16 From Latin to vernacular science

§1 This concluding chapter of part 2 of this book considers how Latin’s rôle as the leading language of science and learning came to an end. Above (chap. 14), we have seen that the eighteenth century was crucial to ending Latin’s hegemony in science. First, the more general question is taken up of whether Latin is now finally dead (§1); Latin’s main advantage, its stability in time, is considered (§2); then the question of how the vernaculars had to adapt to become vehicles of science is briefly tackled (§§3–5); and finally, the general situation is evaluated (§6). The further development of vernacular science is outside the scope of this book; the linguistic changes to Latin will be the topic of part 3. Now, if even in scientific communication and in the Catholic Church, which may have been the two last bastions of Latin, Latin is practically no longer used today, we may wonder: is Latin now a truly dead language? It is definitely extinct as a language with native speakers who learn it from their parents. That ceased to be the case a long time ago. But does this mean that it is dead? Those native speakers developed their way of speaking, which produced the Romance languages. But rhetorical Classical Latin was not the language of everyday life, as even a cursory comparison between Cicero’s orations and his familiar letters shows. Thus, from very early on, literary Latin began to be disconnected from the spoken language. This situation can be seen as continuing until the nineteenth century, when Latin lost the most important position among school subjects. Among humanists from Lorenzo Valla to our own days, who only consider literature written by native speakers as of intrinsic value, this situation is completely misjudged. An entire genre of ‘antibarbarus’ literature meaning to purge Latin grew up over the centuries, culminating in Krebs’s Antibarbarus, which was last reworked by Joseph Hermann Schmalz and printed in Basle in 1905. For Krebs, Latin from Late Antiquity is already of questionable value because the spoken language had drifted away from the written one. The simple amount of scientific, philosophical, and other relevant Latin texts, which is much greater and was

§1 This concluding chapter of part 2 of this book considers how Latin's rôle as the leading language of science and learning came to an end. Above (chap. 14), we have seen that the eighteenth century was crucial to ending Latin's hegemony in science. First, the more general question is taken up of whether Latin is now finally dead ( §1); Latin's main advantage, its stability in time, is considered ( §2); then the question of how the vernaculars had to adapt to become vehicles of science is briefly tackled ( § §3-5); and finally, the general situation is evaluated ( §6). The further development of vernacular science is outside the scope of this book; the linguistic changes to Latin will be the topic of part 3. Now, if even in scientific communication and in the Catholic Church, which may have been the two last bastions of Latin, Latin is practically no longer used today, we may wonder: is Latin now a truly dead language? It is definitely extinct as a language with native speakers who learn it from their parents. That ceased to be the case a long time ago. But does this mean that it is dead? Those native speakers developed their way of speaking, which produced the Romance languages. But rhetorical Classical Latin was not the language of everyday life, as even a cursory comparison between Cicero's orations and his familiar letters shows. 1 Thus, from very early on, literary Latin began to be disconnected from the spoken language. This situation can be seen as continuing until the nineteenth century, when Latin lost the most important position among school subjects.
Among humanists from Lorenzo Valla 2 to our own days, who only consider literature written by native speakers as of intrinsic value, this situation is completely misjudged. An entire genre of 'antibarbarus' literature meaning to purge Latin grew up over the centuries, culminating in Krebs's Antibarbarus, which was last reworked by Joseph Hermann Schmalz and printed in Basle in 1905. For Krebs, Latin from Late Antiquity is already of questionable value because the spoken language had drifted away from the written one. The simple amount of scientific, philosophical, and other relevant Latin texts, which is much greater and was 1 See chap. 8 §7 above. Leonhardt (2013: 78) points out that '[a]fter Cicero, however, the vernacular disappeared from literature'.
