The Writing Revolution

by Amalia E Gnanadesikan

  St. Cyril was devoted to the cause of vernacularism, pitting himself against the “Trilingualists,” who believed that only Hebrew, Greek, and Latin could be used to worship God. Cyril’s alphabet and his translations served to bring the Christian faith to the Slavic people in their mother tongue. Ironically, however, the translations of Cyril, Methodius, and their followers had the predictable fossilizing effect. Old Church Slavonic became the language of faith in Orthodox Eastern Europe while the spoken language evolved into the various Slavic languages spoken today. Eventually Slavonic was unintelligible to everyday Slavs.

  Today the Cyrillic alphabet is one of the world’s major scripts, used for the Slavic languages Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Serbian. It has also been adapted to many non-Slavic languages across the former Soviet Union, including Moldovan, Tajik, Turkmen, Tatar, Kazakh, Uzbek, and Kirghiz. The languages of the Northwest Caucasus such as Abkhaz and Kabardian are notable for having around 50 consonants each, with only a couple of vowels. The adaptation of Cyrillic to these languages is therefore quite clumsy, not at all the elegant one-phoneme/one-letter system that Cyril intended. But Cyrillic is now one of the scripts of civilization, and poor alphabetic design is the price many languages have had to pay for a share in civilization.

  13

  The Age of Latin

  According to later tradition, Rome was founded on the morning of April 21, 753 BC, by a bandit warlord, Romulus, whose penchant for waging war against his neighbors was to form part of the national character. After Romulus, six more kings were said to have ruled Rome, of whom the last three were Etruscan. Then in 509 BC the last king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, was deposed and the Roman Republic established.

  We will probably never know exactly how much of this founding myth is true, but one thing that did happen is that the fledgling city of Rome fell under the influence of expanding Etruria (see appendix, figure A.6). The Romans adopted many aspects of Etruscan religion and culture, plus numerous Etruscan words to go along with them, looking to their more sophisticated neighbors as a source of learning and civilization. More significantly, they also borrowed the Etruscan alphabet, a spin-off of the Greek alphabet created around 700 BC (figure 13.1).

  The Romans adapted the technology of writing to their own language, an archaic form of Latin, in the sixth or seventh century BC. The written tradition being young at the time in Etruria, the Romans felt no need to be slavishly faithful to their model. What they arrived at was reasonably well adapted to their language, though it was not a perfect phonemic match. Nor was it exactly the Roman alphabet we know today. Written entirely in capital letters and, at first, occasionally from right to left or boustrophedon, it ran A B C D E F H I K L M N O P Q R S T V. The last letter spelled [u], not [v].

  The new Roman alphabet had five vowel letters, A, E, I, O, and V, or as we now write it, U. These letters stood (not coincidentally) for the vowels [a], [e], [i], [o], and [u]. In the spoken language, these vowels could be either long or short, but the alphabet had no way to distinguish them. Although the lack of a length distinction was not usually regretted (length being easily inferred by native speakers), there were occasional efforts to record it, such as by doubling the vowel letter, by using the so-called I longa (a taller version of I), or, later, by using a diacritical mark called the apex (shaped or ’). The language also contained the diphthongs [ai], [au], and [oi], which, suitably enough, received digraphs: AE, AU, OE.

  Figure 13.1 The Etruscan and Roman alphabets, as descended from the archaic Greek alphabet. The Etruscans learned the whole alphabet and copied it out (second column), but in inscriptions eliminated some of the letters (third column). The original Roman alphabet is on the left in the right-hand column, with later additions to the right. Sources of the additions are shown with arrows.

  As for the consonants, it was a good thing the Romans adopted writing before the Etruscans decided to expel the unnecessary letters B and D (and, for that matter, O) from their alphabet. Although the original Greek letters B and Δ had stood for sounds not present in Etruscan – voiced plosives – the Etruscans’ original fascination with the abecedary, or alphabetic list, preserved these letters long enough for the Romans to copy them. As for their pronunciations, the Romans must have learned them either from Etruscans bilingual in Greek or from Greeks living in the colonies of southern Italy.

