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Re: USAGE: Vulgate (was: Slezan)

From:Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Sunday, February 1, 2004, 23:24
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 =============================================== http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown ray.brown@freeuk.com (home) raymond.brown@kingston-college.ac.uk (work) =============================================== "A mind which thinks at its own expense will always interfere with language." J.G. Hamann, 1760

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Costentin Cornomorus <elemtilas@...>