A former teacher of mine served in the British army during the war, attached to a West Country regiment stationed in Norfolk. As an Australian, he had no great difficulty understanding the speech of both his own troops and of the local East Anglians, but they found each other at times incomprehensible. This in itself is interesting, but of greater interest is the fact that the local East Anglian fishermen apparently found the Friesian Dutch relatively easy to communicate with.

The point of the anecdote, of course, is that the formal distinction between ‘English’ and ‘Dutch’ may, it seems, be partly illusory: these are categories that are imposed by convention: by geography, by politics, by the power of the media, and by our natural desire for order. The reality, however, may be very different. If we could take away all such imposed perceptions, each speech community might make surprising choices about those other communities with which it felt the closest linguistic kinship.

Similar observations may be made about the distinction between Latin and the so-called ‘Romance’ languages.

Hilaire Belloc claims, in The Path to Rome, that he managed to speak Latin throughout his epic walk from the Moselle to Rome and that he was generally understood by all he met along the way. It was a bit of an affectation, you might think, but a harmless and delightful one — and one which may contain more than just a kernel of truth. The point, of course, is that to Belloc the modern romance languages and Latin are so alike that mutual intelligibility is possible — at least in certain circumstances.

Sceptics will of course argue that French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian each possess their own well-developed systems of syntax and phonology as well as their own rich literatures. They will moreover confidently assert that no native speaker of French, Italian or what-have-you can possibly understand classical Latin without first submitting to long years of very possibly painful instruction. This is no doubt correct, though I cannot resist saying in passing that many an old Roman, I suspect, would have had trouble understanding Cicero in full spate before a jury, particularly when his client’s case was a shaky one! Deliberate obfuscation, whether for literary affectation or to disguise a flawed argument, may be a useful device in any language!

But what can I seriously say to the sceptics? Firstly, perhaps, that we should think of language in terms of registers. This word register has emerged as a technical term, in the field of linguistics, for the various styles or levels of speech and writing within a given linguistic community.

For example, in English we might speak of a popular youth register (my readers will perhaps suspect that I am starting at what I regard as the low end of the scale, and they might even sympathize with my jaundiced judgement). Let me define this register as that level of speech which we associate with Triple-J and other forms of media addressed to our hapless young. Next we might consider the level of educated discourse, the kind of speech that one would expect to hear in ordinary conversation between educated people. Then there are technical registers: the language of sailors, or motor mechanics, or cricketers for example. This leads on to literary registers — the language of books — which may themselves be classified chronologically: Johnsonian, Shakespearean, Chaucerian English for example.

Now, the point is this: how many native English speakers are equally comfortable using or even understanding all these different registers? How many modern kids can really follow the King James Bible? How many modern rugby players can comfortably curl up with a copy of Johnson’s Rasselas? How often does your average dental mechanic dip into Middle English lyric poetry?

Yet we all speak English – or don’t we? I think there lurks a profound inconsistency here. Even today, an Italian will understand much if not most of what a Spaniard says, speaking in his own tongue. Yet how many of us would understand Chaucer if we met him face to face? On what basis, then, do we describe Italian, Spanish and Latin as different languages, while claiming that we ourselves share a common linguistic citizenship with Chaucer and even King Alfred?

The fact is that we readily enough agree that ‘English’ is the native tongue of Alfred, Chaucer and ourselves, and (if we think about it at all) that ‘Greek’ has been spoken continuously from Homer’s day to the present. But ‘Latin’ has somehow been sidelined. Dante, we maintain, chose to write his Divine Comedy in the vernacular and thereby really ‘invented’ modern Italian. Spanish too, and French, sprang apparently fully grown from their respective native soils, distantly related to Latin perhaps, but really entirely distinct.

Now the interesting fact is that Dante himself almost certainly saw this distinction very differently: He would have seen himself as using one form of Latin (we would now call it Italian) to write the Divine Comedy, and another (he called it gramatica, we would just call it Latin) for his de vulgari eloquentia, while accepting both forms as styles (or registers) within the same great linguistic tradition. In other words Dante instinctively distinguished between literary and vernacular registers of the same language. It is we who have seized on the distinctions he made, prized them apart and set them in concrete.

In my own anecdotal example, the one with which I began this article, we see the imposition of metalinguistic categories on the basis of geographical/political convention; in the case of Dante, on the other hand, a chronological gulf applies — as a consequence, no doubt, of our post-medieval idea of ‘renaissance’, fuelled by Dante's own precise and scholarly attempt to differentiate between categories of speech. If it’s old and dead we call it Latin, if it’s fresh and new and vivid we call it Italian.

So what is the real relationship between Latin and the modern romance languages? Are they merely different manifestations, different registers, of the same tongue? And if this is true, how is it that the Italian schoolchild has almost as much trouble learning to read Virgil as the young anglophone? And if this is not true, how did the independent vernaculars such as Italian and French spring into existence, and what was their relationship with Latin during the Middle Ages when, for a time, both Latin and the vernaculars must have existed side by side?