  The Etruscans had found a use for Greek Γ, now tilted (and eventually rounded) into C, making it one of their three ways of spelling [k], along with K and Q. In trying to make sense of this profusion, the Romans followed the Etruscans’ lead in using Q only before U. The QU letter sequence was used to spell Latin [kw], a special two-part consonant pronounced much like qu- is in English today, in words like quick and queen. C was used for most other cases of [k], including in the sequence [ku], and K was relegated to an alphabetic backwater, being rarely used except in a few traditional spellings such as kalendae, the first day of a Roman month and the source of our word calendar.

  This left written Latin in the unsatisfactory position of having no way to distinguish [g] from [k]. The invention of G, by the simple expedient of adding a horizontal line to the end of C, is credited to Spurius Carvilius Ruga, in the third century BC. The letter was placed seventh in the alphabet, in the position of Greek and Etruscan Z, which the Romans were not using. In a fit of conservatism, the abbreviations C. for the first name Gaius and Cn. for Gnaeus (formerly spelled Caius and Cnaeus) were retained.

  The Etruscans used F, the Greek digamma, for bilabial [w] (transliterated υ). At the time of the Latin adaptation Etruscan was still using FH for [f], a practice the Romans followed at first and then simplified to just F, a letter they were not otherwise using.

  Latin did have the bilabial semivowel [w], as well as the palatal semivowel [j], but the Romans considered them variants of the vowels [u] and [i] and used the letters V and I accordingly. Whether to pronounce these letters as vowels or as semivowels was usually pretty obvious: if they occurred before a vowel, they were almost always to be pronounced as semivowels. U was originally a handwritten variant of V, the latter being the norm in formal inscriptions.

  Somewhere in the transmission of Greek to Etruscan or from Etruscan to Latin, the letters of the alphabet lost their distinctive Semitic-derived names. Instead of alpha, beta, gamma, the Roman alphabet’s letters had simple, one-syllable names. The vowels were just called by the long forms of their sounds: [a], [e], [i], [o], [u]. Most plosives were called by their sounds plus a long [e] added to make them pronounceable: B was [be], C was [ke] (not [se] until many centuries later), D was [de], etc. K, following the Etruscan custom of pairing it with A, was [ka], and H, perhaps to match K, was [ha]. Q was [ku], also following the letter pairings established by the Etruscans. Other consonants – the nasals, liquids (L and R), and fricatives – could theoretically be pronounced alone without a helping vowel, although such “syllabic” consonants did not occur in any normal Latin words. However, the original pronunciation of the letter names appears to have been syllabic anyway: The fact that Etruscan, by contrast, did have syllabic consonants strongly suggests that the Latin letter names were derived from Etruscan, but that cannot be proved. Eventually the syllabic pronunciation gave way to one with a short helping [e] in front: [ef], [el], [em], [en], [er], [es]. The later Latin names are basically the ones familiar to speakers of Western European languages. (English, however, replaced long [a] with [e], [e] with [i], and [i] with [ai], giving us pronunciations such as A and K; B, D, and E; and I. These changes, which affected all words, not just the letters of the alphabet, were part of the Great Vowel Shift that occurred over the course of the fifteenth century.)

  Armed with its alphabet and its military ambitions, Rome grew in power. Having shaken off Etruscan dominance, the Romans subdued most of the other Latin people in the surrounding region of Latium in 338 BC and then, after much bloodshed, the Samnites of the southern Apennines in 290. Rome then began to eye – and conquer – t
he rich Greek city-states in the south. Finally, war with the other great power in the western Mediterranean, Carthage, was inevitable. The Punic Wars (Punic being the Roman version of Phoenician) left Carthage defeated in 201 BC and utterly destroyed and plowed under with salt in 146 BC.

