious practicality of learning Latin.

 

[sahaidak]

I don't think, however, that local Vulgar Latin dialects (Romance languages of OTL) would remain at "uneducated peasants' speech" level forever. Look at modern Arabic world: there are vibrant vernacular literatures (e.g., in Egypt) along with dominant High Arabic literature.
Similarly, in ATL Gallia/Francia there would be Gallo-Romance poetry and prose (centred on specifically Gallic topics and aimed at Gallic audience) and world-appealing literature, philosophy and so on, written in Classical Latin, - instead of French-only culture of OTL France.
How would relative linguistic unity influence political development of South-Western Europe and its overseas colonies? Arabic or Chinese examples aren't very hopeful: peoples, sharing the same literary language, often engaged in the armed conflicts with each other (and French-Spanish border wasn't more militarized than Taiwan Strait or the Persian Gulf, rather less militarized). Decolonization would proceed even with (not very probable) united Latin Europe instead of independent French, Spanish and Portuguese empires. However, idea of European integration could be proposed earlier and supported more, if large chunk of continent would be culturally unified.

 

[Leo Caesius]

Butterflying away the Printing Press and Protestantism (two not entirely unrelated phenomena) would be a good start.

 

[tchizek]

I guess it depends on the definition of a major language - it is one of 4 languages taught at my kids high-school. Every doctor, lawyer, veterinarian, scientist, and some engineers and teachers speaks and/or reads at least some Latin. It is not growing and changing the way English does, but then it never did - that was why it was replaced in everyday use.

How much more major do you want? Everyday use? Well you could easily consider French and Italian vulgar forms of Latin and they are in every day use. There are Latin loan words in English and German that are used every day. Latin is used every day in every courtroom in the US, every science lab in the world and most universities. Seems fairly major to me.

 

[sahaidak]

Butterflying away the Printing Press and Protestantism (two not entirely unrelated phenomena) would be a good start.

Absence of printing press? Very unlikely... And Romance-speaking countries are not and were not Protestant (Southern France excepted). I think that Germanic-speaking countries (which were centres of Protestantism, by coincidence ) would not remain in Latin sphere in any case - distance between Church language and vernacular was too great.
Printing in Catholic country could be major means of Latinization - through prayerbooks, abecedarii, and so on. Thus, I don't see abolition of technological progress as precondition for Latin's survival.

 

[RGB]

Remember that acknowledgment of your preferred home-grown Latin dialect opens up new niches and opportunities for writers!

If everyone wrote in Latin we might have a lot less writing traditions segregated by country, and further, we might get less literature in general, at least through the middle ages and the 18th/19th century.

 

[Reekwind]

Nowadays, all Arabs have one standard language, despite speaking very different (and sometimes mutually unintelligible) dialects. Similarly, all Chinese read (and often can speak) Mandarin Chinese, while speaking different Sinitic languages in everyday situations

And where was the European equivalent central authority to the Caliphate or Qing Dynasty? That's what you should be looking to address. To give an idea of the scale of the problem - in 1789 half the population of France, obviously a much smaller geographic region than Europe and with a relatively centralised state apparatus, did not even speak French!

 

[sahaidak]

And where was the European equivalent central authority to the Caliphate or Qing Dynasty? That's what you should be looking to address. To give an idea of the scale of the problem - in 1789 half the population of France, obviously a much smaller geographic region than Europe and with a relatively centralised state apparatus, did not even speak French!

And where was the Caliphate after 10th century? Of course, Abbasids in Baghdad and later in Cairo, as well as Ottomans in Istanbul even later, named himself caliphes, but they did not rule over Arabic world. However, Standard Arabic existed in spite of political fragmentation.
If you look for all-European authority - it is simple: Roman Empire, Frankish Empire, Holy Roman Empire, Papacy. Yes, former two are long dead (as well as Caliphate), but latter two were alive and relatively powerful as late as 17th century.
French example is good argument for possibility of Latin Europe - if Provencal-speaking peasants could be made Frencmen (and Sicilians could became Italians) by mass education, army and newspapers, then Latin-speaking Europe is possible too.

 

[Leo Caesius]

Absence of printing press? Very unlikely...

