Throughout the Dark Ages, the few literate Europeans continued to write in classical Latin. Or they tried to: as their speech evolved, their writing sometimes mutated to match it. A list of commonly misspelled words, written in the third or fourth century, offers a glimpse of what was happening. For example, the list insists on calida (hot) not calda: the unstressed “i” was evidently disappearing. (Now it is calda in Italian.) Other sounds were changing, too. Use frigida not fricda, the list advises. The word for “cold” was on its way to today’s fredda.
在整個黑暗時代，少數精通文學的歐洲人繼續用古典拉丁語寫作。隨著語言不斷進化，其他人有時試圖讓寫作發生相應的變化。一份寫于三、四世紀的常見拼寫錯誤的單詞列表，能讓我們一窺當時發生了什么。例如，這個列表堅持使用“calida”(意為“熱的”)而不是“calda”：不重讀的“i”顯然正在消失。(現在意大利語是“calda”。) 其他讀音也在變化。那個列表建議使用“frigida”而不是“fricda”。這個詞意為“冷的”，現在寫作“fredda”。
Nor was pronunciation the only moving part. Modern students of Latin often wrestle despondently with the language’s case system, in which the role a noun plays in a sentence is signalled by alternative endings. These collapsed into fewer forms in the Dark Ages; in modern Italian they leave no trace. Meanwhile, Latin’s three genders (masculine, neuter and feminine) merged into two. Words were substituted. People stopped using Latin’s loqui, “to speak”, and started using parabolare, which originally had a narrower meaning. It became Italian’s parlare.
發音并不是唯一改變的部分?，F代拉丁語學生常常沮喪地與這種語言的大小寫系統作斗爭，在這種系統中，名詞在句子中所起的作用由不同的結尾來表示。這些在黑暗時代坍塌成更少的形態；在現代意大利語中，它們沒有留下任何痕跡。與此同時，拉丁語的三種性別(陽性、中性和陰性)合并為兩種。很多詞有了替代。人們不再使用拉丁語的“loqui” (意為“說話”)，而是開始使用“parabolare”，這個詞最初的意思比較少?，F在這個詞的意大利語是“parlare”。
A millennium or so after Cicero’s moans, in other words, Europeans spoke a range of tongues that were nevertheless related to each other and to Latin. What happened next in Italy had as much to do with politics as with the dynamics of languages. The contrast with its northern neighbour is instructive. France was unified by the conquest of territory spreading out from Paris; the conquerors brought Parisian speech with them, and that became “French”. A mighty state then did its best to teach that language everywhere, and to eradicate local variants.
換句話說，在西塞羅抱怨之后的一千年左右，歐洲人說著各種各樣的語言，盡管這些語言彼此關聯，也與拉丁語有關。接下來在意大利發生的事情，不僅與語言的活力有關，也與政治有關。與北方鄰國的對比很能說明問題。法國通過征服從巴黎向外擴張的領土而統一；征服者帶來了巴黎語，并成為“法語”。當時，這個強大的國家竭盡全力在各地 教授這種語言，并根除當地的變體。
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