2 In his Elegantiae linguae latinae of 1471. In contrast to later authors, Valla saw himself as a native speaker of Latin, albeit in a colloquial form ('Italian'), in a way similar to modern Arabs, as is pointed out below. much more influential than in the case of purist Latin, provides a first hint that the Ciceronians' argument misses the point. In contrast, such extreme 'humanism' was sometimes accused of having killed the 'living' Mediaeval Latin with a straight-jacket of Ciceronianism, for instance by Norden (1958: 2:767): Der lateinischen Sprache, die im Mittelalter nie ganz aufgehört hatte zu leben und demgemäß Veränderungen aller Art unterworfen gewesen war, wurde von denselben Männern, die sich einbildeten, sie zu neuem dauerndem Leben zu erwecken, sie zu einer internationalen Kultursprache zu machen, der Todesstoß gegeben. 'The Latin language, which had never completely ceased to live in the Middle Ages and had therefore been subject to changes of all kinds, was dealt its death blow by the same men who imagined that they could awaken it to new permanent life, make it an international cultural language.' Taking into account the argument in this book, it is clear that this is at least exaggerated: in fact, 'normal', non-humanist Latin continued to flourish in early modern times, 3 but the humanist criticism and its later consequence of disregarding 'non-native' Latin literature is nevertheless clearly obsolete today, as we understand much more about written and oral forms of languages. In fact, there are many similar cases of diverging written and spoken language: Swiss Germans write Standard German but speak dialects that can be as far from it as Italian is from Latin. The school language is different from one's mother tongue, and people learn to express complicated (e. g. scientific) thought only in the former. The parallelism goes even further: depending on the amount of nationalism, people will still try to formulate 'higher' things in their dialect (as the Swiss Germans do), 4 or they switch to the standard language when speaking about such matters (as Italians or Bavarians would). For the less cultivated, it feels awkward to speak the written language and they may commit errors induced by their spoken variety, both in spoken and in written Standard German. And yet, who would claim that Swiss authors such as Gottfried Keller or Friedrich Dürrenmatt wrote a language that was dead for them, were not native speakers of German, and that their works are therefore of no value? This phenomenon was first studied in depth by Charles A. Ferguson (1959), who spoke of 'diglossia'. The difference is, of course, that there is Germany, where the 'dead' language can be experienced in action for the Swiss. For Arabs, not even this is the case: dialects are spoken in all Arabic-speaking countries today, but Classical Arabic is still written, even in newspapers, although nobody speaks it as a mother tongue. So is all contemporary Arabic literature a dead literature?
Instead of using the unclear and pejorative term 'dead', Leonhardt (2013: 19) rightly proposes calling Post-Classical Latin a f i x e d l a n g u a g e instead. It certainly makes sense to distinguish 'dead' languages, knowledge of which was lost at some point and whose partial knowledge had to be recovered by scholars later on, 5 from fixed languages, which are no longer learned from one's parents and family but knowledge of which and their literature has never been lost and which continue to play important rôles in society. Among the latter, we can distinguish subforms such as liturgical languages (such as Coptic, Hebrew, Koine Greek, Latin) and fixed international languages (such as Koine Greek until the fifteenth century, Latin until the nineteenth century, or Standard Arabic until today). Leonhardt (2013: 7) points out that the trend in modern linguistics to restrict the study of language to its 'natural' form, that is, one that is oral, spontaneous, and 'untainted' by schoolmasters, is an inheritance from nineteenth-century Romanticism and is completely unscientific. The approach in the present book (as in Leonhardt's) of not distinguishing between 'dead' and 'alive' phases of Latin is an attempt to remedy this manqué 'humanist' approach. Despite being fixed, we will see below in part 3 that scientific Latin did change over time. Following Christine Mohrmann, who spoke of a 'normativisme évolutif', 6 Stotz called the linguistic development of Mediaeval Latin in general a 'fortwährende Normenentfaltung' (1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004): I, §9.8 =vol. 1, p. 33). In this progressive unfolding of norms, older norms remain valid (in contrast to living languages, where they are forgotten and become obsolete), but new norms may nonetheless be added. Some syntactic change happened in the Middle Ages (e. g. concerning subordinate clauses), but most importantly much new vocabulary was added to Latin's stock. Academic Latin also changed through time, but differently than a living language: there were no sound shifts reflected in the orthography, and hardly any change in the grammatical structure, but new constructions from within and sometimes from Greek were adopted besides, again, a lot of new vocabulary. We can thus say that Latin in the past one and a half millennia was not a dead language but (among other things) a living, although fixed, language of erudition. The linguistics of fixed languages is a field that has hardly been trodden as yet.
