Re: Proto-Romance

In a message dated 3/22/2004 2:48:12 PM Eastern Standard Time,
ray.brown@FREEUK.COM writes:

>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.
I took the question to mean "which elements of classical Latin were not found
in Vulgar Latin of any period?'  (And if that's not his question, it's mine
at least.)

I had always assumed that Classical Latin was no more of a "conlang" than the
literary register of any other language.  That is to say, it would have
included some vocabulary that was rare or absent in ordinary conversion, sentences
would have been longer & more complicated than in speech, certain grammatical
devices would be more or less common than in speech, etc., but the fundamental
structure would be essentially the same as in the spoken language of the
period during which the literary form took shape.  That is to say, it would
largely be a more conservative version of the spoken language.

When people on this list call Classical Latin "a literary conlang" or the
like, that suggests to me that there were some substantial granmmatical
differences between it and the spoken language that did not come from CL merely being
more conservative.  I keep expecting someone to follow up by claiming something
like [to make up a fake example] "In ordinary Latin speech, no one ever used
those future tense forms found in Latin grammar books.  Some Latin authors
made those up to make the language more like Greek. That's one of the conlangy
parts of Classical Latin."

So, with that as background, I'd like to ask:  was any substantial part of
Classical Latin grammar constructed/made up, and opposed to coming from the
Vulgar Latin of the appropriate period?

Doug

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