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Download today. Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.
Today, we're going to talk about how to pronounce a little word you probably use hundreds of times a day.
And then we look at why the Latin language died.
Did you know that even though we always spell the word the the same way, there are actually two ways to pronounce it.
And the rule that governs which pronunciation you choose is kind of like how you choose between the words a and an.
I didn't know this until I started the Grammar Girl podcast and people wrote in to complain that I was doing it wrong.
Then I checked the Merriam -Webster dictionary, because you'd be amazed how many times people tell me I'm doing something wrong without checking first that they know what they're talking about.
And lo and behold, this time they were right.
There are pronunciation guidelines that I never learned.
At one of my book signings, I talked about this with the attendees, and a lot of them said they were taught this rule in choir classes.
Now, I never took choir, so maybe that's why I didn't know.
Here's the deal. Pronounce it the if the next word starts with a vowel sound.
That's like how you choose the word an if the next word starts with a vowel sound.
The apple, an apple.
example, and pronounce it the if the next word starts with a consonant sound.
That's like how you choose the word a if the next word starts with a consonant sound.
The tree, a tree. Just as with a versus an, for the and the, it's not the first letter of the next word that matters.
It's the first sound.
Here are some examples when the next word word starts with a consonant sound.
Did aardvark bring the cheese platter?
Where is the universal remote?
Note that universal starts with a consonant sound, Y -Y -universal, even though it starts with a vowel, the letter U.
And here are some examples when the next word starts with a vowel sound.
I prefer the effervescent water.
Did squiggly get the MRI?
Note that MRI starts starts with a vowel sound, E, the MRI, even though it starts with a consonant letter, M.
The big exception to these rules is that people also use the the pronunciation when they want extra emphasis or to indicate that something's important.
For example, if you really want to make a point, you might say that a performer is the best you've ever heard, or that the fantasies and chocolate fundraiser is the social event of the year.
And here's a little fun history tidbit since we're talking about how the language gets simplified a lot lately.
The or the is a very old word, and according to Etym Online, old English used ten different words for it.
So with just two pronunciations, we're actually getting off easy.
Finally, I notice when I go back and listen to the podcast that I still sometimes get these wrong, so I apologize.
I try try to remember, but since I spent decades of my life not making a distinction between the two pronunciations, I do still get it wrong sometimes.
Now, we're taking a look at the life, death, and afterlife of Latin.
You'll often hear Latin called a dead language, but that phrase can be a little misleading.
Latin isn't exactly dead.
It's more of a linguistic zombie.
We may not use Latin to hold conversations, but if you've ever tried to show off your botanical naming skills by identifying a dandelion as Teraxacum officinale, then you know Latin never truly left the building.
It's been hiding in plain sight all along.
So what is a dead language, anyway?
Linguists use the term dead language when a language no longer has native speakers or isn't used in ordinary day -to -day conversation.
By this definition, Latin qualifies.
No babies are being raised to speak Latin as their mother tongue these days.
But Latin's case isn't as straightforward as, say, Cornish, which lost its native speaker in the 18th century, or other languages that simply went extinct.
Latin's death was peculiar.
It happened slowly, from the bottom them up rather than the top down.
In other words, Latin stopped being spoken casually on the street, but it stayed on in lofty places like churches, universities, and courts.
Latin didn't just vanish overnight.
It gradually split in two.
There was the formal fancy Latin you'd hear in speeches, textbooks, and legal documents.
We call that classical Latin.
And And then there was the version people actually spoke in everyday life, and we call that vulgar Latin.
Think of it like the difference between Shakespearean English and modern casual conversation.
For centuries, both versions coexisted, but they kept drifting apart.
Over time, the spoken version kept evolving and changing, while the formal version stayed frozen in place.
That widening gap between the high and low forms is a big part of why Latin eventually stopped being a living spoken language.
So when we say Latin, we might think of the elegant language of Cicero, Caesar, or St. Augustine.
That's classical Latin, the polished literary form that was standardized in grammar and taught in schools.
