Latin and Greek Classical Languages - Term Paper Example

By “By their very nature, languages have histories which reach far back in time. It is the task of historical, comparative linguistics to recover the details of that history. From the evidence of the ages, including the present, a composite picture of the linguistic past is assembled.” (Baldi, The Foundations of Latin p 1) Greek and Latin are often associated and both are academically classified as classical languages, with Greek evolving as the language of intellectual choice. The supposition that the latter derived largely from the former is a prevalent point of view and seems to have basis in fact, if one takes Diringer’s extensive analysis to heart as presented by J.B.Calvert in The Latin Alphabet, an extract of which appears below. The Latin alphabet of 23 letters was derived in the 600s BC from the Etruscan alphabet of 26 letters, which was in turn derived from the archaic Greek alphabet, which came from the Phoenician. The digamma, which represented a w sound in Greek was adopted for the different Latin sound f that did not occur in Greek. The gamma was written C in Etruscan, and represented both the hard g and k sounds in Latin, which was confusing. All of this reinforces the notion of Greek as the root language. Some of the old letters dropped from the Greek alphabet were also retained as numbers in the Latin. The same thing happened in Latin with a few of the Etruscan letters that did not correspond to Latin sounds. The number symbols evolved into the normal letters C, L, M and D in the course of time, though the symbol for 1000 was adapted for expressing larger powers of 10 by adding more forward and backward Cs. It is said that the L came from the Etruscan chi, but it could just as well have been half of the C symbol, as the D comes from half of the M. All these number symbols represented abacus counter columns, together with the I, V and X, so that I, C and M need be repeated no more than four times, V, L, and D no more than twice, in specifying a number. The representation of large numbers and of fractions in Roman numerals or Greek numerals is a complicated subject. Roman numerals were used for business, Greek numerals for science. The latter indicates that the use of Greek by academics in classical studies over Latin may reinforce the notion that the former is considered a more academic language and the latter a more practical linguistic choice over history. Indo European languages have roots in both Greek and Latin. The relationship between the two (Greek and Latin) is undeniable; their status as classical languages is as well. Simeon Potter in Language in the Modern World refers to the work of nineteenth-century linguists Bopp, Grimm, Pott, Schleicher, Brugmann, Osthoff, Paul, and Delbrück to trace the Indo-European word for horse as “related to Classical Latin currere to run from older cursere, and therefore formerly denoted runner, leaper, courser. They then showed that the original Indo-European form was ekwos which became ikkos in Greek dialects, but hippos in Classical Greek (as in English hippo-potamus river horse and Phil-ip lover of horses), and which became equus in Latin (as in English equine of, or like, a horse and equestrian pertaining to a horseman.” (Potter, p 90-91) However, some experts including Baldi believe the further tracing of the roots of the languages is not only preferable but possible, and that such study provides a clearer more accurate view of the relationship of one over the other regarding their own specific relationship to modern Indo-European languages. According to Baldi, “It is the task of historical linguistics to recover the details of that history. From the evidence of the ages, a composite picture...of the linguistic past is assembled, according to established principles of investigation.” (Baldi, The Foundations of Latin p 1). UC Berkeley linguist, George L Hart, defines classical language as one with a literature that is classical— i.e., it should be ancient, it should be an independent tradition that arose mostly on its own, not as an offshoot of another tradition, and it must have a large and extremely rich body of ancient literature. While Baldi might agree with Hart on a good portion of this definition, he would probably take issue semantically at least, to whether the language, indeed, “arose on its own,” or if we simply accept that it did because no historical evidence to the contrary is available. Tracing the roots of the Latin language presents a unique set of problems as a language, unlike Greek, without a known affirmative pre-history. Baldi maintains roots for Latin go as far back in time as possibly 6th century B.C.E. Without a historical context, it must be considered a starting point. Yet Baldi insists that the histories of Latin and other ancient languages can be written with proper empirical study, “as long as other related languages are available which furnish some material clues...research can proceed even in the absence of anterior written records and extensive texts.” (Baldi, p 2) The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the generally accepted reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages derived from Latin and Greek (PIE) includes the languages of the people who lived about 4000 BC. They were, in all probability, the languages spoken by the people of the Copper and Bronze Ages or perhaps earlier, in Neolithic or even Paleolithic eras. What we know of them comes mostly from reconstructing their language as an antecedent of the category, Indo-European languages, in which Greek and Latin are included. Indo-European is the term used to refer to the family of languages which were originally spoken throughout much of Eurasia west of the Urals and also in the Indian subcontinent, with an outlying branch in Chinese Turkestan. The language from which all these languages are descended is the Proto-Indo-European early version, which can, as Baldi would agree, be reconstructed by historical and comparative linguistics. Probably spoken in the Pontic-Caspian region of southern Russia in about 3000 BC, the earliest attested subgroups of the Indo-European language family are Anatolian, Hellenic, Indic, and Iranian. The other major subgroups are: Celtic, Italic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavonic, Albanian, Armenian, and Tocharian. In his study of the Indo-European languages which evolved from ( PIE), Baldi, while admitting an advanced culture probably flourished in Greece before the arrival of the Greeks, maintains firmly that the Greek we know as classical language is at the root of Indo-European language and its evolution, thus relegating Latin to a position of evolution from the Greek (and other languages). “...the Greek...branch stands out as a primary source of information concerning the parent language (of Indo-European).” (Baldi, Indo European Languages, p 67) While Greek is considered at the root of Latin, and therefore a natural antecedent of the Indo European languages, Latin, closer in proximity to modern languages, is chosen by many experts to be studied as the direct corollary with modern Indo European languages. In her study of SVO patterning in Latin and French, Bauer writes, “Word order has often been the subject of diachronic studies of French and other Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. In contrast to these previous studies I have attempted to demonstrate...the fundamental cohesion of the reorganization of all grammatical structures of Latin (into Indo European structures), referring at the same time to psycholinguistic considerations that can account for this comprehensive development. (Bauer, p 213) Yet, considering the widely practiced use of Latin to trace modern languages, and considering Greek’s more academic use by scholars in other areas of study, one must wonder if the use of the Latin simply provides a more direct pathway to answers than the harder-to-trace and earlier Greek language history and forms. Hencken, in his study of the relationships between Indo European Language as it informs archaeology, takes on the task. “Now let us see what we actually know of the earliest Indo-European languages from written records... Now that Linear Minoan Script B has proved to be Greek, we know that Greek was being written as far back as about 1450 B.C. These are the oldest dated Indo-European documents thus far discovered.”(Hencken, p 6) The author further projects that from evidence of early Indo European writing, “One gets the impression that Indo European languages had existed a long time before the second millennium B.C.” (Hencken P 6), thus affirming Greek as a more likely parent (root) language. The Indo-European Language Family tree prepared by Jack Lynch of Rutgers University seems to suggest a path to the Greek that runs from the Proto Indo-European to Hellenic to Greek. It stops dead there. The path from that same starting point flows from Italic to Latin to six Indo European Languages, including Spanish, French Portugese, Italian, Rumanian and Catalan, the latter spoken in northern Spain. Other charts agree on Lynch’s Latin branch but go further and connect the Satim branch of Indo-European language from the Greek to Celtic languages of the West, including Gaulish, Manx, Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, Cornish, Breton and Welsh. Views concerning the breakup of the initial language family (PIE) into groups somewhere around the late 1700s are often related to specific hypotheses about where exactly the Indo-European Homeland was. Some scholars have it located on the steppes of southern Russia, hypothesizing that successive migrations to the west brought speakers into Europe, others south into Anatolia, and south or southeast into Iran and India. Another major view places the Homeland in Anatolia with migrations northwest, north, northeast, and east. Models of language history will affect what is eventually accepted as the most likely reconstruction. So when we see charts like Lynch’s that seem to give short shrift to the path of the Hellenic languages, it is likely that the more familiar (to the Western scholars, at least) Latin roots to Western languages at times gain favor in studies over the Greek. In conclusion, a new focus on palaeography in both ancient Greek and Latin literature will surely add to our current knowledge and attitudes concerning the evolution of Indo-European languages from the original Greek and Latin. Today we know that the Greek minuscule book-hand form had, by the end of the 15th century, become a cursive hand from which the modern cursive hand evolves. Tracing the minuscule hand through all of its ancient stages, we now can assume that somewhere along the line it absorbed the modern cursive style of writing, together with some of the ancient elements that help us trace the language’s origins to well beyond those of Latin. Original Greek writing being limited to the expression of the language of a single people has a comparatively narrow and simple ancestry (as far as we know). On the other hand, the Latin alphabet, having been adopted by the nations of Western Europe, underwent many transformations in the course of development of the national handwritings of the different peoples, and consequently had a wide and varied ancestry. Yet Latin palaeography in literature, at least, is at a disadvantage as compared with Greek in that Greek documents date back to the 4th century B.C., and the development of Greek writing (therefore language) can be fairly well illustrated by a series of examples of the succeeding centuries. There is no such series of Latin documents available with which to trace the growth of Latin writing to the same remote period. No Latin document, either of a literary or of a non-literary character, has ever been recovered which can be placed with certainty earlier than the Christian era. Egypt, which has given us thousands of documents in Greek, has until now yielded little in Latin. Most of the knowledge we have of Latin writing in the 1st century come from documents recovered from Pompeii. All of this stifles our exacting studies of Latin as a root language for the Indo-European. While we might categorize from a scholarly perspective Greek and Latin as classic languages, we must assume that one, Greek, holds seniority over the second, and that Latin is its certain if not complete derivative. We must also assume that Latin, as a precursor to modern Indo-European Language, is a relative newcomer to that area of study as compared to the Greek, steeped in a much more ancient language tradition References Baldi, Philip, An Introduction to the Indo-European Languages, Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Baldi, Philip, The Foundations of Latin, 1 Indo-European and the Indo-European Languages, Mouton de Gruyter, 1999. Bauer, Brigitte L.M., The Emergence and Development of SVO Patterning in Latin and French: Diachronic and Psycholinguistic Perspectives, 7 Conclusion, Oxford US, 1995 Diringer, David, The Alphabet, 3rd. ed., London: Hutchinson, 1968, reviewed by Calvert, J.B., The Latin Alphabet: http://mysite.du.edu/~etuttle/classics/latalph.htm Hencken, Hugh, Indo-European Languages and Archeology: II The Earliest Traces of Indo European American Anthropological Association, 1955. Potter, Simeon, Language in the Modern World, 7 The Indo-European Family, Penguin Books, 1960 . 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