Tuesday, March 22, 2016

How to Talk Like a Roman by Ian Ross




To celebrate the launch of The Battle for Rome in Australia, HNSA is delighted to welcome Ian Ross, author of the Twilight of Empire series, to  educate us on how to talk like a Roman! Ian was born in England, and studied painting before turning to writing fiction. He has travelled widely, and after a year in Italy teaching English and exploring the ruins of empire reawakened his early love for ancient history, he returned to the UK with growing fascination for the period known as late antiquity. He now lives in Bath and has been researching and writing about the later Roman world and its army for over a decade.

How to talk like a Roman

How did ancient Romans speak? The obvious answer is that they spoke in Latin; everybody knows that. True enough, Latin was the principal language of the empire for nearly a thousand years, the language of government, the army and the law. But the majority of the population in the eastern half of the empire continued to speak Greek, even to write in Greek and to carve their grave inscriptions in that language. There were other tongues too: Syriac and Aramaic, and the older languages of the Italian peninsula, North Africa, and the Celtic and Germanic peoples of the north. All them coexisted beneath the surface of Latin unity.





Even within Latin there were accents and dialects. The population of the old Carthaginian territories of North Africa continued to speak with a Punic accent, which sounded rather slurred to Roman ears. The emperor Septimius Severus, who came from that land, apparently had a strong Punic accent even after years in Rome. He would probably have pronounced his own name as Sheptimiush Sheverush. We could almost imagine that inhabitants of different ends of the empire having trouble understanding each other, both speaking their own version of Latin.

But beyond different languages and dialects, there were other sorts of speech in the Roman world. Soldiers, for example, had their own particular language, the sermo militaris. Only a few words of this ‘soldier talk’ have survived, so we don’t know much about it. Was it something the troops themselves devised, like the ‘jack speak’ of the 18th century Royal Navy, or the ‘thieves’ cant’ supposedly spoken by criminals of the Georgian underworld, to avoid detection by honest folk? Something deliberate and exclusive, in other words, a private code for initiates only? Or was it just a basic form of Latin used by those in command, to communicate orders to recruits who may have come from different cultures, and spoken different languages?


 


Whatever it involved, this ‘barracks Latin’ was probably rather rough and barbaric to the educated Roman ear. But so was the speech of the common people more generally, who had their own way of talking too: the sermo vulgaris. We can get some idea of this, at least, from the graffiti remaining on the walls of Pompeii. Roman society, of course, was extremely patriarchal, and Roman culture was suffused with what we might call machismo. Pompeian graffiti often features violently graphic sexual slurs and boasts. But this is hardly surprising, when even high-class metropolitan poets like Catullus, whose audience included Julius Caesar himself, made sexual jokes so offensive to modern tastes that until fairly recently they could not be translated into English for fear of obscenity.



 

It’s often amusing, therefore, when readers today complain of historical novelists putting ‘bad language’ into the mouths of their fictional Romans. Often, writers are more likely to tone down their portrayals. Romans, most probably, spoke much the same as we do, with all of our differences and dialects, our crudity and politeness. But just as we ‘translate’ the Latin of our characters into various forms of modern English (the older habit of using ‘archaic’ speech in historical novels seems, thankfully, to have died out), so we translate their thought processes, their reactions and their ideologies into forms recognisable to a contemporary readership. This, of course, is inevitable. I have yet to read a historical novel that manages completely to eradicate all trace of a modern consciousness. Perhaps I would not want to.


Many thanks for the great post, Ian!

You can learn more about Ian and his books on his website and he would love to connect with you via Facebook  and Twitter. Take a look at his Journal for more great posts on the Roman world. 
The Twilight of Empire series can be purchased from Harper Collins Australia.




The Roman Empire is on the brink of civil war. Only Maxentius, tyrant of Rome, stands between the emperor Constantine and supreme power in the west. Aurelius Castus, promoted from the ranks for valour and loyalty, is now a tribune in Constantine's army. But great honour brings new challenges: Castus is tormented by suspicions that his aristocratic wife, the mother of his child, has been unfaithful. And as Constantine becomes increasingly devoted to Christianity, Castus is forced to ask himself whether he is backing the wrong man. All know that the coming war will decide the fate of empire. But Castus's own battle will carry him much further - into the shadowy realms of treachery at the heart of Rome itself. The third book in the brilliant Twilight of Empire.
 
Historical Novel Society Australasia celebrates writers and readers of historical fiction. Sign up to our newsletter to be the first to hear news of our conference in Melbourne in 2017.
  
 Elisabeth Storrs is the author of the Tales of Rome saga. Head over to her blog Triclinium for the chance to win a set of the Twilight of Rome series.

6 comments:

  1. I understood that many Roman soldiers spoke the language of the Etruscans. Could this not have been what was referred to as sermo militaris?

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  2. Thanks for dropping by, Steve. I'm not sure what Ian has to say about your suggestion. From my viewpoint, the Etruscans were integrated into the Roman population by the C 1st BCE soit's likely that some of their words and terms would have been absorbed into the Latin vernacular but I don't think the Etruscan language would have been the sermo militaris.

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  3. I'd agree with Elisabeth, I think - Etruscan certainly fed into Latin, and several Etruscan words and names turn up in later sources, but the Roman army of the empire recruited mainly outside Italy (especially after the 1st century AD), so I suspect the 'sermo militaris' would have drawn more on northern European languages, if it wasn't just slang!

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  4. Interesting that the army wasn't manned by'Romans' but by people they had conquered and assimilated. Is that right? And the Etruscan language was largely indecipherable to modern historians until the Pyrgi tablets were discovered in the latter part of the 20th century. If it was still prevalent in imperial Rome, I think it would have been investigated further.

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  5. Fascinating piece! As ex-military and a linguist I found it bang on the nail. When you're in a tense situation in a multi-national force, you need sharp, direct commands. In the family sting room or a dinner party at your boss's house, then a completely different register.
    As a writing technique, using style, tone, jargon and formality of language through dialogue is a powerful one.

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  6. Alison-you do a great job in your novels achieving just those differences! Glad you enjoyed the post:)

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