Pedants' Paradise

[doversoul1]

The problem there is with as.

I mention Polish only to show that there are speakers of modern European languages who do just that. Of course the Poles speak in an informal register, like everyone else - but they manage a whole host of noun cases. Even a locative.

I don’t quite see the point of the Polish example. No matter how incredible it may look to non native speakers, people learn their mother tongue without having to ‘manage’. Are you saying that classical Latin was the Romans’ mother tongue, therefore it is nonsense to say that it is a language for writing? I am running out of strength, too.

[french frank]

I think there's a difference between handling a 'complicated ' language - many African languages were/are highly complex where people are illiterate. It's a 'literary' language that doesn't lend itself to being spoken.

[jean]

... Are you saying that classical Latin was the Romans’ mother tongue, therefore it is nonsense to say that it is a language for writing?

Of course it was their 'mother tongue' - but please show me where I have said it is not a language for writing? It was for writing and speaking. You could do whatever you wanted with it.

It could have literary registers, but it could lend itself to being spoken.

...I am running out of strength, too.

If I may say so, you haven't expended as much of it in this discussion as I have, or had to repeat yourself so often.

Since nobody seems inclined to read texts of any length however many links I give, here are some quite succinct comments from people who appear to have some knowledge of Latin.

.

[jean]

...if one's starting point is that 'classical Latin' is the high water-mark of polished, refined Latin, one is, of necessity, talking about written texts.

Cicero thought his Latin was indeed the high water-mark of the development of the language, though he knew it could be used in more or less polished ways. But it's clear from his writings, and those of others, that they didn't think they were writing only about writing.

But that if does not quite make the right connection between those propositions. One is talking about written texts because in the absence of sound recording, it is impossible for anything else to have survived; but it is perfectly possible for polished, refined people to have polished, refined conversations, and we get a glimpse of how those conversations might have sounded from Cicero's Letters.

I can see I am going to have to quote some passages from the book on the history of Latin that you and I both discovered.

The question of whether or not the spoken Latin of such writers was essentially the same (whether exactly the same, pretty much the same, the same in all essentials, the same in many important characteristics &c) is a secondary, quite separate, issue. It doesn't interest me much because there is no way of knowing and no one that I know of has provided compelling evidence one way or the other

The book (on the history of French) that you quoted with approval actually included Cicero's letters in the category of vulgar Latin , so your author clearly thought she knew how an educated Roman might have conversed!

The term 'vulgar Latin' is a baggy, sprawling term for a spoken form whose existence is attested in writings and which can be deduced from language development. Whether or not its usage overlapped with 'classical Latin' is the point, not whether 'classical Latin' was also spoken.

Whether 'classical Latin' was also spoken is very much my point, and has been since the beginning of this discussion.

You wrote

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

and that's what I have been arguing against ever since.

(I am not quite sure what you mean here by overlapped.)

Historically, I don't believe he term 'vulgar Latin' was nearly as baggy as you suggest. If people want to use it baggily now, there's not much I can do about it. But they never used to. Surely you do not take seriously VincentG, whose wretchedly expressed views about how the term should be used I have just quoted a second time?

The writers of the Republican period made use of the terms sermo urbanus (the speech of the educated) and sermo cotidianus (everyday speech/language) as well as sermo vulgaris (whatever exactly they meant by that - the speech of ordinary people, the masses, the uneducated), so it seems a bit perverse to insist that sermo vulgaris should cover just about every sort of spoken language of every period.

.

[jean]

It's a 'literary' language that doesn't lend itself to being spoken.

Can you identify any features of Latin that lead you to think it could be a literary language only?

[french frank]

Can you identify any features of Latin that lead you to think it could be a literary language only?

It isn't 'features of Latin' that are involved: it's features, specifically, of the Latin as written by writers of the time. In this case, it would be written by men often educated in oratory and rhetoric, and would involve sentence construction (as distinct from strictly grammatical syntax like Acc + Inf, or use of the subjunctive). It's a 'feature' of written Latin which is allowable because it remains on the page and doesn't disappear as soon as uttered (cf Proust, sort of) - formal speeches excepted.

Vocabulary: in any language, many writers choose words carefully which they would not generally speak as being more esoteric and which they have had time to consider, rather than using the first word that came into their heads.

