The Mother Tongue Read Online Free PDF Page B

gradually split into three branches. These were North Germanic, consisting of the Scandinavian languages; West Germanic, consisting principally of English, German, and Dutch (but also Frisian, Flemish, and other related dialects); and East Germanic, whose three component languages, Burgundian, Gothic, and Vandalic, died off one by one. Many other European languages disappeared over time, among them Cornish, Manx, Gaulish, Lydian, Oscan, Umbrian, and two that once dominated Europe, Celtic and Latin.
    Celtic, I must hasten to add, is not dead. Far from it. It is still spoken by half a million people in Europe. But they are scattered over a wide area and its influence is negligible. At its height, in about 400 B . C ., Celtic was spoken over a vast area of the continent, a fact reflected in scores of place-names from Belgrade to Paris to Dundee, all of which commemorate Celtic tribes. But from that point on, its dominions have been constantly eroded, largely because the Celts were a loose collection of tribes and not a great nation state, so they were easily divided and conquered. Even now the various branches of Celtic are not always mutually comprehensible. Celtic speakers in Scotland, for instance, cannot understand the Celtic speakers of Wales a hundred miles to the south. Today Celtic survives in scattered outposts along the westernmost fringes of Europe—on the bleak Hebridean Islands and coastal areas of Scotland, in shrinking pockets of Galway, Mayo, Kerry, and Donegal in Ireland, in mostly remote areas of Wales, and on the Brittany peninsula of northwest France. Everywhere it is a story of inexorable decline. At the turn of the century Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia had 100,000 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 distinct contrast, didn’t so much decline as evolve. It became the Romance languages. It 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, the year 813 is a convenient milestone. It was then that Charlemagne ordered that sermons throughout his realm be delivered in the “lingua romana rustica” and not the customary “lingua 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 construct 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 on 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 capita ), but the street term was testa, a kind of pot, from which comes the French la tête and the Italian la testa (though the Italians also 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, ville,