Other Vulgar Latins?
From: | Peter Bleackley <peter.bleackley@...> |
Date: | Tuesday, February 21, 2006, 12:08 |
Let's start off with the not entirely outrageous premiss that Classical
Latin was the Patrician acrolect of Latin, and Vulgar Latin was anything
else. Now, we know that the Vulgar Latin from which modern Romance
languages are descended lost [h], but we know from Catullus' poem "Chommoda
dicebat", and from graffiti, that in the first century BC there were people
who overproduced [h], so it appears that there was more than one form of
Vulgar Latin. Presumably the forms with [h] lost were Plebian dialects
particularly common in the legions, explaining their spread across the Empire.
What evidence do we have of the range of dialectal variation in Latin? It
might be fun to extrapolate a descendent of Arrius' dialect.
Pete
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