  Meanwhile, the Romans had encountered Greek culture. Translations of Greek plays began to be performed, and Roman writers began to copy Greek styles and produce the first Latin literature. Cultured Romans studied Greek, and young scholars traveled to Greece to study philosophy. When mainland Greece was wrested from Macedonian rule in 197 BC, the original Roman intent was to leave the city-states free, as they had been before the coming of Alexander’s father, Philip of Macedon. Though this arrangement did not last very long, the Romans retained a respect for the Greeks’ cultural achievements. Greek was the language of the eastern Mediterranean – the Hellenistic world – and so it was allowed to remain.

  Out of the meeting of Greece and Rome came the civilization that ruled – and shaped – much of the Western world. The Romans loved to fight, but they also loved discipline and order. Thus they made warfare into a science, and the inexorable advance of their legions conquered the known world from Britain to Mesopotamia. The same discipline and order were called upon to rule their empire: they created a strong bureaucracy and legal system to administer it, and built roads, bridges, and aqueducts to sustain it. On the other hand, the Romans looked to Greece for inspiration in literature, philosophy, and the visual arts. Eventually they were also to look to Jerusalem, as they adopted the new Christian religion.

  As the Romans absorbed Greek culture, they also absorbed Greek words. This led to an alphabetic problem. The Roman alphabet, though ultimately derived from the Greek, was noticeably different from it. How then were the Romans to spell Greek words in Latin? Greek had aspirated plosives, which they spelled Θ, Φ, and (in the Ionian version of the alphabet) X. The Romans had not bothered to include these apparently useless letters in their alphabet. When they found they needed to represent aspirated plosives after all, they fell back on using digraphs, two letters for a single phoneme. These consonants sounded like plosives followed by a heavy breath, so that is how the Romans wrote them: TH, PH, CH.

  The Greeks had a couple of letters that stood for a sequence of two consonants, [ps] and [ks]. The Romans, having abundant sequences of [ks], accepted one but not the other, adopting X from a western version of the Greek alphabet in which it stood for [ks] but using PS for the other sequence. The Greeks also used Z, which they now pronounced [z], a foreign sound to the Romans. The Romans therefore readmitted Z to the alphabet, but relegated it to the end, the typical place for new letters. Greek also had a strange vowel sound, Y now being pronounced [y], a rounded front vowel as in French tu. Thus Y also joined the alphabet, at the end with Z. Perhaps no one realized that Greek Y and Roman V had originally been the same letter, V having lost its tail along the way. The [y] vowel was never easy for the Romans to pronounce, and even the Greeks eventually began pronouncing it simply as [i]. Since the alphabet could not have two letters named [i], Y came to be called y graeca, Greek I. The name zeta was borrowed along with the letter Z and survives in the British name zed.

  The Roman alphabet thus reached its full classical length of 23 letters. It ran A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z. Again, V was a vowel, the shape of the letter we now know as U.

  This was the alphabet with which the Roman Empire was ruled. The will of the emperor in Rome (an office instituted under Caesar Augustus in 27 BC) was conveyed to military commanders and governors of the provinces in written letters. Law courts, tax collectors, military clerks, and public officials everywhere depended on writing and its ability to retain information (overcoming time) and to communicate at a distance (overcoming space).

  As these uses of writing increased, so did others. As trade flourished and Rome prospered, the finances of the more wealthy citizens became complex enough to demand literacy. With Rome ruling the entire Mediterranean world, people were more mobile than previously, traveling great distances on governmental assignment, on military duty, or for commercial purposes. The use of private letter writing grew accordingly. With the growth of a leisured class, literary endeavors multiplied. Roman authors wrote history, satire, comic plays, epic poetry, odes, and technical manuals.

  Nevertheless, Roman society retained a strongly oral character. The majority of the population – almost all of those who were not wealthy, doing business for the wealthy, or employed by the government – were illiterate, particularly in the provinces where neither Latin nor Greek was the language of the native population. Literacy was not assumed: official communication to the public was done through town criers. Even the written word retained a strong oral connection. With no way to mass produce texts, authors gave public readings of their works; this was how they made a name for themselves. The wealthy, though literate, would often have their slaves do the hard work of writing, almost priding themselves on their poor handwriting. Even bookish people, if they wanted to relax, would have their slaves read to them rather than read to themselves. In the days before type, punctuation, and balanced page layout, even reading was work.

