Old Languages Never Die; They Just Fade Away: The preacher speaking aloud in Latin in the middle of the first millennium may have been producing sounds that were startlingly at variance with the spellings in his written notes. This can explain how it is that congregations could understand St. Augustine’s sermons, though written down and transmitted to us in ‘classical Latin’. And Dante probably thought of himself as using one form of Latin (which we would now call Italian) to write the Divine Comedy, and another he called gramatica (we would just call it Latin) for his scholastic works, such as the de vulgari eloquentia. He thus distinguished between the literary and vernacular registers of the same language.
