the Latin language of Frostborn
Reader Brendan asks:
Just found your Frostborn series. Very well done, from what I’ve read so far.
I do have a question: is the “Latin” spoken in that universe actually something more like Brithenig? I’d think so, given how it had a thousand years to evolve, and it was spoken by British Celts/Romans.
The Latin spoken in Andomhaim would originally be the Latin of Late Antiquity mixed with numerous Celtic words, since the founders of Andomhaim came out of sub-Roman Britain. In the thousand years since, it has changed, mostly by addition of quite a lot of loanwords from orcish, dwarven, and dark elven. Especially orcish, since the humans of Andomhaim had the most contact with orcs so far. Like, a lot of the common curse words are actually orcish, since orcish is a more satisfying language in which to curse. 🙂
That said, when the founders of Andomhaim arrived from Earth, they had a complete library of Roman and Greek authors (including some now lost on Earth), so Andomhaim has preserved what they call “proper” Latin, or the Latin as written down in the Roman authors they brought from Earth. So an educated noble would be expected to converse in proper Latin without any orcish or dwarven loanwords turning up, and there would be a difference between the Latin of a noble and a commoner, since a commoner would simply use whatever word he had learned, whether Latin, orcish, or dwarven. That was why Morigna’s speech always sounded so archaic to everyone she met – she learned most of her Latin from Coriolus, who spoke “proper” Latin, and she learned orcish as a separate language, and she never mixed the two.
-JM
(I’m back… I had to dig up this post since I’ve taken so long to respond.)
So it looks like there’s a diglossic situation? I know in our world, Romance countries typically kept Latin as the official “high” language until well into the Middle Ages, and only made their Vulgar Latin varieties official later. (Portugal, for example, switched from Latin to Portuguese in the 1200s, IIRC.)
As Ridmark lives in the 1400s, it would look like plenty of time for something like Brithenig to develop among the commoners, with a katharevousa-like classical Latin kept among the upper classes and for official and church purposes. I think it would be cool to have something along the lines of Brithenig be the variety spoken by commoners, perhaps with a bunch of orcish words thrown in. Plus, it would provide a plausible way to explain names like “Andomhaim” or “Ridmark” which don’t look very Classical Latin (I’d expect the Latin forms to be something like *Andomania or *Ridemarcus), but could plausibly be a Brithenig-like language.
That all seems logical. Though I do expect the Andomhaim version of Latin would have quite a few orcish loanwords that have migrated in by this point, and maybe with a few dwarven terms. Though given that Ridmark and company have only spent parts of books 1, 4, and 9-10 in the actual High Kingdom itself, it hasn’t come up yet.