"Eventually, the social advantages of speaking Latin and having an identity as a Roman outweighed those of speaking and being Etruscan, so that over the generations, fewer and fewer children learned Etruscan." The end result is that the Etruscan language simply died.ĭying languages aren't just an ancient phenomenon, either. "After the Romans conquered Etruria, succeeding generations of Etruscans continued to speak Etruscan for hundreds of years, but some Etruscans, naturally, learned Latin as a second language moreover, many children grew up bilingual in Etruscan and Latin," Pulju said. This happened with the Etruscan language, originally spoken in what is modern day Tuscany in Italy. How did bachelor and bachelorette parties get started?
Languages can go extinct, though sometimes native speakers of a language all die, or over time their first language switches until eventually there are no fluent speakers left. That's why people tend to think, perhaps erroneously, of Latin as an extinct language. The only difference between English and Latin is that old English developed into modern English and modern English alone, whereas classical Latin diversified and gave rise to a number of different languages. And the English of 'Beowulf,' from about the year 1000, is so different from modern English not comprehensible to us today." But no one would say English is a dead language - it simply changed very gradually over a long period of time. "Elizabethan English, from about four centuries ago, is still mostly comprehensible to us, but Chaucer's English, dating from the 14th century, is much less so. "English has been spoken in England for over a millennium, but it has changed over time, as is obvious if you compare present-day English to Elizabethan English, as seen in Shakespeare," Pulju said. Such linguistic evolutions happen with every language. Those new languages are what we now refer to as the Romance languages, which include French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish. "They gradually added up over the centuries, so that eventually Latin developed into a variety of languages distinct from one another, and also distinct from classical Latin," Pulju said. Crucially, the alterations to Latin were particular to the many different regions of the old Roman Empire, and over time these differences grew to create entirely new but closely related languages.
0 kommentar(er)
