Re: Classic, Normal, and Vulgar Lingo

At 10:35 pm +0100 21/1/00, BP Jonsson wrote:
[...]
>
>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.
I somehow doubt this.  There was one big difference between the development
of literary Latin and the development of 'standard' Greek - the Romans,
particularly in the early period, were deliberately imitating models from a
different language (i.e. Greeks), the Greeks were imitating no foreign
forms but developing a standard from their own spoken language.

The only really artificial form of Greek in the early period was the
Homeric dialect.   Altho every so often some keen person produces the
"original" version with vau restored in all the correct places etc, this is
a vain exercise.  The Homeric works are clearly the result of a long oral
tradition existing in many dialects and the poems took shape in Ionia and
are thus essentially Ionian with a good admixture of Aiolian, all passed on
to us through 'official' Athenian recensions!

The early & Classical authors wrote in their various dialects.  This is
something we do not find in Latin.  They would hardly do this if there was
an artificial standard form.  Of course once one starts producing
literature, language prescriptivists appear so some artificiality begins to
creep in.

After Alexander we have the spread of the Greek Koine over the near/ middle
East.  I know this was essentially Attic Greek, but the peculiarly Athenian
features like -tt- where most Greeks had -ss- were dropped in favor of more
commonly acceptable forms.  It was not dissimilar IMHO to what has been
(and still is) going on in English as an 'international' English Koine is
developing.

I know that at centers like Alexandria there were scholars deliberately
writing stuff in antiquated form.  But the impression I get is that in the
Hellenistic world the position was very much like English in our modern
world - generally accepted written standards with educated speakers keeping
fairly close to them, and varying levels of colloquial dialects ranging
from near standard to slang, with older forms - sometimes scarcely
intelligible to the majority, e.g. some Lowland Scots dialects today,
surviving Doric dialects of the Peloponese then - still surving in the
language's homeland.

In the troubled times of the 3rd & 4th cents AD, when the Empire almost
disintegrated more than once, colloquial Greek seems to have undergone
quite a change with something like the modern pronunciation taking over.
The reaction among the Byzantine elite was to 'purify' the language and an
articially Atticizing language was adopted - and thus began Greek diglossia
which continued until the 20th cent.

The situation in Latin, however, seems to me a much more sharply defined
diglossia analogous to the Katharevousa/ Dimotiki diaglossia of Greece in
the 19th cent. & for much of the 20th.  Of course there were always cross
influences between the two and I suspect there were similar cross
influences between Classical & Vulgar Latin.

>It is
>not improbable that a person like Caesar could travel along a diglossic
>continuum in both languages(*), or would you disagree, Ray?
I have no doubt at all that Caesar had an excellent commond of Vulgar Latin
- you don't get the sort of loyalty from your troops that Caesar commanded
unless you can communicate with your troops!  But he was also no mean
writer of the Classical language.  However he did not balk at things like
'castrorum ponendorum' (which Cicero would've shuddered at, preferring
'castra ponendi' - assuming Cicero would want to talk about "pitching
camp"); indeed, I suspect we come close in Caesar's writings to the sort of
way the Senatorial classes spoke at that time.

>
>(*) Indeed I believe to have come across the phrase "bene doctus uterque
>lingua"
'utraque lingua' I think  :)

>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 don't know it.  The closest I can think of is Horace:
docte sermones utriusque linguae   [Carmina 3, 8, 5]

'thou who has learnt the modes of speaking of both languages'
('docte' is vocative)

The two languages are Latin & Greek.

[....]
>
>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!
But I assume the "Rhomaika katholika" was the artificially Atticizing Greek
of the Byzantine Empire which differed a fair bit from the spoken Greek of
the ordinary people.  Blue blood does not ensure that one will not speak
the vernacular  :)

[...]
>>"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?
ego.

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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