The App. Prob. merely mentions the poor pronunciation (equus not ecus). But, taking a word like 'caballus' - which appears to be as 'Vulgar' as they get (being apparently of barbarian origin): do the poets only use it in their poetry, never in speech? Do the prose writers use it at all? Did Cicero ever use it, and if not, was it that the poets were less educated, or that they would use it in their poetry but never in speech?

The difference between us is perhaps that it's because you don't see 'classical Latin' as being a purely written form that you don't consider these important features of 'classical Latin'; whereas I see 'classical Latin' as a term defining the written language, so the differences matter. In the end it boils down to whether we have the same understanding of the two propositions:

Cicero spoke in the same way that he spoke
Classical Latin was the written form of the language of the [classical] period.

Aren't we just starting out from different definitions?

[amateur51]

It isn't 'features of Latin' that are involved: it's features, specifically, of the Latin as written by writers of the time. In this case, it would be written by men often educated in oratory and rhetoric, and would involve sentence construction (as distinct from strictly grammatical syntax like Acc + Inf, or use of the subjunctive). It's a 'feature' of written Latin which is allowable because it remains on the page and doesn't disappear as soon as uttered (cf Proust, sort of) - formal speeches excepted.

Vocabulary: in any language, many writers choose words carefully which they would not generally speak as being more esoteric and which they have had time to consider, rather than using the first word that came into their heads.

The App. Prob. merely mentions the poor pronunciation (equus not ecus). But, taking a word like 'caballus' - which appears to be as 'Vulgar' as they get (being apparently of barbarian origin): do the poets only use it in their poetry, never in speech? Do the prose writers use it at all? Did Cicero ever use it, and if not, was it that the poets were less educated, or that they would use it in their poetry but never in speech?

The difference between us is perhaps that it's because you don't see 'classical Latin' as being a purely written form that you don't consider these important features of 'classical Latin'; whereas I see 'classical Latin' as a term defining the written language, so the differences matter. In the end it boils down to whether we have the same understanding of the two propositions:

Cicero spoke in the same way that he spoke
Classical Latin was the written form of the language of the [classical] period.

Aren't we just starting out from different definitions?

After all this time, I enjoy trying to spot which part of ff's latest post jean will alight on (and vice versa) natch.

I reckon it's (cf Proust, sort of) in this one

Let's look through the Round Window to see who's right ...

[jean]

Ah, but is it not an almost proven fact that, in any culture that has a writing system, people do not speak (in their everyday lives and not in any formal occasions) as they write? I thought that was how Linguistics (at least Pragmatics) came about as an academic discipline.

More about pragmatics.

The Greeks, and the Romans after them, studied the grammar and syntax of their own languages, of course. But important to their thinking about language was also the study of whole texts - a discipline they called Rhetoric.

Rhetoric continued to be studied throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but it became increasingly fossilised and
fell out of favour (it had had its critics in antiquity too, Plato famously arguing that it just taught you how to lie). Many of its insights were taken over by literary criticism and stylistics - all the classical-sounding terms you find there come straight from rhetoric.

When the relatively new discipline of linguistics turned its attention to whole texts, whether written or spoken, and how they produce there effects, the closely-related disciplines of Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis make their appearance. Neither arose directly out of the (by now very unfashionable) study of rhetoric, but both pretty soon realised haw much they shared with it.

There is quite a lot of scholarly work on this topic, if you care to look for it.

Here's an example. I haven't read the whole work, but you can see from this where it's coming from (or going to):

Abstract:
This paper focuses on discourse analysis, particularly persuasive discourse, using pragmatics and rhetoric in a new combined way, called by us Pragma-Rhetoric. It can be said that this is a cognitive approach to both pragmatics and rhetoric. Pragmatics is essentially Gricean, Rhetoric comes from a new reading of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, extending his notion of discourse to meso- and micro-discourses. Two kinds of intentions have to be considered: first, communicative intention, and, then, persuasive intention. The fulfilment of those intentions is achieved by a successful persuasive-communicative action. The psychological, philosophical and logical aspects derived from the pragma-rhetorical perspective are crucial in view of its applications in several practical domains

[french frank]

After all this time, I enjoy trying to spot which part of ff's latest post jean will alight on (and vice versa) natch.

I reckon it's (cf Proust, sort of) in this one

All right, I'll pick on it 'Sort of' because although Proust has very long and involved sentences (as might occur in the classic writers), they are too rambling to be compared with th - oops, phone rang - to continue - with the logic of the Latin writers ...