Modern scholarship has come up with some surprising and exciting answers. Before looking at some of these, we need to remind ourselves that all writing is merely notation, and that language is really about sound and utterance. In other words, judgements about language cannot be based merely on forms of spelling: appearances may be deceptive.

For example, written Arabic has three separate noun case endings, but these are pronounced only in highly formal circumstances and by educated people, having long since disappeared from popular speech. This means, of course, that certain words are spelled one way and pronounced quite differently. Such a situation might also apply in other languages. If we encounter the word bonum in one text and buono in another, is it safe to say that the first text is written in ‘Latin’ and the latter in ‘Italian’? It may not be that simple. It may well be that both words were pronounced identically, and that only the notation is different.

Even in classical Latin, the final m was definitely not vocalized in some situations, and probably never pronounced as we pronounce it. Lesson: do not trust spelling. If all this seems far-fetched, consider such ordinary English words as night or knob or though, where notation and pronunciation have long since parted company. French offers even better examples: chantent where ent is not pronounced, the silence of final s and t, all reveal a wide gulf between what might be called theory and practice.

Space does not permit me to offer more examples, so I shall attempt a conclusion. It is this. Latin continued to be spoken by ordinary people in western Europe long after Rome ‘fell’, but the available registers of the language no doubt multiplied as the education system weakened and the several regions of the old Empire lost contact with the centre and with each other. Only towards the end of the first millennium, little more than a thousand years ago, do we first start to hear complaints that ordinary people could no longer readily understand their clergy when they preached to them!

At about the same time new forms of notation appeared, not universally, but according to need. The Strasbourg Oaths are usually regarded as the first surviving document in French, but it is probably more accurate to describe them as the first attempt to express a particular military/legal register of Latin in phonetic notation, and to write down the universal speech as it sounded, rather than in accordance with traditional and conservative convention.

To anyone who loves language in general, and the Latin/Romance tradition in particular, this is exciting stuff for it brings with it that delightful frisson that comes from having one’s assumptions overturned. To those who find language a tedious but necessary tool it will perhaps offer less delight but much valuable instruction in the virtue of fluidity: to assume that French, for example, sprang into existence with the Strasbourg Oaths, to take no interest in anything that preceded it, nor any cognizance of the Latin that was written after it, is to impoverish and even cripple one’s capacity to judge and appreciate literature.

If we could go back to the last days of the Roman Empire I think we would be surprised to find how Italian Latin sounded even then. The tendency towards the convergence of the oe and ae diphthongs with long e would have been well advanced, as would the characteristic modern Italian treatment of c and g. Syntactically, too, I think we would have detected a preference, among ordinary people, for a possessive de followed by what might have been distinguishable as an ablative, in place of the more formal genitive. Of course the ablative would have sounded like an accusative anyway, because the final m of the accusative would have been silent.

It is not hard to imagine a kind of bastard register of spoken Latin in which prepositions were employed to carry more of the burden of sense, and in which final noun/adjective endings were sloppily fudged. Speak this patois according to the Italian rules of pronunciation and what have you got? Does it matter whether we call it Vulgar Latin or Proto-Italian? Would its speakers have understood Cicero and Virgil? Up to a point, if they were spoken clearly, with all the supportive clues of tone and gesture. Does your modern banker or plumber or man on the Clapham omnibus understand Shakespeare?

When I used to teach Latin in school years ago, I was often asked by appalled students, ‘Sir, did the Romans really speak like this?’ I have to admit, too, that sometimes my own faith wavered, though I always knew that Latin had to be read aloud to be appreciated at all. More than twenty years ago I saw Don Dunstan splendidly declaim one of Cicero’s invectives against Catiline and I knew then that the power of any highly-developed literary language can only be made truly manifest in speech. Any lingering doubts I might have had were swept aside last year, however, when I took part in a conference of Latinists in Italy at which everything, even the conversation in the coffee breaks, was done in Latin. Latin works, I discovered.

It is both expressive and logical. It makes dramatic sense to begin a sentence with an accusative if we need to emphasize the object of the verb. Even in English this can still be done with our few remaining accusative forms, though it sounds a bit old-fashioned now: Whom do you seek? Him I prefer. Arms and the Man I sing! But for all that I think the conference organizers were wrong. They spoke their daily Latin with an Italian accent, and of that I approve on balance, but to me the whole exercise was artificial. In my opinion the Italian language itself is the proper register of Latin for day-to-day use.

But a case may be made for using formal literary Latin still. Until the nineteenth century it remained in use as a rather artificial language of discourse in the universities. That is gone forever. But there are two areas in which it must, I think, be supported if the cultural balance of our society is to survive. Firstly, it is the language of a great literature, both ancient and medieval. Even in more recent centuries men like Milton wrote in it and our knowledge of our own literary tradition is thus incomplete without it. Secondly, it is, I think, the most appropriate and universal register of language for public worship, for theology, for ecclesiastical solemnity, for high praise and dignified eulogy.

(* David Daintree is Master of Jane Franklin Hall, University of Tasmania. He is a classics scholar and an expert in medieval Latin.)