I don't see why not. It took centuries for it to catch on in Europe, to say nothing of the difficulties of popularizing it in the Middle East (where there were several abortive attempts to introduce it).

And Romance-speaking countries are not and were not Protestant (Southern France excepted).

Really? Huh. You learn something new every day.

Thus, I don't see abolition of technological progress as precondition for Latin's survival.

I have to disagree. The rise of print capitalism (made possible by the invention of movable type) democratized printed knowledge. When books were scarce and literacy was low, their users were were much more likely to belong to a select class (spanning national and linguistic boundaries) and they were more likely to be written in a single "truth language" for the region (in this case, Latin). In my opinion, it is not a coincidence that less than a century separates Gutenberg from Luther, and I do not think that I'm going on too great a limb by saying that the success of Protestantism was tied to the success of these early Bible translations into the vernacular (particularly in German-speaking Europe, where Luther's Bible was a run-away best seller).

Obviously the influence works in both ways - translations into the vernacular and Protestantism arrived hand in hand, and I'm not going to say that the one caused the other, but I do believe that they are connected.

Now, take a look at the Middle East. Various vested interest groups (religious conservatives, scribal cadres) managed to thwart all efforts to introduce the printing press, and literacy remained very low throughout the region well into the 20th century. Print capitalism was late in coming to the region and translations are scarce (few translations into or out of Arabic are made; even today Israel translates more books into Hebrew than the entire Arab world does into Arabic, and Iceland has them both beat). As a result, the use of the vernacular is very much a fringe phenomenon outside of certain genres of media (e.g. movies, but strangely not the news media).

 

[A Random Person]

Latin is survived through other languages, 60% of english is latin. French and Spanish are even more...

 

[sahaidak]

Latin is survived through other languages, 60% of english is latin. French and Spanish are even more...

And all these laguages are mutually unintelligible...

 

[Reekwind]

And where was the Caliphate after 10th century?

Which one? The Caliphates, in various forms, existed as pan-Arabic bodies for centuries. Even with the Turkish Ottoman Empire the Arabic world remained unified to a degree simply unimaginable in Europe. The fragmentation of the Arab world is no more than a century or two old... its been 1500 years since the last comparable Latin institution collapsed

If you look for all-European authority - it is simple: Roman Empire, Frankish Empire, Holy Roman Empire, Papacy. Yes, former two are long dead (as well as Caliphate), but latter two were alive and relatively powerful as late as 17th century

And just how much of Europe did the Holy Roman Empire rule? More importantly, what language did its subjects speak? Similarly, the Papacy has done well to maintain Latin amongst a few thousand clergymen. It has never come close to providing some kind of temporal leadership to all of Europe

Now if you can conjure up a scenario in which the Roman Empire somehow survives (I'd dismiss theCarolingian Empire, Latin had already fragmented by this point) then you have a central temporal authority enforcing a single language. Latin can only survive as a major language when it has the backing of a major state

French example is good argument for possibility of Latin Europe - if Provencal-speaking peasants could be made Frencmen (and Sicilians could became Italians) by mass education, army and newspapers, then Latin-speaking Europe is possible too.

Of course... given a central authority strong enough. My whole point is that, in contrast to the Chinese or Arabic worlds, Europe has not had such a state since the fall of Rome

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Arabic survives because the Koran is believed to be the actual words of the Prophet; and that it is illegal to translate the Koran (or at least use such translations for certain purposes).

Christianity could not really put Latin in that position, because Jesus probably spoke no Latin. Greek might fill that role (HE probably spoke Koine fluently), but Latin can't. Remember that the Latin bible is called the Vulgate - i.e. the bible translated into the vulgar or common tongue. Of course, the RC church promptly fossilized it!

The other problem is that Islam and Judaism both expect the average believer to be able to use their scriptures in the original. Throughout most of the middle ages, peasants were not encouraged to understand the scripture their religion was based on.


I think that if you want Latin to survive in the same way Arabic has, you might need to butterfly away Christianity. IF Mithraism, say, or Sol Invictus were established as the state religion of the Western Empire, and IF they had a body of scripture established in an invariant form in Latin, and IF they required all full members of the church to be able to read their scriptures (with Mithraism, that might not be even every adult male, but it would be a significant minority), THEN you could get Latin as a major language surviving until this day (as others have pointed out, the SPOKEN forms of said 'Latin' might be mutually unintelligible, but the WRITTEN form would be constant).