But ordinary Romans weren't quoting Virgil over dinner, they spoke Vulgar Latin in daily life, sermo vulgaris meaning common speech. The vulgar part in Vulgar Latin isn't used to mean rude.
It just means everyday colloquial Latin.
Interestingly, the same root gives us the word divulge from the idea of making knowledge common by revealing it or publishing it.
For a long time, classical and Vulgar Latin existed side by side, a situation linguists call diglossia.
Classical Latin was used for writing, formal orations, and education, while vulgar Latin was the language of markets, farms, and family gossip.
Over centuries, the two varieties did drift apart, but a fun example of the time when they coexisted comes from graffiti in Pompeii, where the eruption of Mount Vesuvius froze two two different scribbles of the same phrase, one written in classical Latin and one written in vulgar Latin.
May whoever loves thrive, and may he who knows not love perish.
The spelling in the vulgar graffiti reflects how a local might have said the phrase, cutting grammatical corners.
It shows us a glimpse of real spoken Latin, as opposed to the textbook Latin a Roman school schoolteacher or a modern Latin class would insist on.
And here's a little tidbit for Monty Python fans.
The high versus low Latin contrast is illustrated in the classic film Life of Brian.
In one famous scene, a Roman soldier catches Brian painting a slogan on a wall and ends up giving him a stern Latin grammar lesson, conjugating Romanus to Romani, correcting directing verb forms, and so on.
Even though it's a comedy sketch, it underscores a real dynamic.
Proper Latin was something you got drilled into because everyday speech didn't always follow those strict rules.
It's kind of like how the English you might use to write a social media post is different from what you'd put in, say, the essay you wrote when you applied to an Ivy Navy league university.
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Quince .com slash grammar. So how did Latin come to be considered a dead language?
Well, it was more of a slow fade than a dramatic death.
As the Roman Empire expanded across Europe and North Africa, Latin, especially the vulgar kind, spread far and wide.
The empire at its height covered around 5 million square kilometers, and Latin encountered all sorts of local languages and accents.
Over time, the Latin spoken in these regions started sounding a bit different from the Latin in Rome.
much like how English in the United States evolved a different accent and slang from the English used in England.
When the Western Roman Empire fell in the 5th century, there was no central authority or mass communication to keep everyone speaking the same way.
Small sound changes and new words accumulated over generations.
By the early Middle Ages, a farmer in Gaul, which became modern France, and a fisherman in Italy would have had a hard time understanding each other, even though both would say they were speaking Latin.
But in fact, they weren't really speaking the old Latin anymore.
They were speaking early versions of romance languages like Old French and Old Italian, though no one called them that yet.
A big light bulb moment came in 813 CE at the Council of Tours.
Church leaders looked around and realized something kind of awkward. Most people couldn't understand sermons anymore because they were still being delivered in fancy classical Latin.
So the bishops made a new rule.
From now on, preachers should translate their sermons into the rustic Roman tongue, lingua roma rustica, basically the everyday language people spoke.
It wasn't Latin like Cicero wrote, it was closer to what we now recognize as early French. In other words, by the early 800s, it was official.
The Latin that regular folks spoke had drifted so far from the original that it had basically become a new language.
And just a few decades later, in 842 CE, the Oaths of Strasbourg, a pact between between two Frankish kings, had to be written in this new Romance language, plus a Germanic one, so their soldiers could understand.
Those two moments are like giant neon signs pointing to what had been happening quietly for centuries.
Latin wasn't just changing, it had sprouted a whole new family of languages.
So did Latin really die at this point?
Well, it depends on how you you look at it.
You could say Classical Latin died as a native spoken language.
Nobody was using Cicero's Latin at the medieval dinner table anymore.
But Vulgar Latin didn't so much die as morph into new languages.
Think of it as Latin trading in its old toga for a bunch of new costumes.
In one former province, Latin gradually turned into Spanish.
In another, it became Italian Italian, or French, and so on.
It was less a sudden death and more of a case of identity change.
Even after people stopped speaking Latin in everyday life, it definitely wasn't gone.
In fact, it had a pretty impressive afterlife.
