Re: Evolution of Romance (was: **Answer to Pete**)

Roger Mills wrote:
>> (Sorry for the delay, I used the wrong email addr.)
>[snip]
>>>> Well, yes, Vulgar Latin was not " a colloquialized form of what we
>>>> call Classical Latin." Indeed, I find that description somewhat
>>>> misleading.
>>>
>>> Sorry, bad phrasing on my part. What I meant was, CL and the language
>>> of the man in the street should better be considered as _registers_
>>> of a single language, just as, I assume, the language of the KJV was
>>> not that of contemporary everyday speech; nor e.g. the language of
>>> serious writing on history, literature, religion, science et al.
>>> nowadays is not the speech of everyday Americans or Brits. But they
>>> are variants of a single language, not sister languages-- and the
>>> latter, I gather, is what M. Cortez is claiming for Roman times.

I still consider the situation of Dimotiki vis-a-vis Katharevousa in
Greece of the 19th & 20th cent to be a better analog of the relationship
between Vulgar Latin and Classical Latin. The term 'diglossia' suggests
they were felt to be in some ways different languages and I think a case
can be made for considering Dimotiki (or rather the continuum of demotic
dialects) and the artificially created Katharevousa as sister languages
(maybe more like Siamese twins  :)

But as many people used both forms in different circumstances, the two
forms of Greek (one natural the other artificial) did cross fertilize,
so to speak, so that there was a whole spectrum of dialects/idiolects
between the two. My guess is that something like that was going on in
the Roman Empire. But I'll not labor point any more. As one mailer
observed, it depends on how one defines 'dialect' and 'language'.

>>>>>> Well, slap my ass and call me Cato-- has M. Cortez never heard of
>>>>>> Proto-Romance?
>>>>
>>>> Isn't Proto-Romance late Vulgar Latin?
>>>
>>> That's certainly been the conventional wisdom for years....Some
>>> respondents to the thread have said "Well, there's no written
>>> evidence for anything like VL in Roman times"-- ignoring known
>>> dialectal features, Plautus, Pompeiian graffiti, etc., and the later
>>> CE writers who complied lists of correct/incorrect pronunciations and
>>> spellings. When one poster mentioned these, the response was "How do
>>> you know that?" Duh. Read a book, people, there's good, though not
>>> vast, documentation.
Quite so - the evidence most certainly is there and can be found if one
looks.

[snip]
>>>> If all that M. Cortez is doing is to say "French ain't descended
>>>> from Classical Latin," then I go along with that. But if he's saying
>>>> something radically different, i.e. that Proto-Romance was not
>>>> related to any sort of Latin then, of course, I disagree. But, as I
>>>> said, methinks one needs to read the book.
>>>
>>> Agreed. I've asked the ideolenguistas where I can get it. Amazon-US
>>> doesn't turn up anything. Is there an Amazon-France, or
>>> equivalent...?
Yep - I've ordered books from it. It's quite simply:
http://www.amazon.fr/

--
Ray
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