Linguistic Development of Latin in Surviving Roman Empire

[SlyDessertFox]

How would latin evolve in a world where the Roman empire survives more or less intact to the present day? In particular, I am interested in the evolution of names, both of cities and of people.

For example, could Tauromenium (Turin/Torino), eventually be shortened to "Taurin" or Mediolanium (Milan) "Mediolan"? Ditto for cities like Colonia Agrippina and Colonia Augusta being shortened to "Agrippina" and "Augusta"?

I'm far less certain on Roman people names though.

 

[Salvador79]

Some of the changes which occurred in OTL ROmance languages would not occur:
- obviously Germanic loanwords would not abound
- also, the way words changed (you gave some examples) would not occur if spoken Vulgar Latin were not the only or predominant means of language transmission.

But other changes which occurred with OTL Latin, Spanish Portuguese, and, to some extent, French might occur with Latin in a surviving Roman Empire, too:
1) the simplification of grammar
2) heavy Greek influence

As for 2), both OTL and ATL the influence of Greek comes basically through academic / scientific language.
As for 1), all Indo-European languages began as highly synthetic languages, where all the grammatical information was stored in long and complicated suffixes at the end of words. Then, the stress moved forwards within words to the first syllables, with the result that all the information tended to be in the mumbled, unstressed parts of speech, which was impractical. Indo-European languages have therefore undergone a millenia-lasting development of abandoning suffixes and transferring the information stored there (e.g. about case, gender, tense, mode) into separate words.
E.g. the present perfect of "to have":
In Latin, it was "habui" (of "habere"); in Italian it became "ho avuto", in French "j´ai eu", in Romanian "am avut").
Or the cases of nouns:
In Latin, it was "domus, domi, domo, domum, domo"; in Spanish it became "casa, de casa, a casa", in French it became "le maison, du maison, à la maison".
This, I suppose, would happen in some form or other to a surviving Latin, too.

 

[The Professor]

Indeed.

Since a continuing empire would to some extent standardise and level the changes in the regional vulgate Latins a way to start would be to look at the mediaeval (ie pre1300) dialects of Italy, Iberia, and (southern) France and see what changes from Latin they have.

 

[Mr. pollos]

I know near nothing of linguistics, so I am talking(typing) out of my ass, but I think vernacular Latin may become simplified. To quote someone who is a linguist on the development of languages that were OTL in a situation similar to this ALT Latin.

The historical extent of the Persian-speaking area is highlighted by the nature of Persian/Farsi itself -- it is much "simpler" (or "impoverished") grammatically compared to its relative and neighbor Pashto. As the Persian empire (and the corresponding Persian linguistic area) spread, the language was imposed on generations of adult learners who rid the language of some intricacies and complexities. For example, Pashto has a complex system of noun plurals, 4 cases, noun-internal vowel alternations (like 'man'-'men'), several declensions and 2 grammatical genders; Persian has none of these. The system of verb forms too is much more complicated in Pashto than in Persian. There is a very nice discussion of this "Persian conversion" process, as he calls it, in John McWhorter's What Language Is. (Other languages that exemplify this include Indonesian vs. other Austronesian languages, Swahili vs. other Bantu languages, Brazilian Portuguese vs. European Portuguese, Afrikaans vs. Dutch, Mandarin vs. Cantonese, and even English vs. other Germanic languages.)

http://www.geocurrents.info/geopolitics/the-dream—or-nightmare—of-“greater-iran”


One could expect spoken Latin to become les grammatically complex and simpler to learn than literary Latin, or say OTL Portuguese, by way of a similar process. Then again, OTL Arabic is one of the hardest languages to learn, and some dialects are not even inter legible. On the griping hand, maybe a unified administration can make the difference.


Alternatively written Latin words may gradually turn into heterograms with pile ups in linguistic shifts, and we may end with a china like Roman Empire were People can’t understand each other speach but everyone can read the administrative documents. There is some evidence this was happening in the Late Sassanid Empire...

 

[kasumigenx]

Neapolitan and Tuscan are the direct descendant of latin.

We might see ALT! Occitan/Gallic Latin replacing Roman Latin.

 

[Fabius Maximus]

IOTL, the northern and western Romance languages (i.e., French, the Iberian languages, and Italian north of the La Spezia-Rimini Line) have certain shared linguistic features resulting from the influence of the Germanic languages on the local dialects. Assuming that this wouldn't be a factor in a surviving Rome TL, the closest real-life equivalent to a modern Roman language would probably be the southern Italian dialects or Sardinian.

 

[kasumigenx]

IOTL, the northern and western Romance languages (i.e., French, the Iberian languages, and Italian north of the La Spezia-Rimini Line) have certain shared linguistic features resulting from the influence of the Germanic languages on the local dialects. Assuming that this wouldn't be a factor in a surviving Rome TL, the closest real-life equivalent to a modern Roman language would probably be the southern Italian dialects or Sardinian.

There are also gallic influences.