Content area
Full text
Romance languages have 800 million native speakers throughout Europe and the whole world and some major Romance languages are widely adopted as lingua franca, but their extensive evolution from Vulgar and classical Latin seldom receives adequate attention. This paper uses an analytical synthesized approach to explore the extensive normal evolution from Latin to its modern Romance varieties. Both historical and linguistic perspectives are employed to clearly demonstrate the normality in the long development of Latin and Romance languages and in the evolutionary path concerning the emergence, development and death of the Latin language. Historical investigation shows that Latin language's development path follows a fairly normal trajectory as other constantly changing social and cultural processes. Meanwhile, linguistic theories prove to be effective tools for analyzing the extent of the normality of the evolution from Latin to Romance languages. Language uniformity explains why Latin can be granted the official status during its initial development. Theory of language change reveals the underlying cause of the disaggregation of Latin into those of its diverging dialects which eventually evolve into modem Romance languages. The language standardization offers clues as to why social classes can offer a solid foundation for the normal development in Latin and its Romance offspring by way of standardization. Historical evidence and linguistic analysis all support the finding that the evolution from Latin to modem prevailing Romance languages is a considerably normal process.
Keywords: Latin, language uniformity, language change and variation, language standardization, normal evolution
Latin (Lingua Latina) is a language of the Indo-European family that first appeared in Italy in the mid 2nd millennium BC. As the most important member of the Italic branch of Indo-European, Latin is divided into several historical periods and social dialects. There are two varieties of Latin: Classical Latin ( the literary dialect used in poetry and prose) and Vulgar Latin ( the form of the language spoken by ordinary people, which by the 9th century diverged into the various Romance languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan, Sardinian, Franco-Provencal and Dalmatian). After the rise of the Catholic Church, Medieval Latin, the ecclesiastical language of the Catholic Church, became the lingua franca of educated people in the West. Around the 16th century, the popularity of Medieval Latin...