Re: Classic, Normal, and Vulgar Lingo

At 22:22 +0100 20.1.2000, Raymond Brown wrote:
>>
>>Most people would've spoken a form somewhere on a continuum from Vulgar
>>Latin to Classical Latin,
>
>Yes, indeed.  I have argued much the same.  And probably most of the Roman
>aristos in the Classical period were pretty much trilingual - Vulgar Latin,
>a sort of 'katharevousa' Latin, and Greek.
But there must have existed much the same continuum in Greek at the time --
indeed at all times after Alexander, I imagine! -- so that Plutachus and
his servants spoke as differently as did Seneca and his servants.  It is
not improbable that a person like Caesar could travel along a diglossic
continuum in both languages(*), or would you disagree, Ray?

(*) Indeed I believe to have come across the phrase "bene doctus uterque
lingua" somewhere -- probably Seneca writing to Lucilius, since that is the
only prose I read where something like that would have been likely to
occur.  I may have read its Swedish/German/English equivalent in some
modern text and translated it mentally on the fly.

BTW I once listened to a lecture on Byzantine historians.  Among their
fovorite complaints against militarist-become-Emperors was that they could
not speak correct Greek -- or "Rhomaika katholika" as the phrase goes! :-)
--, and yet these purple-clad sword-rattlers were generally blue-blooded
natives of Constantinople.  It is a much later period, of course!

>
>
>"Hadvantages" 'Arry used to say whenever he wanted to say "advantages", and
>"ambush" became "hambush".   He thought he'd
>spoken marvellously if he said "hambush" as powerfully as he could.
>
Qui Anglice interpretavit?



/BP

 B.Philip Jonsson  <mailto: bpj@...> <mailto: melroch@...>
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