Pedants' Paradise

[jean]

Slavic languages not only have a case system - they appear to have retained cases even Latin had dropped before they all split from Proto-Indo-European or whatever.

It's often said that English lost its cases because the endings in OE and Old Norse were slightly different from each other. I don't think anything similar explains their loss in French, for example.

[french frank]

Sorry, should have made my add a separate post.

[jean]

Yes, it answers some of my points!

What happened to morphological distinctions as languages developed, and why, is fascinating - but the really important question is how these complex structures arose in the first place, only to be gradually dismantled later.

That's a process we can never observe.

[gurnemanz]

Yes, it answers some of my points!

What happened to morphological distinctions as languages developed, and why, is fascinating - but the really important question is how these complex structures arose in the first place, only to be gradually dismantled later.

That's a process we can never observe.

I'm half way through this book at the moment which is fascinating and very detailed. I could never hope to summarise findings, but there is a lot on the gradual transfer of meaning from concrete to abstract connotation, such that almost all language can be perceived as metaphor and also on the usage of preposition and postposition in various languages, as mentioned above.

[jean]

Thanks for that - he takes on exactly my question, which hasn't really been much discussed. In fact, it is sometimes suggested that the Romans couldn't really have spoken this highly complex language, but that there must have existed in parallel a far simpler version that would have been spoken by ordinary people.

I'm looking at some pages from the book now.

[ahinton]

To some extent it is a matter of mere spelling (omitting the gaps) and word positioning: instead of "in the house" write "housein" or even "houseinthe" ; instead of "at home" write "homeat". Voilà! the same old locative case rises again. It - the meaning - had always been there in the minds of civilized men.

Given that all the world's "men" make up less half of its total population and that you would in any case likely conclude that many of them are less than "civilised", "the meaning" might be thought to have deteriorated into the kind of Through the Looking Glass state wherein "'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less" and "'If there's no meaning in it,' said the King, 'that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any'"...

[french frank]

In fact, it is sometimes suggested that the Romans couldn't really have spoken this highly complex language, but that there must have existed in parallel a far simpler version that would have been spoken by ordinary people.

Vulgar Latin, which is where the Romance languages came from. The Appendix Probi gives many clues to the way people were speaking Latin, as distinct from how it was written. [An English version might say 'chimney not chimbley, nuclear not nucular, going to not gonna']

[jean]

That's not really what I mean - I'm talking about the belief that not even Cicero could have spoken as Cicero wrote.

But the large body of letters of his that survive gives the lie to this; they read exactly like informal conversational language.

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[french frank]

That's not really what I mean - I'm talking about the belief that not even Cicero could have spoken as Cicero wrote.

That's what I meant to imply - 'classical Latin' was a written language, not a spoken one. Vulgar Latin was the vernacular (though it could be written down but was not standardised).

[jean]

...'classical Latin' was a written language, not a spoken one...

I don't believe that, and I think Cicero's letters are powerful evidence that it isn't true.

Of course I am not denying that there existed the provincial and dialect forms that we call vulgar Latin that gradually turned into the Romance languages. But I have heard people argue that nobody could possibly have spoken Classical Latin because of its morphological complexity.

These people have not encountered modern Polish.

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[french frank]

I don't believe that, and I think Cicero's letters are powerful evidence that it isn't true.

How is that evidence that classical Latin was spoken?

[jean]

Because the letters read like conversation.

I don't believe that someone who wrote to his close friends in that easy and fluent way spoke completely differently when they were together.

[french frank]

Because the letters read like conversation.

I don't believe that someone who wrote to his close friends in that easy and fluent way spoke completely differently when they were together.

When you use the terms 'conversation', 'easy' and 'fluent', how does that differ from what he wrote in his political writings, for example? You seem to be making some distinction.

[jean]

I am making a distinction between the letters and the speeches only in terms of subject-matter and context; I am not arguing that the language of the speeches couldn't have been spoken, though they were clearly delivered in a more formal context.

And though we only have written versions of them, I don't know why we have to assume that those were so very different from what was delivered in the Forum.

And don't we think the people who listened to them understood what they were hearing?

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[jean]

The Appendix Probi gives many clues to the way people were speaking Latin, as distinct from how it was written. [An English version might say 'chimney not chimbley, nuclear not nucular, going to not gonna']

Those examples are vocabulary, not grammar; and it is the complexity of Latin grammar and the resulting extremely fluid word-order that's suppose to mean it could never have been spoken, isn't it?