... on Latin / Romance revisited

What Latin Sounded Like - and how we know
NativLang
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_enn7NIo-S0

I

Before actually watching video, I suppose you mean the pronunciation around the times of Cicero and Livy?

Because the Gaulish pronunciation in the time of Gregory and Fredegar of Tours might have been more like < fidem > [feith], < seruum > [serf] and both nominative and plural < seruus / seruos > [sers] ... since that is close to how things were spelled once the pronunciation changed under Alcuin and the old one became the basis for new languages like French and Provençal.

After watching the video : especially as both English and French and Spanish tend to confirm there was a stage at which Fidem had become Feith.

II

Felis Hypogei est paratus ad insiliendum in animaM immortalEM tuaM, I suppose?

Second word means what?

Doormat? (Wild guess)

How Did Latin Become A Dead Language?
NowThis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZJ0fzr1ajg

0:11 I was just going to say it, but "Cromm Cruach" came before me:

Cromm Cruach

The Church used Latin as it was the language of the Empire NOT the other way around

[back to me]

1:12 "it was only around the fall of the Empire that Latin died and these new languages were born"

No, they were born before the fall of West and East Rome last avatars in 1917-18 ...

Wait, you meant like fall of Constantinople .... no, they were around before 1453 too.

Or you meant around the fall of Ancient Rome with last Emperor before Charlemagne?

No, Latin rather than this lived on a bit past Charlemagne.

What you may mean is that the regional pronunciations (you know, English doesn't sound the same in California and in Oxford) started the road of phonetic changes leading up to Romance languages.

Church Slavonic is more diversified than English et pour cause : when a Serbian and an Ukrainean celebrate liturgy, the Serb pronounces the words and consequently letters basically as in Serbian, and the Ukrainean basically as in Ukrainean - with those added words, endings, letters, syllables, which Slavonic has and they haven't.

And that was about how Latin functioned, both in Church and at Court and in Courts, with more and more diverging pronunciations, since unlike Slavic languages descended from same pronunciation, up to 800.

THEN Alcuin of York is asked to reform the ecclesial pronunciation in Gaul, and he does.

So, suddenly Latin has two pronunciations in each place in Gaul (France, Benelux, parts of Germany, Switzerland) : the common Alcuinian one which basically tries to restore old pronunciation by "time travel" (Alcuin got a pronunciation via English students who had learned it as foreign language since the day of Pope St Gregory and Augustine of Canterbury).

On one occasion the OTHER one has to be written down, it is a court version of the regional variety. In Strassburg a German speaker has to speak Latin so a Romance speaker - or a big number of them - can understand. From then on, you get the idea that the two pronunciations can be written most phonetically with two different spellings.

Then Latin SPLIT - old spelling + new-old (Alcuinian) pronunciation became Latin as separate from Romance languages, while old pronunciation (for last centuries up to then) with new spelling christallised in work after work and language after language.

1:20 Latin has a noun inflection, also known as declinsion, slightly less complex than that of Russian or Polish, since having one case less (6, not 7). Latin has a verb inflection, also known as conjugation, somewhat less complex than most Romance languages (where the new future and past future got two sister tenses or sister moods in conditional and past conditional).

So, sorry, that is not a very coherent explanation, it is simply ideology rather than history.

1:49 "of what was called Vulgar Latin"

No, Vulgar Latin is a modern term.

Sermo vulgaris meant faulty pronunciation, which were less and less noted. The language as such when written was termed Latin.

3:10 - 3:13 "The Church was a huge fan of Latin largely because that is what the common man spoke!"

Thank you, one who is at least getting THAT right!