The Roman Empire spread Latin around, eventually
leaving - through the fall of empire and the Middle Ages - a bunch of different Romance
languages. Wait, but what about here in Roman Africa? We know they wrote Latin; we know they spoke
it. Where did it go? Let's take a journey. Let's dig into the rare traces of evidence
of what an African Romance language could have been like before it vanished and wonder
what kind of Romance language it might've been. This is a map, the kind you've seen before in
games, books, movies. It shows the Roman Empire at its greatest
extent. Now let me add another layer of more recent
Roman... Romance stuff. It shows Romance languages that survived into
or nearly to modern times, from português to català to le français to sicilianu to armãneashti. I could hardly fit them all. This isn't a story about them though; it's
a mystery about the negative space between them. These missing areas tantalize us with their
lack of a modern home-grown Romance language. Our story starts here, in the largest of these
areas: North Africa. Home to a prosperous civilization speaking
not Latin but Punic, a Semitic language. Punic was heard in cities like Karaly, Hippo,
Utica meaning "old", and above all their famous capital "Qart Ḥadasht", Carthage, the "New City". But across the strait, the Roman Republic
is expanding out of Latium, down Italy's boot, and across into Sicily. Rome and Carthage will fight it out in not one
but three Punic Wars over more than a hundred years. Carthage loses and is leveled. Punic will dwindle but survive, sometimes
even in official inscriptions, but written beneath Latin. Yes, you speak Latin now! And your name is Africa. Rome divided up the land into provinces; the
one around Carthage bore the name Africa. In the late days of the empire these provinces,
ranging from Morocco into Libya today, were combined into this whole Diocese of Africa,
one of the most prosperous parts of the empire. For all that time, the Latin here reads just
like Latin. But as the empire cracks and crumbles, we
start to encounter enticing fragments of linguistic evidence from this "Roman Africa". The year is 430. This rich Roman diocese is facing a threat
from the north. The walls of Hippo, one of its most prosperous
cities, are surrounded by Gaisericus and his formidable force. These are Vandals, with a captial V. An Eastern Germanic people who made their
way into Spain, struggled to fight off both Romans and Visigoths, and now turn their sights
towards Africa. Inside the walls, the city of Hippo grows
hungrier by the day, including one of its most distinguished residents, Augustinus. Now in his 70s, Augustine has already left
a lofty literary legacy, yet at times he penned more mundane remarks. Like this one about the way people around
him spoke, our first hint: they can't tell a "bone" apart from a "mouth". See, in proper Latin one is "ōs" with a long
vowel and the other is short "ŏs", but here they'd both be "ŏs" because their "ears can't
discern the shortening or lengthening of vowels". The Vandals will conquer this city, Augustine
will perish in the siege, but the un-classical vowels hinted at will live on. The Vandals set up a kingdom and for one hundred
years impose their rule but not their tongue. This is a wooden tablet found south of Tébessa,
Algeria, just one of more than 40 Albertini Tablets that contain Vandal legal documents
written down not in their Germanic Vandal language but entirely in Latin. At first glance it looks mostly like good
Latin, until you notice all the misspellings. Take time to analyze those mistakes, because
they aren't random. The lawmakers leave off final M just about as much
as they spell it. They constantly confuse the letters B and
V, substituting the letter B for V over 50 times and only using V correctly 14 times! (A mistake that might be charmingly familiar
to any Spanish speakers out there, but we'll come back to that.) The Vandal tablets reveal something else,
too. Augustine reminds us that good Latin had long
and short vowels using the example of ŏs vs ōs. It's true for other vowels, like ĭ versus
ī. That short ĭ evolved in Romance languages
East and West to an ē sound, so a Vulgar Latin pear, pira, became an Italian pera. But in all the misspellings, the Vandal tablets
never do that. They consistently treat all Is the same: they
eat "pirs" not "pears". Which reminds me of another Romance language:
Sardinian. On Sardinia to this day the way they speak
is so unique that it's often treated separately from the rest of Romance. While other Romance languages shuffle vowels
around, Sardinian simply does not distinguish long ones from short: a pear isn't a pera,
it's a pira. Just as we're told happened in the early days
of African Romance. We've been ignoring a big part of this story. Latin and Punic haven't been the only tongues
in these North African provinces. Alongside, before and after them, there are
languages that look quite a bit different, written like this. To outsiders this was Moorish or Berber, but
it's a close-knit bunch of languages spoken by millions of Amazigh people today. Look at Tamazight words long enough, and you'll
find something curious: layers. They keep traces of words they've been in
contact with throughout the centuries; indeed, they integrate borrowed words remarkably well
and remarkably fast. Some words recall the Punic days before the
Romans took Carthage. Others are more recent, from Arabic, or even
very recent, from French. But among these layers are words from Latin. Tricky words. Some of them keep the shape of a proper, classical
nominative case -us. Others perhaps resemble something out of our
lost Romance language, like maybe accusative case ones without the M just like the Vandal
tablets. One author I read thinks this could explain
why Tamazight has -us and -u side by side. It's a sliver of a fact to go on, but if true, it fits with what we see in Romance
history: a tendency to take a non-nominative and make it the basic form of a noun. If African Romance emerged, it emerged in
tumultuous times. Roman rule falls to the Vandals. Vandals to the Byzantines. Byzantines give way to the Umayyads. And throughout all of them, Amazigh people
are playing an outsized role... heh, even Augustine is one. As are many of those who set out to take Hispania
for the Umayyad Caliphate in the year 711. It's tempting to point to this conquest as
a dividing line in history – I've seen that many times – but look through the eyes of this period, and you might just
see waves of takeovers. Four new powers in a couple centuries. But more than most conquests, this one brought
a new and lasting era for the region. Not always in the way you might think. So here's a question: when the Umayyad clan
from Mecca took Spain, and people arrived from Africa, what language do you think they
spoke? Was it... Arabic? Maybe Tamazight? Considering the histories and finds, according
to this scholar it was most likely some kind of Latin! And if their African Romance had the feature
we guessed it might earlier, failing to tell B apart from V, its early arrival in Spain
could explain a mismatch. The B/V confusion wasn't absent from Spain,
for whom the phrase goes vivere, to live, is bibere, to drink, but Isidore of Sevilla
testifies it's more characteristic of Africa. And yet it would become so very Spanish. So then, what if some new arrivals tipped
the scales in favor of B? Or what if... it's just a stretch to pin this
on our unknown emerging language, and other papers warn us V changed from the north instead. Oh well, what about words? Did African Romance leave a fingerprint on
the local vocabulary? Go back to Augstine, who told us how Africa
avoided that ōs/os confusion: they actually used an improper word "ossu". And so did Spain... ah, but that word was
popular with the rest of Romance, too. Instead consider the Romance word for "face". No, not that one. Not that one either. The one heard uniquely throughout Iberia. Rōstrum meant "beak" in Classical Latin, and
rostro still does in Italian, but guess where a "rostro" turned into "face"? Hispania and Africa. For me, it's more guesswork with few answers. But I can't help [but] follow this story to
the end. Whatever African Romance may have been, it
did come to an end. After it outlasted centuries of conquests,
the geographer al-ʾIdrisi writes clearly in the 1100s about a local tongue and gives
it a name not far from what I've been calling an "African Romance language": al-lisān al-lātīnī
al-ʾIfrīqī. Our final piece of evidence falls close to
that late date: the grave inscriptions of Tripolitania. These epitaphs do their best to keep Latinic
words alive. They do resort to ditching final M and writing
B for V, like we've seen before. They also often misspell Cs as K. See, Cs
in Romance languages changed from /k/ to a soft sound in /ts/e or /ts/i. But here in stone we read "pake" and "bikeisima"
where Italian has "pace" and "vigesima". By misspelling KE and KI, these stones insist
on preserving an old k sound that other Romance languages softened to ts, ch or s. The only other exceptions I know of are the
extinct Dalmatian and, again, the living Sardinian. Like so much of the evidence, it's suggestive,
not definitive, but it's our last trace of African Romance. As the language fades, a Norman conquest of
North Africa, led by the king of Sicily who bankrolled that geographer, brings contact
with new Latinic languages from Europe, and we'll hear nothing more from this variant
of Romance, perhaps on its way to becoming its own language or languages, that maybe,
just maybe if we reach into the past we catch hints of its lost final Ms, its Bs and Is
and KEs and KIs, its distinctive vocabulary, its affinities with Sardinian. Maybe. Thanks for adventuring back into language
history and wondering with me. "Gratias ago", thank you to patrons for keeping
me animating and supporting future linguistic tales. Stick around and subscribe for language.
Morder Tunisian Arabic still retains a lot of Latin words. Some of which are used frequently during our daily lives : Qattus from Latin Cattus, Fallus from Pollus, Sbitar from Latin hospitor, kayyas from latin Callis ...
Thanks for sharing
I once read that the tunisian dialect is derivated and linked to punic due to arabic and the aforementioned being both semetic languages..
it is sad that the literature of carthaginians vanished from existence... they must have produced some real masterpieces.. i came across a very long poem called punica written by a roman poet that takes the punic wars and carthage as its topic and concern .. tnajmou taqrawha tahfouna alkhr fma pdf
Great, I really enjoy nativlang videos. I enjoyed this one too.
Lots of could’ve beens and maybes...thanks for sharing anyway
Thanks a lot for this, interesting indeed