"latin is a dead language" brother in my native language we call "black" the same word as in Latin, same for all the Romance languages that inhrited it with a syllable shifted.
Latin and modern romance languages are the same language at different points in time. Just like how Old English and Modern English are the same language in different times.
Latin never died, it just changed and evolved over time. Like all languages do.
Even today, the English we speak right now already has evolved notable differences from the English of 1925, just a hundred years ago.
I would still call them different languages from Latin, you would not call Icelandic Old Norse and a chicken one of the animals it evolved from. If you can't speak it, it is a different language.
I will note though that what people call "dialects" of a romance language, particularly ones that are within the former borders of the Roman Empire, are plain wrong as they are just as much independent descendants as the language people say they are dialects of are. As an example, Sicilian or Neapolitan and others should not be considered dialects of Italian as they'd be more accurately called sister languages. Same with Occitan and French and many more.
The problem is that there is no border that separates Old Norse from Icelandic. Or Italian from Latin. Because the process of linguistic change is so gradual, there is a seamless transition and it is impossible to tell where Old Norse ended and Icelandic began. A modern Icelander might not be able to speak Old Norse, but neither would an Old Norse speaker from the 12th century be able to speak or understand the Old Norse of the 8th century, while he might be perfectly fine with the Old Icelandic of the 13th century. And a modern day Londoner might not be able to speak English with a thick Scottish accent, and both English speakers might have some trouble understanding one another. Just like how Danes and Norwegians can have some trouble understanding one another but are usually still able to communicate. Does that mean that Scottish-accented English is a different language from other English accents? Linguistically, the answer can actually be yes, because there is no scientific distinction between languages, dialects and accents. As they say, a language is simply a dialect with an army.
The lines we draw between different language variants, especially between historical language variants, are completely arbitrary and usually based on politics or historical events rather than anything to do with the languages in question themselves.
I disagree. Languages are defined by certain characteristics and of course, some changes are gradual, but you still very much can pin-point the de facto home of a language and use that "dialect" as a representative of the language, which is why standard [language] exists. It is arbitrary, but it very much allows you to say that Icelandic definitely is not Old Norse because it has characteristics that conflict with how the Old Norse we know is defined (such as an additional t sound emerging in words like "troll", making them pronounced "trotl", and thus letting even English be a more accurate pronunciation of Old Norse than Icelandic in this case). In Italian these linguistic conflicts between the older and newer language define where it stops being Latin as well, which is where Italian starts taking on so much Germanic influence. You cannot say that "Old English does not exist it's just English" or "English does not exist it's just Anglo-Saxon" or that "Old Norse and Gothic are the same language actually", a border does exist, the lines drawn are still very much useful to identify and distinguish them and denying that sounds like pedantry for the sake of it.
The problem is, again, that these lines are completely arbitrary. Words, sounds and grammar are never static, they are in a state of constant flux. Why make it a new language when sound X changes but not when sound Y changes? Why does Latin become Italian when it starts taking on a lot of Germanic loanwords but not when it took on a lot of Greek loanwords? Furthermore, these changes are usually impossible to pin down precisely in time because they are gradual processes that happen over a period of time. This is especially problematic for historical language varieties because our knowledge of them often relies on very sparsely attested historical sources. So the changes we see in historical languages might often have more to do with the patchy survival of historical records than with actual linguistic developments.
Standard languages did not exist until very recently, and are prescriptive language variants instituted by a government or other regulatory body. They don't always accurately reflect spoken language variants and are often not static themselves either.
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u/Apprehensive_Gur_302 May 24 '25
When I catch my black friend calling himself the latin derivative of the word black (latin is a dead language)