Fixed languages are also not 'dead' in the sense that they can, all of sudden, become fully 'alive' again, as happened with the fixed liturgical language Hebrew in the form of Ivrit in the twentieth century. Although this is not very likely to happen any time soon for Latin, Latin does not seem to be as 'dead' as one might think, even today. A quick glance at the Latin V i c i p a e d i a shows that on 3 November 2018 it had 129,438 entries (54th among all languages in Wikipedia) with 112,290 users, although only 161 of them had made edits within the past month. 7 In early 2021, it contained nearly 4 million words, only slight less than the Perseus Classical Latin text collection. 8 The numbers for Modern Greek are only slightly higher. No other dead or fixed language comes close; 9 Sanskrit (also a fixed language of liturgy, culture, and erudition) follows with only 11,351 entries. Vicipaedia's main page has the traditional Latin artes & litterae opposed to scientiae (see chap. 1 §6 above), besides societas, technologia, and lingua latina as main categories. It would thus seem that the field in which Latin is still most used is that of Latin literature, science, and technology. Of course, the Latin diction used has also taken up much from the modern European languages such as English and German, the continuation of a process observed above for Jesuit Latin. Some examples of words from Vicipaedia entries: disciplina scientifica, ethnocentrismus, societas conlaborativa, psychologia gestaltica, moratismus (i. e. behaviourism), miliardum, usor (all these terms yielded 0 hits in Corpus Corporum as of 2021). The administratores of Vicipaedia have to take care that the usores do not use 'Vulgar' Latin; indeed, the Latinity of their pages differs significantly, but they are mostly perfectly understandable. There is a warning: 10 Si paginam alia lingua ac Latina exares, velut pessimae Latinitatis insignem, sive Latinitate utaris a machina confecta, noli mirari aut queri cum pagina tua deleatur. 'If you write a page in another language than Latin, or one distinguished by horrible Latinity, or you employ Latin made by machine translation, you must not be surprised or complain when your page is deleted.' 7 See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias (3 November 2018). 8 Estimated from the downloadable dump https://dumps.wikimedia.org/lawiki, counting only article text, without discussion and editing history. 9 The artificial language Esperanto has more entries, but it is spoken as a mother tongue by several thousand people by now. 10 https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicipaedia:De_Latinitate (21 June 2018). §2 The truly great advantage Latin had to offer for science was its s t a b i l i t y over time and its long memory 11advantages that Greek shared only up to the fall of Constantinople (1453). The use of the classical form of Greek diminished rapidly and for good after this traumatic event. The linguistic studies (chaps [18][19][20] will show that the Latin language changed very little over two millennia, that the variation is more of a stylistic nature than of a unidirectional change over time. One could say that the positive side of a language being 'fixed' is its stability. Someone able to read Varro can also read Newton's Latin (although he may not understand the maths) nearly two thousand years later. In contrast, even Newton's English is already a significantly different kind of English than ours today. If Old English or Old High German scientific texts existed, they would be very hard for us to read now. A somewhat later example may illustrate this, the German translation of the De sphaera of John of Sacrobosco by Konrad of Megenberg (1309-1374): Euclydes der maister beschreibt uns waz spera sei, und spricht: 'Spera ist ain gank ainer ůmbverte ains halben kraizzes, deu veste und eben stet an irr mittelmezzigen lengen und di man also lang umbfůrt piz sie wider kůmpt an die stat irs anvanges.' 12 Spera igitur ab Euclide sic describitur: spera est transitus circumferentie dimidii circuli quotiens fixa diametro quousque ad locum suum redeat circumducitur. 13 'A sphere is thus described by Euclid: a sphere is the orbit of the circumference of a half circle having a fixed diameter when it is led around until it returns to its initial position.' In the mere half-millennium between Konrad's times and ours, his German has become very hard to read for German-speakers. Some of the problems that arise are orthographic, but the more serious ones concern vocabulary: 'mittelmezzige lenge' is now called Durchmesser; 'die stat', Ort. By contrast, Sacrobosco's Latin is still close enough to Cicero's that the latter would have understood it easily (although probably disdaining its style). Thus, Antoine Meillet was spot-on when he pointed out (1928: 1): avancée de l'époque moderne l'organe de la science et de la philosophie dans l'Europe occidental. 'As the language of a great empire […] Latin kept its stability during some eight hundred years. When the unity of the spoken language began to break down, from the third to the tenth century AD, the unity of the written language persisted. Until late modern times Classical Latin remained the organ of science and philosophy in Western Europe.' The argument that Latin's status as a 'dead' language actually benefited it in its rôle as language of science because the language was no longer suffering erosion by linguistic change and remained intelligible and usable as a kind of metalanguage, 14 was already used in the time when Latin was fighting to retain but finally lost this rôle. 