ancient rome

[glenis]

if a modern day italian went back in time to ancient rome would they understand the language?

[Celtigra3]

If they spoke Latin, I suppose they would!

[Solarjunkie]

I remember my Latin teacher telling us that she used Latin while on holiday in Italy and was generally able to make herself understood & to understand; so I suppose your answer is yes!

[sudu]

we were have a discussion about a similar topic in my latin lesson the other day. my latin teacher also teaches ancient greek and he said that when he was about 14 he went to greece and tried to ask some ferrymen what time the ferry was coming in his best ancient greek. they looked at him a bit oldly but gave him the answer and he understood that too. i have also heard that you can understand italian quite well if you have a good knowledge of latin. allen- i think there is some truth to this.

[Narolines]

H'mm....Ancient Greek and Modern Greek are much more alike than Latin and Italian, so I'm not surprised your teacher was able to make himself understood in Greek. It's also true that you can work out the sense of some Italian if you have a knowledge of Latin, but that's also true of French, Spanish and any other language tha's a direct descendant of Latin. I think Allen's on the right lines when he says that the relationship between Latin & Italian is a bit like that between Modern English and Anglo-Saxon, but Italian hasn't been subjected to the same external linguistic influences as English, so isn't QUITE that distant - while Ancient & Modern Greek are more akin to Middle English and Modern English; you might not understand every word of Chaucer, but you can get the sense of it quite clesrly, and you can certainly understand the everyday words he uses.

[Peter Pedant]

hey babies this is a question in glosso-chronology !

I betcha didnt know that.

and the answer is....in 960 the Carta da Capua was written in italian (earliest example of) because they say by then Italian and Latin had become sufficiently different to make a difference.

well anyway that is what my Italian textboke said in 1970 - Si dice cosi - I think but I cant remember.

Any Latinist should be able to just start talking holiday Italian.

As for Greek, my Classics teacher could not make himself understood with his ancient greek in the fifties, but that could have been an issue with pronounciation. He would be using HMC 1906 (all the HeadMasters at a Conference agreed on a standard, and then a forty years later they agreed on a different standard !). Modern greeks can understand my New Testament greek so long as it is in sentences and occur in the NT.

Arabic - no problem as Q has limited mutation in Classical Arabic for 1,400 years.

Classical Mandarin they say didnt have any tones but did have final letters (which sort of fropped off and were replaced by the four tones) and has been 'reconstructed' by linguists - who clearly have nothing better to do with their right arms.

I hope this helps

PP

[mike b]

For what it's worth, apparently Dante regarded himself as writing in Latin. In any case, there was no such country as Italy until the nineteenth century, and even nowadays many dialects are mutually comprehensible only with great difficulty, some preserving more early features than others. (An Italian TV series about the Sicilian Mafia had to be shown with subtitles in the rest of the country.)

As far as Greek is concerned, there are problems apart from changes in stress and pronunciation. In modern Demotic Greek, as opposed to the Puristic version which is used less and less nowadays, much of the vocabulary consists of borrowings, often from Turkish times, Even, if not especially, names of everyday objects bear no relation to the classical. However, the comparison is still closer to the Modern English/Chaucer parallel than to Beowulf.