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Re: Proto-Romance

From:Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Monday, March 22, 2004, 19:48
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? 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. 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. Ray =============================================== http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown ray.brown@freeuk.com (home) raymond.brown@kingston-college.ac.uk (work) =============================================== "A mind which thinks at its own expense will always interfere with language." J.G. Hamann, 1760

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And Rosta <a.rosta@...>