Re: USAGE: Vulgate (was: Slezan)

On Wednesday, January 28, 2004, at 07:10 PM, Costentin Cornomorus wrote:

> --- "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...> wrote:
[snip]

>> Nevertheless, despite knowing this, I had been
>> led astray by the
>> name "Vulgate" and have long believed it to
>> have been written in
>> the vulgar Latin.  Thanks for setting me
>> straight.
>
> A strange quirk is the name of that text.
But this is the English name - properly they are:
editiones vulgatae 'published editions'.

> Apart
> from there being two Vulgates (Old and New), the
> name was borrowed from the Latin name of the
> Septuagint, which itself was called Vulgate on
> account of it being written in Greek, the vulgar
> tongue of the Jews that used the text.
well, except that 'vulgar' is now a bit misleading in English*.

What we have here is quite simple:
vulgus = 'the public'
vulgare = to publish, to put into the public domain

The Septuagint put the Hebrew scriptures into the public domain
not only for the hellenized Jews of Alexandria but, indeed, for
the Hellenistic world generally; hence it was truly an 'editio
vulgata' - an edition put into the public domain.

*Thus 'Vulgar Latin' IMO is not the best name for the reconstructed
language; Proto-Romance would, I think, be less misleading or maybe
even better 'Romanic' <-- 'lingua Romanica' (a term actually used).
But it's difficult to change established usage.
=====================================================================

On Wednesday, January 28, 2004, at 07:30 PM, Costentin Cornomorus wrote:

> --- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
[nop
>> And you tell correctly :)   How anyone who has
>> actually read any of
>> the Vulgate can think it's Vulgar Latin beats
>> me. It has all the
>> full-blown morphology of Classical Latin.
>
> I look at it like this: if it were written in VL,
> why would they [linguists, et r] have to
> _reconstruct_ VL from patchwork sources like
> textual errors, spelling mistakes, Romance
> languages, and all?
Yes, indeed  :)
>
[snip]
> There is simply no way he could have used
> Vulgar Latin; there was no standard form.
>
> Well, he could have - and it would have been a
> boon for all the North African Romance
> conlangers! ;)
Yep - but if he used the North African norms, the
result would have been too regionalized and not helped
promote Christianity elsewhere.  There simply was no single
standard.

> I mean, when Dante wrote, there
> was no standard Italian either!
Indeed not - but Dante made a conscious decision to write his
Divina Cemedia in a vernacular language and, after considering
Provençal which had already a literary form, plumped for Tuscan
and thus set the standard for a literary italian language to
emerge.

It is true that Jerome could have taken a vernacular form, perhaps
of Italy, and help forge a literary form.  But the result would have
seemed a regional version to peoples in Gaul, the Iberian Peninsular
and North Africa, which would rather defeat one of the aims of producing
an 'editio vulgata' - also it would have been rejected as barbaric by the
educated.

More importantly Jerome was not commissioned to translate the scriptures
into any vernacular, but to compile a single, coherent and complete Latin
version.

Dante had no such commission.

Ray
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