Throughout the Dark Ages, the few literate Europeans continued to write in classical Latin. Or they tried to: as their speech evolved, their writing sometimes mutated to match it. A list of commonly misspelled words, written in the third or fourth century, offers a glimpse of what was happening. For example, the list insists on calida (hot) not calda: the unstressed “i” was evidently disappearing. (Now it is calda in Italian.) Other sounds were changing, too. Use frigida not fricda, the list advises. The word for “cold” was on its way to today’s fredda.
在整个黑暗时代，少数精通文学的欧洲人继续用古典拉丁语写作。随着语言不断进化，其他人有时试图让写作发生相应的变化。一份写于三、四世纪的常见拼写错误的单词列表，能让我们一窥当时发生了什么。例如，这个列表坚持使用“calida”(意为“热的”)而不是“calda”：不重读的“i”显然正在消失。(现在意大利语是“calda”。) 其他读音也在变化。那个列表建议使用“frigida”而不是“fricda”。这个词意为“冷的”，现在写作“fredda”。
Nor was pronunciation the only moving part. Modern students of Latin often wrestle despondently with the language’s case system, in which the role a noun plays in a sentence is signalled by alternative endings. These collapsed into fewer forms in the Dark Ages; in modern Italian they leave no trace. Meanwhile, Latin’s three genders (masculine, neuter and feminine) merged into two. Words were substituted. People stopped using Latin’s loqui, “to speak”, and started using parabolare, which originally had a narrower meaning. It became Italian’s parlare.
发音并不是唯一改变的部分。现代拉丁语学生常常沮丧地与这种语言的大小写系统作斗争，在这种系统中，名词在句子中所起的作用由不同的结尾来表示。这些在黑暗时代坍塌成更少的形态；在现代意大利语中，它们没有留下任何痕迹。与此同时，拉丁语的三种性别(阳性、中性和阴性)合并为两种。很多词有了替代。人们不再使用拉丁语的“loqui” (意为“说话”)，而是开始使用“parabolare”，这个词最初的意思比较少。现在这个词的意大利语是“parlare”。
A millennium or so after Cicero’s moans, in other words, Europeans spoke a range of tongues that were nevertheless related to each other and to Latin. What happened next in Italy had as much to do with politics as with the dynamics of languages. The contrast with its northern neighbour is instructive. France was unified by the conquest of territory spreading out from Paris; the conquerors brought Parisian speech with them, and that became “French”. A mighty state then did its best to teach that language everywhere, and to eradicate local variants.
换句话说，在西塞罗抱怨之后的一千年左右，欧洲人说着各种各样的语言，尽管这些语言彼此关联，也与拉丁语有关。接下来在意大利发生的事情，不仅与语言的活力有关，也与政治有关。与北方邻国的对比很能说明问题。法国通过征服从巴黎向外扩张的领土而统一；征服者带来了巴黎语，并成为“法语”。当时，这个强大的国家竭尽全力在各地 教授这种语言，并根除当地的变体。
译文由可可原创，仅供学习交流使用，未经许可请勿转载。
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