  The advent of Christianity had a complex effect on literacy in the Roman world. Originally a small and scattered sect, its members maintained unity through letters, with those from its original leaders – the apostles – later forming the Epistles of the Christian New Testament. As an offshoot of Judaism and a religion of the Book, it inherited a great respect for the written word. Literacy was therefore a valuable skill to the early Christians. However, Roman Christians were distressed by the educational curriculum of the time, which featured works with strongly pagan themes. This left them in the ambiguous position of valuing literacy but not education. The net result was that literacy was encouraged among the clergy and members of the growing monastic orders (many of whom would not otherwise have had a chance to learn to read), but not among the laity.

  By the time Christianity became widely accepted in the fourth century (Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 forbade persecution of Christians, and in 391 Theodosius outlawed paganism in favor of Christianity), the Roman Empire was already past its prime. Amidst economic woes and barbarian invasions, even literacy had begun to retreat. In an attempt to shore up the empire, Diocletian had divided it in two in 286 and focused on the eastern, previously Hellenistic half. Constantine reunited the empire temporarily but moved the capital to New Rome, Constantinople (now Istanbul), in 330. Rome was becoming a has-been.

  In the Western Empire, the barbarians continued to press. In 410 the Visigoths thoroughly sacked Rome, then moved on to found a kingdom in Gaul. In 406 barbarian tribes had already laid Gaul waste and one of them, the Vandals, went on to conquer Spain, then continued on into North Africa. The Roman legions were brought home from Britain to defend the homeland, and within decades Britain was invaded by Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. Attila the Hun, after inflicting heavy damage on the Eastern Empire, ravaged much of northern Italy in 452. One of his successors, Odoacer, gave the Western Empire its deathblow, proclaiming himself king of Italy in 476. The last Western Emperor, the young Romulus Augustulus, was deposed and pensioned off, too unimportant to assassinate.

  So ended the empire of Rome. The empire of Latin, however, kept right on going for another thousand years, and in some arenas – in education and in the Roman Catholic church – for some five hundred years after that. Nor did the Roman alphabet succumb; after some initial retreat it prospered greatly and is used far more widely today than anyone could have imagined in 476. (The Eastern Empire also continued. Considering itself the true Roman Empire, the Eastern, Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire, though shrunken, lasted until the fall of Constantinople in 1453.)

  In typical fashion, the barbarians that invaded the empire adopted the language of civilization and learned Latin: they may have conquered the empire, but Latin soon conquered them. Although North Africa (and later much of Spain) was lost to th
e Arabs – and therefore to Arabic – in the seventh century, much of the rest of the Western Empire went on speaking Latin, whether or not they were now ruled by barbarians. Even today, with the notable exception of Britain, the parts of Western Europe that were inside the Roman Empire generally speak modern forms of colloquial Latin, which we know as the Romance languages.

  The Latin the newcomers learned, however, was already slightly different in different regions. As the Romans had conquered each province, they had stationed legions there, sent administrators, and settled colonists. The colonists brought with them the colloquial Latin of the time, which became the new colloquial Latin of the particular province. Since spoken language is forever changing, the colloquial language the colonists brought was different in each province, depending on when the province was settled. From then on, the local Latin evolved somewhat differently than the language back home in Italy. As long as a province remained under Roman rule, it remained in some degree of contact with Italian Latin, and its further evolution was influenced by Italy. Once a province was lost to the Romans, these linguistic updates tapered off, though somewhat maintained in the west by the continued religious importance of Rome.

  The Romanian language, for example, began as the Latin of the colonists who first settled in the province of Dacia in AD 107. As Dacia was the last province to be added to the empire, it received a relatively late form of Latin, making Romanian in some ways more like Italian (the Latin that stayed home) than the other Romance languages.

  However, Dacia was also the first province to be lost to Rome, in 271. Changes occurring in Italy after this time left Dacian Latin (early Romanian) unaffected, while independent changes were free to occur in Dacian. And thus in other respects Romanian has less in common with Italian than other Romance languages.