[amateur51]

All right, I'll pick on it 'Sort of' because although Proust has very long and involved sentences (as might occur in the classic writers), they are too rambling to be compared with th - oops, phone rang - to continue - with the logic of the Latin writers ...

Same situation with Henry James?

His life-long pre-occupation with constipation seems somehow to have infected his writing style, imho.

[jean]

It isn't 'features of Latin' that are involved: it's features, specifically, of the Latin as written by writers of the time.

I assumed I didn't need to specify that I meant Latin as written by writers of the time,, because that's all we've got.

In this case, it would be written by men often educated in oratory and rhetoric, and would involve sentence construction (as distinct from strictly grammatical syntax like Acc + Inf, or use of the subjunctive). It's a 'feature' of written Latin which is allowable because it remains on the page and doesn't disappear as soon as uttered (cf Proust, sort of) - formal speeches excepted.

Can you really except formal speeches, when the written-up versions form such a large proportion of the surviving corpus?

The Ciceronian period is known mainly from his speeches; when AS observed how easy it must have been to lose the sense of what you were hearing when you had to wait so long for the verb at the end, I suggested that the ancients were just much better at deferred gratification than we are.

That was a joke, but there was truth in it - we simply do not know how people dealing with languages which have features other than our own approach their understanding of them.

When I taught Latin to English students, one of the things they found most difficult was to get used to looking at the endings of words for vital information as to their function in a sentence. Sometimes they arrived at A level still relying mainly on guesswork.

But when I taught Old English to Poles, going straight for the word endings was something they took for granted.

And it should not need to be said that sentences in Latin don't all have to be that long.

Vocabulary: in any language, many writers choose words carefully which they would not generally speak as being more esoteric and which they have had time to consider, rather than using the first word that came into their heads.

The App. Prob. merely mentions the poor pronunciation (equus not ecus). But, taking a word like 'caballus' - which appears to be as 'Vulgar' as they get (being apparently of barbarian origin): do the poets only use it in their poetry, never in speech? Do the prose writers use it at all? Did Cicero ever use it, and if not, was it that the poets were less educated, or that they would use it in their poetry but never in speech?

Unless you can show that particular words as found in the written sources were in themselves unsuitable for conversational use, none of this is relevant to our deciding whether what we find in the written language does or doesn't lend itself to colloquial speech. More to follow...

[french frank]

I think I will end there. The major point is how you define 'classical Latin', no more, no less.

[doversoul1]

Thank you, jean (re: Pragmatics) , but I put away all my books etc. on Pragmatics some ten years ago and have no intension of dusting them off the shelves but it is good to see that people are still talking about the Gricean Maxims. Maybe you can remind me of what hermeneutics is all about.

But I think I’ll end here, too. Another major point is, how you define spoken language. Without it, the discussion will just go round in circle (as it has).

[french frank]

But just to add: you can't compare the way Polish people today speak and write with Polish writers of an earlier period. English writers now write in much more casual, colloquial style.

"Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible, or from one of our elder poets, in a paragraph of to-day's paper."

To suggest that writers, in general, wrote in the same way as they habitually spoke seems to diminish literature, in the same way that assuming all novels are disguised autobiography diminishes the imagination and creativity involved.

And now I'm done

[jean]

Aren't we just starting out from different definitions?

May I respectfully suggest we're starting out from your definition - you introduced the word classical into a discussion in which I had questioned whether it really was impossible to believe that Cicero spoke as Cicero wrote. I did not use the word classical at all, and hadn't been intending to:

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).

The best comment on this is probably one I found recently - all the comments here are sensible, if brief, answers to the question Was Classical Latin ever spoken?:

In brief, it is probably a mistake to frame one's thinking in terms like "classical" and "vulgar." These categories as we now use them are really more an artifact of scholarly tradition than of the linguistic reality they obscure.

Latin speakers (depending on time and place and social class etc) didn't usually experience their own language, written or spoken, in such a dichotomous way any more than Modern English speakers do. And they didn't use them that way either. Spoken and literary language blended into one another in various complex ways at different times and in different places.

See "The Blackwell History of the Latin Language" for more specifics as well as more nuance and a much higher word count than I am willing to produce on my phone.

(There's a link to the book in an earlier post of mine. I'll try to find it and re-post it.)