Re: Vulgar Latin

At 7:42 pm -0500 9/1/00, Nik Taylor wrote:
>Raymond Brown wrote:
>>              1st decl.          2nd decl.       3rd decl
>>            SING.   PLUR.     SING.   PLURAL    SING.   PLURAL
>> Nom.       capra   capras    muros   muri      flores  flores
>> Oblique    capra   capras    muro    muros     flore   flores
>
>Wasn't the 1st declension nom. pl. -e or -ae?
No - the evidence is that the nom. & acc. plural were both -as.

-as was, in fact, the original nom. plural ending.  The ending -ai, -ae was
a later development on the analogy of the 2nd declension & pronominal
stems.  It may be that the older ending survived in rustic speech.  More
likely it was the influence of the 3rd declension (or both) that led to the
'restoration' of the nom. pl. -as.

The modern Italian & Romanian plural -e developed from -as.  The final -s
in the eastern dialects gave way to some palatal sound, and /aj/ --> /e/.
If the plural 'amice' had survived we'd expect the plural of 'amica'
/amika/ to be /amitSe/ in modern Italian, just as the plural of /amiko/ is
/amitSi/ - it isn't.  The plural is /amike/ 'amiche'  <--- amicas.

>
>> (some dialects preferred 'esse' <-- 'ipse' in both uses).
>
>Were there none that used "ille" for pronouns and "ipse" for articles or
>vice versa?
Brithenig   :)

I'm sure there must have been.  Indeed, some dialects of Catalan still use
forms derived from 'ipse' as the def. art. but AFAIK they all use forms
from 'ille' for the pronouns.  IIRC differentiation of use is found in some
Sardinian dialects - but I'd have to check that one out.

>> Spanish 'aquel' <-- accu ille.  In Dacia we find 'acce', Romanian 'acest'
>> <-- acce iste.
>
>I've also seen _aqueste_ and (I think) _aquese_ in samples of Old
>Spanish.
Excellent - thanks.

>>   A big subject, but *very, very* briefly: disappearance of inflected
>> passive (& deponent verbs!)
>
>When did this occur?  Was this an early or a late development?
There's evidence even in Classical Latin that deponent; Petronius, e.g. has
'loquis' instead of 'loqueris'.   AFAIK there's no evidence of any
synthetic passives in Vulgar Latin, so without checking, I'm pretty sure
this was an early development.  The fact that the perfect tenses were
already analytical even in the Classical language must've given a strong
impetus to make the whole passive analytic.

I should say my reply to Nicole was, of necessity, simplified in places.
VL was never a standardized language as CL was; it was simply the spoken
Latin carried across the Empire by legionaries, merchants & settlers.

One feature I didn't mention was the adoption of quite a few Greek terms
into the slang language - cf. French 'coup' ultimately from Greek
'kolaphos'.

Ray.


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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
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