'The Latin language being dead, that is, no longer the property of any nation but only through mutual consent of scholars adoptedas the Roman writers left it to usas the language of the sciences, it is not subject to any changes. Thus, all nouns, all verbs, all words, even the slightestprovided that Latin will not be abolished altogetherwill have for those versed in it the same meaning in a thousand years as today, and as they already had two thousand years ago.' §3 Latin had taken over the function of being Europe's language of science and learning from Greek and was succeeded by several European vernaculars; we might speak of a translatio linguae, comparing it thus to the mediaeval concept of translatio imperii (Pörksen 1999: 649). Some of Latin's heirsand, one is tempted to say: murdererswere already encountered above (chap. 14 § §3, 6), especially French. After the initial success of French as the sole international language in the eighteenth century, three languages soon ended up replacing Latin as the languages of science throughout the nineteenth century: French, German, and English (Gordin's 'triumvirate'). Somewhat earlier, Italian 15 started to be used for scientific publications, but this was not to last long, as a look at the languages in the list above (chap. 14 §3) shows. In the early twentieth century (after World War I and the exclusion of German scientists from international scientific conferences for eight years), English started to ascend to world hegemony, which (at least in the natural sciences) is today all but complete, as can be seen in Ammon's graphic ( fig. 29). The curves show how only German between the Wars and then Soviet Russian were able to briefly challenge English after the break-up of the 'triumvirate'. Latin is not even depicted any more. Latin as the language of the sciences had some clear advantages, especially its ready-made vocabulary and syntax for scientific use, but most of all its international comprehensibility. 16  ties. The three new languages of science (German, French, English) are all Indo-European languages with a similar structure and heavily indebted to Latin (and more indirectly to Greek). This made it relatively easy for them to adopt and to share the position of language of science, as any scientist with a decent education could be expected to read all three languages. A brief look at how these three vernacular languages acquired the necessary vocabulary and syntax concludes this part of the book. How their vocabulary had to adapt is discussed in more detail in chapter 21.

Scientific vocabulary
§4 As soon as the vernacular languages start to be used for scientific matters, technical terminology from Greek and Latin is quite naturally taken over. Die deutsche wissenschaftliche Prosa hat sich nicht auf der Grundlage einer eigenen untergründigen mündlichen Kultur herausgebildet, sondern als Lehnprägung der lateinischen Schriftkultur. 'German scholarly prose did not develop on the basis of its own underlying oral culture, but rather as a borrowed formation from Latin written culture.' The entomologist Theodore H. Savory observed that contemporary scientific language can be very easily translated, as illustrated by an example of a short entomological text he translates very closely from French to English, shown in figure  30. This observation is interesting, although it will become clear (chap. 22) that this can only work if scientists in both languages share the science in question and have established a one-to-one correspondence between termstoday, espe-cially when they share the general Begriffsgemeinschaft. All of this is the case here, as most terms are of Greek or Latin origin ('arthropod', 'chitinous', 21 'ecdysis', and so on). Moreover, both French and English developed their scientific language out of Latin. But the situation is very different for languages that do not take over concepts easily (see chap. 23), or that do not (yet) share the Begriffsgemeinschaftfor instance, for Arabic translators from Greek in the Middle Ages. Thus, this easy translatability of scientific language is largely illusory. Besides vocabulary, one-to-one syntactic correspondences are also crucial to transplant a science from one language to another. Syntax §5 Syntactic borrowing in the Western European vernaculars from Latin was probably considerable, but the field is understudied. 22 Blatt (1957: 69) concluded about syntactic borrowing: These two features taken together, viz. the architecture of the sentences or phrases and the rationalisation of the language, suffice to prove that Modern European syntax bears the stamp of the Latin genius. European standard languages of to-day may be considered useful instruments for modern thought, because tuned from Classical syntax.
In the case of German, more infinitive and participle constructions, hypotaxis, and more complex sentences have been named as emerging under the influence of Latin. 23 It also seems that the modern Western European languages took over some absolute constructions from Latin. We shall confine the discussion to one example of a potential borrowing that works in English but not in German. 24 English can form -ing-form or passive participle clauses that resemble the Latin participium coniunctum and the ablativus absolutus. Thus, one can say: