alphabet

[Hortatus]

The Collins gem Latin dictionary says the word for alphabet is abecedarium, -ii (nt) and elementa (ntpl) but Cassell's gives litterarum nomina et contextus.

Any ideas on the different versions, were they used at different times?

I liked the idea of abecedarium, and wondered if its etymology was abcd-ium or abd-dare-ium, as in 'to give your abc's'.

The internet tells me that Spanish also has a word with this root 'abecedario', as well as the word 'alfabeto' like those French, Italian and English use.

 

[Dantius]

abecedarium would come from abcd, no relation to dare. elementa is sometimes thought to derive from the letters L, M, and N, though that's not the only theory.

What you're seeing here is something that will come up a lot with English->Latin dictionaries, namely that a lot of concepts which we have really strongly established terms for in English did not have terms in Latin that would make sense outside of specific contexts. This is why, beyond sentences in Latin composition textbooks that are carefully constructed to help you practice English->Latin skills, it is very difficult to compose good Latin with just a dictionary until you gain a good amount of reading experience and experience using a detailed Latin->English dictionary (plus word search tools like the PHI Latin Texts website) in order to understand how the Romans would express a thought.

The term abecedarium is only found in late Latin. It's probably the best term for the concept of the alphabet, though; different people will have different opinions about how "classically" one should compose Latin, so many would object to the use of abecedarium on the grounds that it's not classical.

The word elementum is classical and often used to mean the first rudiments of knowledge in a specific field, or of course the elements that make something up. Suetonius seems to use elementa to mean something like "alphabet": "quartam elementorum litteram, id est D pro A et perinde reliquas commutet." (describing Caesar's cypher: "one should switch the fourth letter of the alphabet, that is D, for A, and likewise for the rest"), but that's highly context-dependent and elementa would probably not be readily understood to mean "alphabet" outside of context. The phrase prima litterarum elementa ("first rudiments of letters") comes up, but that refers to the knowledge of the alphabet and how to draw/pronounce the letters/spell words, rather than to the alphabet itself.

Since both of those terms are slightly problematic, Cassell uses a more periphrastic phrase derived from Quintilian: "Neque enim mihi illud saltem placet, quod fieri in plurimis video, ut litterarum nomina et contextum prius quam formas parvoli discant." ("Nor at any rate does this practice please me, which I see happening in many cases, that children learn the names and order of the letters before their shapes"). Quintilian here is talking about a specific problem he has with early education where people memorize the alphabet in order but don't get good at recognizing the individual letters outside of contexts, so he recommends that teachers also present the alphabet in rearranged orders so that children are recognizing the letters from their actual shapes and not just knowing like "ok this must be C because the last letter was B". So in this context, litterarum nomina et contextus ("the names and order of the letters") does refer to the alphabet, but simply giving that as a translation of "alphabet" ignores the fact that Quintilian uses such a long phrase because of the specific concept he's trying to emphasize, which is a contrast between rote memorization of "C comes after B" and actual knowledge of the letters in the form of "this shape is a C".

 

[Gregorius Textor]

And of course the word "alphabet" itself comes from Alpha and Beta, the first two Greek letters, so "abecedarium" makes excellent sense (if one doesn't insist on being strictly classical).

In English, we also speak of "learning your ABC's", meaning "to learn the alphabet."

Learning the order of the letters seems to be important mainly in order to be able to find words in dictionaries.

 

[Hortatus]

gratias ago Dantius. You have an uncanny knack of not only answering (in delightful depth) the question I thought I was posing, but also answering the one I didn't know I was thinking!

I'd been getting frustrated with my reading and had decided to go back to flashcards for some vocab practice. And hence picked up the dictionary and started browsing - now I see the problems with that quite clearly, and I
shall go back to Caeser and learn his vocab with flashcards instead. Much better, as you say, to learn in context of some reading.

Cassells seems to be structured this way, classical based words and giving lots of references to who words were used by with examples - a bit like case law. The Collin's gem seems therefore to include Late Latin terms, and no usage examples.

I have since seen mention to the word alphabetum, and that makes sense as Collins English dictionary claims 'alphabet' comes from Late Latin, C15.

I'm curious as to what is happening with Spanish and Italian - alfabeto and l'alfabeto. English obviously just takes off the declension entirely as that is what English did, went declension-less. I always thought English did this out of laziness, and of course maybe it did, but it certainly gives the language some options, so maybe it was partly deliberate. But what are Italian and Spanish doing, going to an -o ending instead of keeping the Latin -um. Did both languages make the move away from Latin declension endings at the same time, and was there some specific advantage from the move. Is there any link between the -o ending and the ablative ending in Latin?

It fascinates me why people no longer speak Latin - and that is so anglo-centric of me because of course the romance languages are very Latin-like, but why did they change in the way they have.

 

[Hortatus]

And of course the word "alphabet" itself comes from Alpha and Beta

I vividly remember the first time I realised that, and was just so shocked that such an obvious etymology had remained hidden to me for so long. Scary, the things we learn when we are young and don't question.

In English, we also speak of "learning your ABC's", meaning "to learn the alphabet."

Yes, I'd forgotten we do this as well, I'd thought is wasn't a word though, but 'ABC' is indeed listed in my Collins English.

 

[Clemens]

The reason spoken Latin lost its declensions is largely because of phonological change. For example, the ending -um was probably already pronounced /o/ by non-elite speakers of Latin as early as the first or second century. In the case of a word like alphabetum (assuming that word was even used then), the accusative would then be pronounced as if written *alphabeto, and the dative and ablative cases would also be pronounced the same, having lost the distinction of length. So here already we have three cases with identical endings. Once the cases start to sound like each other, they stop being able to be distinguished by ending alone, and speakers start relying on word order and prepositions and circumlocutions. Eventually this collapsed the six cases into two, at least in the case of Old French.

This process was already underway by the time of Classical Latin, by the way. Proto-Indo-European has more cases, and the locative and vocative cases in Classical Latin are barely surviving. In the case of the locative, it's only with certain words and it always resembles another case, and the vocative is identical with the nominative except with masculine singular nouns of the second declension.

 

[Dantius]

I'd been getting frustrated with my reading and had decided to go back to flashcards for some vocab practice.

I've perhaps experienced the same phenomenon with both Latin and Greek — it's a lot easier to pick up grammar than vocab, so I found that when I started trying to read texts I ended up looking up so many words that it made the experience pretty tedious for me. For Latin, using the Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata series helped with that, since it glosses words along the side (in Latin or with pictures) which saved a lot of tedium. With Greek, I just struggled through the tedium until I had picked up enough words to start reading more comfortably.

 

[scrabulista]

Spanish and Italian do not have the neuter grammatical gender.
The 2nd declension in Latin has the ablative in -o, whether neuter or masculine. I'm not sure if that influenced formation of Spanish words or not.

The few neuter Latin words with Spanish cognates I could come up with were indeed masculine in Spanish.
tempus -> tiempo
nomen -> nombre (not ending in o but masculine)
bracchium -> brazo
caelum -> cielo

Wait for other opinions on that....there may be quite a few words that are neuter in Latin but feminine in Spanish or Italian.

 

[Clemens]

Spanish and Italian do not have the neuter grammatical gender.
The 2nd declension in Latin has the ablative in -o, whether neuter or masculine. I'm not sure if that influenced formation of Spanish words or not.

The few neuter Latin words with Spanish cognates I could come up with were indeed masculine in Spanish.
tempus -> tiempo
nomen -> nombre (not ending in o but masculine)
bracchium -> brazo
caelum -> cielo

Wait for other opinions on that....there may be quite a few words that are neuter in Latin but feminine in Spanish or Italian.

The form of nouns and adjectives in Western Romance languages is largely derived from the accusative. I don’t know about Eastern Romance, but it might be the same. Latin neuter nouns very often become masculine, but sometimes the neuter plural is reinterpreted as a feminine singular. Sometimes a neuter noun becomes two separate words, one of each gender, like grain, graine in French.

 

[Hortatus]

The reason spoken Latin lost its declensions is largely because of phonological change. For example, the ending -um was probably already pronounced /o/ by non-elite speakers
of Latin as early as the first or second century.

Thank you, this makes a lot of sense to me - as a beginner I sometimes find I can make sense of Latin prose without decoding with the declensions, especially if I have an idea roughly what the work is about.
I can see that being just as true for the non-native Joe in classical times as it is for me now. Perhaps this is just something that was bound to happen given how rapidly the empire expanded and took in
new populations.

Spanish and Italian do not have the neuter grammatical gender.

I've been looking at the language tree and seen that Italian and Spanish share a descent through Romance and Italo-Western, so I am guessing they are closer to each other overall than either of them is to Classical Latin - just a guess though, as a hobbyist (I like your disclaimer!).

I've perhaps experienced the same phenomenon with both Latin and Greek — it's a lot easier to pick up grammar than vocab.

This gives me hope! So far it feels a much better approach and I'm making progress again. I've also started using the etymology suggestions from Wiktionary to reduce the memory load.

I have a question about this sentence from Caeser:

Pro multitudine autem hominum et pro gloria belli atque fortitudinis angustos se fines habere arbitrabantur, qui in longitudinem milia passuum CCXL, in latitudinem CLXXX patebant.

In a YouTube tutorial by LatinPerDiem (the ones on Bello Gallico are great) he suggests the part angustos se fines is iconic, as se is literally (now do I mean literally or figuratively, or both) trapped in the narrow borders.
So is this iconic because Caeser was a particularly skilled writer showing a particular style, or would any Latin writer have done the same? Is there a name for this kind of wordplay?

 

[Clemens]

Thank you, this makes a lot of sense to me - as a beginner I sometimes find I can make sense of Latin prose without decoding with the declensions, especially if I have an idea roughly what the work is about.
I can see that being just as true for the non-native Joe in classical times as it is for me now. Perhaps this is just something that was bound to happen given how rapidly the empire expanded and took in
new populations.

Don't misunderstand me; I'm not suggesting that Latin suddenly lost declensions because non-native speakers came along. Latin had already lost cases long before there was an empire.

 

[Pacifica]

I don't think there's any wordplay there. It's just typical word order for a (non-emphatic) pronoun to come in second position, very often "intruding" between an adjective and a noun, for example.

 

[Dantius]

Yeah, it's called "Wackernagel's Law," that certain words, especially se, tend to come in second position in a Latin sentence. I tend to be skeptical about that sort of word picture, though there are other examples that people sometimes cite ("in multo lapsantem sanguine nati" from Vergil ("slipping on the copious blood of his son"), in which lapsantem ("slipping") is placed in the middle of the prepositional phrase about the blood, just as the referenced character is slipping in the middle of the pool of blood). I just struggle to believe that most of those are intentional, because the word order is natural enough that they don't seem marked.

 

[Hortatus]

Latin had already lost cases long before there was an empire.

Oh thanks for the correction. I found an interesting article to set me straight, which covers the loss of the neuter and a little about the loss of the cases

I just struggle to believe that most of those are intentional, because the word order is natural enough that they don't seem marked.

Yeah, it does seem kind of weak evidence, still at least it helped me learn the difference between emphatic and non-emphatic pronouns