The Mother Tongue Read Online Free PDF

France. Everywhere it is a story of inexo-rable decline. At the turn of the century Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia had 10o,000 Gaelic speakers—most of them driven there by the forced clearances of the Scottish Highlands—but now Gaelic is extinct there as a means of daily discourse.
    Latin, in direct contrast,didn't so much decline as evolve. It became the Romance anguages. I is not too much to say that French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian (as well as a dozen or so minor languages/dialects like Provençal and Catalan) are essentially modern versions of Latin. If we must fix a date for when Latin stopped being Latin and instead became these other
    .languages, 8
    13 is a convenient milestone. It was then that
    Charlemagne ordered that sermons throughout his realm be deliverd in the "lingua romana rustica" and not the customary "lin-gua Latina." But of course you cannot draw a line and say that the language was Latin on this side and Italian or French on that. As late as the thirteenth century, Dante was still regarding his own Florentine tongue as Latin. And indeed it is still possible to con-struct long passages of modern Italian that are identical to ancient Latin.
    The Romance languages are not the outgrowths of the elegant, measured prose of Cicero, but rather the language of the streets.
    and of the common person, the Latin vulgate. The word for horse in literary Latin was equus, but to the man in the street it was caballus, and it was from this that we get the French cheval, the Spanish caballo, and the Italian cavallo. Similarly, the classical term for head was caput (from which we get capital and per cap- ita), but the street term was testa, a kind of pot, from which comes the French la tete and the Italian la testa (though the Italians also THE MOTHER TONGUE
    use il capo). Cat in classical Latin was feles (whence feline), but in the vulgate it was cattus. Our word salary comes literally from the vulgar Latin salarium, "salt money"—the Roman soldier's ironic term for what it would buy. By the same process the classical pugna (from which we much later took pugnacious) was replaced by the slangy battualia (from which we get battle), and the classical urbs, meaning "city" (from which we get urban), was superseded by villa (from which the French get their name for a city, Mlle, and we take the name for a place in the country).
    The grammar of the vulgate also became simplified as Latin spread across the known world and was adopted by people from varying speech backgrounds. In Classical Lati
    word endings
    constantly changing to reflect syntax: A speaker could distinguish between, say, "in the house" and "to the house" by varying the ending on house. But gradually people decided that it was simpler to leave house uninflected and put ad in front of it for "to," in for
    "in," and so on through all the prepositions, by this means the
    case endings disappeared. An almost identical process happened with English later.
    Romanians often claim to have the language that most closely resembles ancient Latin. But in fact, according to Mario Pei, if you wish to hear what ancient Latin sounded like, you should listen to Lugudorese, an Italic dialect spoken in central Sardinia, which in many respects is unchanged from the Latin of 1,500 years ago.
    Many scholars believe that classical Latin was spoken by almost*
    no one—that it was used exclusively as a lite rary and scholarly _
    language. Certainly such evidence as we have of everyday writing—graffiti on the walls of Pompeii, for example—suggests that classical Latin was effectively a dead language as far as com mon discourse was concerned long before Rome fell. And, as we shall see, it was that momentous event—the fall of Rome—that helped to usher in our own tongue .

    3.
    OSLO AL LANGUAGE
    *ALL
    LANGUAGES
    HAVE
    THE
    SAME
    purpose—to communicate thoughts—and yet they achieve this sin-gle aim in a multiplicity of ways. It appears there is no feature of