Re: Proto-Romance

Ray:
> On Sunday, March 21, 2004, at 12:44 PM, And Rosta wrote:
> [snip]
> > Ray:
> >> One must bear in mind that Classical Latin was essentially a literary
> >> _conlang_ created from Vulgar Latin under the influence of literary
> >> Greek.
> >>   It was probably at no time anyone's L1, tho we assume the Senatorial
> >> classes would've approximate to it at least on formal occasions.
> >
> > What were some of the conlangy elements?
>
> I don't really understand the question. What are the conlangy parts of
> Quenya & Sindarin?
Unlike Q & S, CL is obviously not entirely apriori. So by "the
conlangy elements" I mean X such that "nonconlang Latin + X =
conlang Latin". Presumably you're talking about more than standard
& literary langs, because standard lgs can get spoken as L1s, and
literary lgs are registers rather than languages.

> We know they are conlangs because we know their
> external history.  But if similar fragments of the languages as those in
> LotR had occurred in some book by an obscure author in a setting which
> seemed to be in this present world, would we readily spot that they were
> Conlangs, e.g. if we came across such fragments in a 19th cent. traveler's
> account, say, of the Amazonian area in a book which otherwise gave no hint
> of being a fake, would the languages have features that made them seem
> conlangy.
>
> Or, to get a closer parallel, what are the features of the modern Greek
> Katharevousa which make us suspect it was a conlang if we knew it only
> from the written form & had no (or very little) written record of the
> demotic form of the language?
>
> A reconstruction from the Romance languages would simply never have given
> us Classical Latin. Indeed, if Classical had never been written down there
> would be absolutely no way in which it could be reconstructed from any
> external evidence.  Whole books have been written on the subject of the
> development of the literary language so it's not something easily done in
> an email.
Of the properties that CL has and VL lacks, which are inventions?
(I'm genuinely curious & have no idea what the answer is.)

> The written language obviously began as a written form of the spoken
> language.  Fairly obviously the Latin of Plautus must've been close to the
> language of the 'person in the street' otherwise he wouldn't have been
> able to make his living as a writer of popular comedy (Terence was in a
> different position - he had wealthy patronage, so his language is a bit
> more refined.)
>
> But as soon as the literate classes came under the influence of the Greek
> literary tradition, they consciously refined their written language in a
> 'purifying' manner (a bit like the Greek Katharevousa two millennia later)
>   which reach its "perfection" in the latter part of the 1st cent. BCE and
> the first part of 1st cent CE.. That 'perfection', known as Classical
> Latin then remained the standard from which written Latin was judged.
>
> Meanwhile the spoken language of the masses had gone its own way and
> continued to do so till it broke up into the regional variants that gave
> rise to the later Romancelangs.
>
> It's a bit like what might have happened if the English of the KJV Bible
> had been looked upon as the "perfect form of English" and people had
> continued to the present day to write the same language while the spoken
> language had continued to changed as it still does. Even by the time of
> King James (I of England, VI of Scotland), such language was archaic &
> artificial. The translators retained it to give the scriptures a feeling
> of 'timelessness', but written Stuart English is rather different and
> written English has continued to change, lagging only a bit behind the
> spoken language.
Retaining archaisms through the power of writing is interestingly
different from deliberate purification (or invention of other sorts).
The former on the whole seems to be a concomitant of writing & is,
I believe, evident in most literate cultures, but the latter isn't.

--And.

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