All through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Latin was still the go -to language for scholars and religious leaders.
If you were educated in Europe back then, you probably wrote your papers, debated ideas, and sent letters in Latin, no matter where you lived.
It was kind of like the ultimate academic group chat, a shared language that let people from different countries actually understand each other.
If you were a student in medieval Paris or Oxford, learning Latin wasn't optional.
It was how you read the big thinkers of the past and how you connected with other smart folks.
Even into the early modern era, Latin was still going strong in universities.
For centuries, if you were doing science, law, or diplomacy, Latin was your ticket in.
It became a kind of universal second language for the educated class.
Not something people spoke at home, but something they all had in common. At the same time, the Roman Catholic Church was doing its best to keep Latin alive.
It didn't matter what language people spoke at home.
In church, Latin was the rule.
And believe it or not, Catholic mass stayed in Latin all the way up until the 1960s.
It wasn't until the Second Vatican Council that local languages were finally allowed. Even today, Latin is still the official language of the Vatican.
If you ever get your hands on a papal document, or fun fact, if you visit Vatican City and find the Latin ATM, you'll see Latin still in action.
It's like a living ghost from the past hanging around in unexpected places.
In the legal and scientific worlds, Latin also refuses to completely die.
Law students still pepper their speech with Latin phrases like habeas corpus, you shall have the body, or in loco parentis, in place of a parent.
Every time a lawyer cites a habeas corpus or a biologist names a new species in Latin, they're keeping a bit of Latin undead and kicking.
Many universities and institutions have Latin mottos, for example, Harvard's veritas, meaning truth, and academic degrees are conferred with Latin titles.
So even though you won't hear Latin at the supermarket, you'll definitely see its imprint in law books, scientific nomenclature, and on the seals of universities.
So to sum up, Latin's everyday spoken form gradually evolved rather than outright expired.
Classical Latin as a native tongue faded away, but its DNA survives in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and all the other Romance offspring.
And the language itself stuck around, preserved by scholars and priests, like a wise old grandfather living quietly in the library.
So calling Latin dead is a bit of a misnomer.
Sure, it's not anyone's first language anymore, but it's had one of the most prolific afterlives of any language in history.
history it's immortal in ways julius caesar could never have imagined that segment was by karen lundy a career writer and editor in the late 90s as a young mom with two kids and a dog she founded one of the internet's first writing workshop communities these days she facilitates expressive writing workshops, both online and off.
Find her at chanterellestorystudio .com.
And finally, I have a familect story.
Hi, Mignon. This is Ben from Scottsdale, Arizona, and I have a familect story that's developing in my family at the moment.
Okay, so you've heard of the Italian dumplings, G -N -O -C -C -H -I.
Well, if you misspell that, at it sounds like something else so a family member of mine went to a store and said i'm looking for some loekie and of course she wasn't successful at finding that but a cousin of ours worked in a restaurant and realized that she was referring to gnotchi d -n -o -t -c -h -i well now every time we see the recipes that has gnotchi in it it's well gnotchi figured you'd like it.
They warmed directly.
Thanks, Ben. I remember not being sure how that was pronounced the first time I ever saw it on a menu.
If you want to share the story of your family, a word or phrase that you only use with your friends and family, leave a message on the voicemail line at 833214GIRL, or leave a voice message on WhatsApp.
Be sure to call from a nice quiet place, and if you want that number or link later, you can always find them in the show notes.
notes. Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast and we have lots of other shows.
For example, tomorrow, the Savvy Psychologist is talking about post -vacation sadness.
I mean, it makes sense to be sad when what you have to look forward to is a dentist appointment instead of a massage appointment, but there's also more to it than that.
And if you want to know what you can do to feel better or avoid it altogether, check out the Savvy Psychologist show tomorrow.
Thanks to Morgan Christensen in advertising, Dan Firerobbin in audio, Nat Hoops in marketing, and Holly Hutchings, director of podcasts, who recently celebrated her 24th wedding anniversary.
Congratulations! And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip -a -day book, The Grammar Daily.
That's all. Thanks for listening.