Note that Chinese is essentially irrelevant here. Speakers of other languages than Mandarin do NOT READ MANDARIN - they read their own language - which is identical in written form! Said written form may have been created for something other than Mandarin. IIRC, the oldest 'chinese readings' for Japanese Kanji are not modern Mandarin.



Third thought. Local vernaculars took over in Europe for several reasons. 1) literacy increased significantly from the mediaeval low 2) there were several local vernaculars that achieved critical mass (Florentine dialect became standard Italian; Luther's largely Saxon dialect that his bible appeared in became standard German)

If all OTL Germany uses 'German' then there are lots and lots of people who can read something written in 'German'. If, instead, that same population speaks Bavarian, Allemanic, Platt (in couple of varieties), Swiss german, etc., etc., while France speaks Breton, Basque, Occitan (in a couple of variants) and Langue d'Oil (in a couple of variants - Norman and Picard aren't exactly the same as Parisian in OTL), while there are 4 or 5 'languages' in Italy, then there would be far more use for a Universal Language of communication, which would be Latin. This is less improbable than it may seem. I know a (Swiss German) women who absolutely maintained that the first foreign language she learned was Hochdeutsch (standard modern high German).

To do this, I think you'd need to prevent the establishment of nation-states, at a minimum. Having more non-German states in the HRE (so it doesn't become the HREGN) would help.

 

[Leo Caesius]

Arabic survives because the Koran is believed to be the actual words of the Prophet; and that it is illegal to translate the Koran (or at least use such translations for certain purposes).

Not illegal, but theoretically "impossible". That is why all such translations are actually named something like "Commentary on the Noble Qur'an" or "The Meaning of the Noble Qur'an". They are clearly translations, but nobody dares call them that; although the Qur'an has often been "translated" into vernacular languages frequently throughout history.

Also note that Persian as a vernacular emerged fairly soon after the Islamic conquest (the first Persian poet of note dates to the early 10th century) and was a vehicle for an immense literature, despite the fact that it had ceased to be a written language after the Islamic conquest. Latin held absolute sway over the non-Romance speaking regions of Europe far longer than Arabic held sway over the non-Semitic regions of the Middle East... in the case of Hungary, until 1844 (when Latin ceased to be the official language).

Christianity could not really put Latin in that position, because Jesus probably spoke no Latin. Greek might fill that role (HE probably spoke Koine fluently), but Latin can't. Remember that the Latin bible is called the Vulgate - i.e. the bible translated into the vulgar or common tongue. Of course, the RC church promptly fossilized it!

I would argue that the dominance of Latin in the West was not entirely because of the status of the Vulgate, but rather because Latin continued in the role of the "truth language" or language of education long after the fall of the Empire in the West. As soon as a popular literature in the vernacular tongues emerged (partly as a consequence of the rise of print capitalism), it was only a matter of time before the emerging nation states adopted their own vernaculars as official idioms. Interestingly enough, this process began in Spain and the Atlantic European states first (although speakers of other Romance languages, such as Florentine Italian, had developed a vernacular literature earlier) and reached Eastern Europe last. I don't think it's too far a stretch to suggest that the policy of vernacularization is related in some way to the development of colonial empires and the centralization of the imperial states that attended the growth of these empires.

The other problem is that Islam and Judaism both expect the average believer to be able to use their scriptures in the original. Throughout most of the middle ages, peasants were not encouraged to understand the scripture their religion was based on.

This was one of the chief complaints of the early Protestants, which is why I tie vernacularization to Protestantism as well (particularly outside of the states that border the Atlantic).

 

[Mark E.]

I wondered this a few times: why couldn't Latin have survived as the language of Italy, instead of a separate modern Italian? It might take POD's about education and a different sort of survival of the Roman system in the peninsula, but that would be a start. Sure, the other Romance languages break off, but couldn't Italy alone have kept a modern version of Latin?

 

[Glen]

There's not many languages in Europe spoken now in the same way they were 1500 years ago. Why should Latin be one of the minority?

