Re: Just a Little Taste of Judean (Part 2)

Padraic Brown wrote:

> On Sun, 11 Apr 1999, Raymond A. Brown wrote:
>
> > What you'd have to do if you insist on the final -m is to explain why
> > Judeans who aren't, as you say, native Latin speakers, have restored a
> > sound long lost to the spoken language.
>
> Why not for the same reason we (English speakers) do?  We don't say
> "sanctu sanctoru", we say "sanctum sanctorum"; "quorum" not "quoro".
> Perhaps the Protojudeans could pick it up from written Latin?
Wait, think about what you're saying here:  Latin as used by English speakers
has for most of its history been pronounced by the spelling, and it's only
recently that the majority of the population could be exposed to education
of any kind, anyways.  In antiquity, that was not at all the case:  VERY few
people back then (anywhere) would have had access even to see the spelling,
much less be able to read it.

> > If you want the -m then it can only come about if we imagine that for some
> > reason a group of Aramaic (or Aramaic & Greek) speaking Judeans decide to
> > learn Classical Latin from written form only and then, for some strange
> > reason, they or their descendants actually start speaking it.  I'm finding
> > that a difficult scenario to envisage.
>
> Well, if they eventually end up with a "standard form", I see no reason
> why it couldn't be applied at least to the spelling.
Well, perhaps, but its influence on the orthographic conventions of future
generations is by no means assured (e.g., <c> survived because you can find
morphophonemic pairs in the language, one palatalized while the other
remains a velar stop -- in short, future generations felt a need in their
*own* language -- not that of the past)

> So that makes for two possibilities: they pick it up from written
> (Classical) Latin and end up pronouncing it (perhaps only in elevated
> registers?); they pick it up from written Latin, spelling it but leaving
> it silent always.
Neither of which I really could imagine, IMHO.  The first requires a kind of
social organization that simply did not exist, and the second, while being much
more probable, IMO does not explain why future generations would,
with the spread of education, not attempt to spell phonemicly (as the idea of
a "proper" spelling system is an invention of the last 300 years or so -- it certainly
didn't exist then to any measurable degree).



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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
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Website: <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."

There's nothing particularly wrong with the
proletariat. It's the hamburgers of the
proletariat that I have a problem with. - Alfred Wallace
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