Mova0.6 pre-release⌕
☰
home / docs / languages / la / 13. Late and Christian Latin; the Vulgate

13. Late and Christian Latin; the Vulgate

From the third century on, written Latin splits into registers that classical grammar keeps apart:

This chapter describes the Latin of the Christian authors and of Jerome's Vulgate (late fourth century), the Latin Mova reads beside the Hebrew and the Greek, and the changes that lead from it to the medieval language (chapter 14) and to French (fr README).

Contents

  1. Sources and registers
  2. Spelling and sounds
  3. Nouns and cases
  4. The verb: periphrases and new forms
  5. Syntax: parataxis, quod/quia, word order
  6. Hebraisms and Grecisms of the Bible
  7. The Christian vocabulary
  8. How Mova handles it

1. Sources and registers

The Bible. The first Latin translations of the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint) and of the New Testament, the Vetus Latina, were made in Africa and Italy in the second and third centuries, word for word and in a popular style. Jerome revised the Gospels (383) and translated most of the Old Testament from the Hebrew (390–405). His translation, with the older versions he did not replace (most of the deuterocanonical books, the Psalter iuxta Septuaginta), became the Vulgate. Mova reads it in the Clementine edition of 1592 (public domain), the text the Catholic Church used until the twentieth century.

The Fathers. Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome himself and Gregory the Great write a Latin that is classical in its grammar and Christian in its vocabulary, and lower in register when they preach.

The documents. Inscriptions, letters, legal and practical texts show the spoken language: the Peregrinatio Egeriae (an account of a pilgrimage, late fourth century), the Appendix Probi (a list of words not to say: speculum non speclum, auris non oricla), the medical and veterinary manuals.

2. Spelling and sounds

The sound changes that make the Romance languages are visible in the spellings of the period (chapter 1):

3. Nouns and cases

4. The verb: periphrases and new forms

5. Syntax: parataxis, quod/quia, word order

Parataxis. Biblical narrative strings its sentences with et:

Et vidit Deus lucem quod esset bona: et divisit lucem a tenebris. Appellavitque lucem Diem, et tenebras Noctem: factumque est vespere et mane, dies unus. (Vulgate, Gen. 1:4–5)

On our data (UD Latin PROIEL training set, NC, counted only, 2026-10-22), et is 75 words in a thousand in the Vulgate New Testament and 21 in a thousand in Caesar's Gallic War.

Reported speech with quod, quia, quoniam instead of the accusative and infinitive: in the Vulgate the quod/quia clause outnumbers the AcI (340 to 241 in the same treebank), where Caesar has 11 to 295 (chapter 10, §11).

The verb moves forward. The Vulgate New Testament is SVO in 44% of its main clauses with a subject and an object, Caesar SOV in 53% (chapter 9, §6).

6. Hebraisms and Grecisms of the Bible

The Latin Bible follows its sources word for word in many places, and its idiom became the idiom of Christian Latin and, through it, of the European languages:

Mova sees these through its parallel Bibles: the Hebrew, the Greek and the Latin of the same verse are aligned by verse, and the meta-world of translate links them (Holy Wars).

7. The Christian vocabulary

8. How Mova handles it

The texts. Mova holds:

In Mova. Latin is parsed by Mova's English parser through en xpos-fill. LLCT dev LAS is 87.35 (2026-10-22); the Vulgate itself is not measured, since its open treebank is NC. Its closeness to the Romance word order (§5) makes it easier for an order-driven parser than Caesar or poetry. In the many-translations meta-world (Holy Wars) the Vulgate is the next text to plug in after the English. Two things are needed first:

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/la/13-late-latin/