 

[Rick Robinson]

I wondered this a few times: why couldn't Latin have survived as the language of Italy, instead of a separate modern Italian? It might take POD's about education and a different sort of survival of the Roman system in the peninsula, but that would be a start. Sure, the other Romance languages break off, but couldn't Italy alone have kept a modern version of Latin?

You could say that Italian IS modern Latin.

Is modern demotika Greek any closer to classical Greek than Italian is to Latin? (I really don't know.) If classical Greek had given rise to half a dozen major modern languages, we might well call modern Greek 'Romaic,' or some such and regard it as just one of several Hellenic languages.

 

[rcduggan]

Which one? The Caliphates, in various forms, existed as pan-Arabic bodies for centuries. Even with the Turkish Ottoman Empire the Arabic world remained unified to a degree simply unimaginable in Europe. The fragmentation of the Arab world is no more than a century or two old... its been 1500 years since the last comparable Latin institution collapsed

I suggest you re-learn some history, my friend... the Arab fragmentation began over 1000 years ago. I don't consider domination by Persians (Buyids), Seljuks, Khwarezmians, Mongols, and various other Turks and Persians to be "pan-Arab." No more than the Holy Roman Empire was pan-Roman, in any case.

And just how much of Europe did the Holy Roman Empire rule? More importantly, what language did its subjects speak? Similarly, the Papacy has done well to maintain Latin amongst a few thousand clergymen. It has never come close to providing some kind of temporal leadership to all of Europe

The Holy Roman Empire at one time (800s) ruled all of Catholic Europe save for Britain and Spain. Later it lost France, but for centuries ruled all of Italy and Germany. Its subjects spoke Latin-derived languages or Germanic dialects. But the leading aristocracy of the Carolingian Empire spoke Latin as well, used as a secondary language for communication.

As for your statement that the Papacy never came close to temporal leadership, all I can say is that you are wrong.

Now if you can conjure up a scenario in which the Roman Empire somehow survives (I'd dismiss theCarolingian Empire, Latin had already fragmented by this point) then you have a central temporal authority enforcing a single language. Latin can only survive as a major language when it has the backing of a major state

I think it is interesting that you are discounting the best chance for the OP's scenario to be fulfilled. It doesn't matter that Latin was diverging at this point. Some mutally-intellegibile form of the language was still used throughout the Carolingian Empire, so that the various sub-kings could communicate with each other, and with the Emperor and his entourage. If the Carolingian Empire had survived (IMO this is very easy to bring about), Latin would continue to be used throughout Europe. The "international" Carolingian state would have lessened the divergence of Latin. And whenever the printing press shows up ITTL, a standard Latin dialect will emerge to be implemeneted throughout the empire (similar to what happened with French or Italian in OTL).

Of course... given a central authority strong enough. My whole point is that, in contrast to the Chinese or Arabic worlds, Europe has not had such a state since the fall of Rome

No, Europe has not had such a state since the end of the Carolingian Empire. I know it is convenient for you to discount them in order to argue your point, but IMO they are the last best chance (there are later, more inferior PODs as well) for Latin surviving as a major language.


Although come to think of it, a subjugated Byzantium leading to absolute Papal primacy by 1000 would probably do the trick as well.

 

[proximefactum]

Many people still go to Latin Mass, so Latin is still very much in use and alive. I think it's a form of modern communication.

I'd say that religious services like Latin Mass or monks chanting from Latin prayerbooks are a form of communication. The words of the chants or the Mass are fixed, but there is prayer and response which is a form of communication that reinforces certain concepts and ideas. One of the criticisms of Mass in the vernacular, for example, is that communication in Latin resists major changes such as in vernacular languages. The communication in Latin is more direct and precise because it is limited to a sacral use. If Latin were a vernacular language now, then it would lose its sacral character and ability to hold against the constant change of modern language. Ditto Qu'ranic Arabic and modern colloquial Arabic. There are similarities between the two languages but the sacral division remains, with the Qu'ranic language reserved for scripture and mosque services.

So the sacral vs. vernacular division is just as important a question as whether or not Latin would survive as a modern vernacular language.

 

[htgriffin]

Avoid the Wars of Justinian. The Latin of Ostrogothic Italia"s urban society survives with said society.

HTG