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| DPCrisp wrote: |
| Rocky wrote: | | There are Classical Latin/Vulgar Latin doublets as well: |
'Course, since there's no such thing as Vulgar Latin, you mean Romance languages have their synonyms as well. . |
I got those pairs from the Vulgar Latin wikipedia page. I wasn't sure what language they were supposed to be. Doesn't orthodoxy claim that there are no extant examples of Vulgar Latin except for some scribbles found on the washroom stalls here and there? If so, that must mean there are no written Latin instances of "pensare", for example. Is that true? You can find manuscripts with "penser", but not "pensare"?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Doesn't orthodoxy claim that there are no extant examples of Vulgar Latin except for some scribbles found on the washroom stalls here and there? |
Here we have a fabulous example of what happens when orthodoxy is operating from a false paradigm. Since they assume that all the Romance language come from Latin, and because this is impossible by ordinary rules of language evolution, linguists have had to 'invent' Vulgar Latin as a cutout in between.
Normally this would not present a problem because they would simply 'posit' its existence 'as a necessity' and then wait while generations of students were taught it and it slowly hardened into dogma. But, as I point out in THOBR, there is always one unavoidable danger with such inventions -- that the 'real' Vulgar Latin will one day turn up. And this is what has happened here. Hence we are now in this position:
1. If all the Romance language evolved from Vulgar Latin, this language must have been spoken virtually everywhere by virtually everyone from Sicily to the Pas de Calais. Yet it is virtually unattested by the sources!
2. If any inscriptions are found anywhere it must mean that Vulgar Latin was a written language -- yet all these people in this vast area have produced nothing except 'some bathroom scribblings'.
3. Somehow every single Romance language group evolved this Vulgar Latin into the Romance languages we know today without a single one of them producing either a document in a transitional form or mentioning the process in any kind of document.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, it is one of our tasks to identify these 'Vulgar Latin' inscriptions. So far 'Early Italian' is as far as we have got though of course it is perfectly possible that some kind of Military Argot did evolve and acquired a written form. Though if so it is pretty amazing that all communication appears to have been via bathrooms.
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A linguist I know indirectly was returning to Britain and offered a series of books for anyone interested because he didn't want to pay excess baggage. From this opportunity I gleaned a copy of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages, a wonderfully heavy tome which will keep any door open, however strong the draught. Anyway, the book gives a detailed explanation of languages from all over the place. For example, modern-day Italy offers us (north to south) Lepontic, Raetic, Venetic, Logurian, Picene, Umbrian, Etruscan, Faliscan, Sabellian, Volscian, Oscan, Messapic and finally Sicel (in Sicily).
Obviously, I'm not going to actually read this book and I have a sneaking suspicion that most of these languages are on the basis of, "Hey, look there's a squiggle on a stone. Isn't this where the Romans said the Faliscans lived. It must be an example of Faliscan". But anyway, I was wondering if THOBR-Latin-branch has anything to say about these (possibly invented) languages?
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| it is fascinating to see what a sad little thing a French or Spanish thesaurus (or Dictionary of Synonyms) is compared to an English Thesaurus. |
Now you mention it, I think Bryson says plenty/most places don't have thesauruses at all.
| I have even heard Spanish linguists saying that there is a natural tendency for a language to tend towards one word for each concept to which the only answer is "take a look at English, mate". |
Trust the linguists. As if we can separate concepts from words and then see how they match up. Can't we say English has one word per concept: pensive, cogitating and thoughty mean different things? Can't we also say the thesaurus is a measure of how many words attach to each concept? (The thesaurus is evidence for both positions, since the point of it is to sift through the synonyms to find the one that suits. They are all the same and all different at the same time.)
Linguists have a special knack of assuming something they observe to be a Law of Nature, mistaking the arbitrary for the objective.
| Is that true? You can find manuscripts with "penser", but not "pensare"? |
Good question. It's bad enough that the road from Latin to Romance seems to introduce letters indiscriminately ( "pensilis, f. pens- pa. ppl stem of pendere hang"), but I don't know how much of this is on the assumption that we know what the infinitives are.
On the other hand, I don't care. i) I don't take the derivations (the direction from A to B) seriously, only the connections (A in Latin = B in French). ii) If it's all so regular that they can deduce the infinitives from a few inflections, that just reinforces the view of Latin as an artifice: a whole bunch of forms, 'attachments', to 'make efficient use' of the infinitives.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Lepontic, Raetic, Venetic, Logurian, Picene, Umbrian, Etruscan, Faliscan, Sabellian, Volscian, Oscan, Messapic and finally Sicel |
Perhaps you can check these assumptions:
1. None of these languages exist with the exception of
2. Etruscan -- which appears to have been a non-Romance language and
3. Sicilian, which like Sard and Corse, are on islands and therefore their languages are sufficiently distinguishable from Italian to be considered distinct languages.
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I'll try but give me a little time; I need to train my wrist to bear the weight of the bloody thing.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| I have even heard Spanish linguists saying that there is a natural tendency for a language to tend towards one word for each concept |
Trust the linguists. If that were true, how could synonyms arise at all? And how could there be any left after this much human history? And wouldn't this mean the earliest languages used multiple words for the same thing? If so, how could anyone learn it? How could it have any meaning, be a language?
If there is a natural tendency towards simplification of grammar, why were there complex languages as recently as a thousand years ago? How could the earliest languages be most complex? How did complexity arise if the tendency is to suppress it?
If there is a natural tendency to shift from P to F, why isn't it still going somewhere else? What comes next? Where did it come from before? If the consonant and vowel shifts are random but systematic, how can there be any possibility of reconstructing ancestor languages?
---
Re. Vulgar Latin, I came across this in the email archives:
One of John Wall's posts [on HallofMaat.com] on British Languages {I can't be bothered to read it all} includes
| Use of the comparative method is validated by its application to languages whose common ancestor is known. Thus, when the method is applied to the Romance languages (which include French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian), the reconstructed common ancestor language comes out rather similar to Latin--not the classical Latin of Horace and Cicero, but something perhaps more akin to the Latin that must have been spoken in various dialects during the Dark Ages, following the breakup of the Roman Empire. |
I can't begin to comment on this: reading it again has sapped all my strength.
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Lepontic, Raetic, Venetic, Logurian, Picene, Umbrian, Etruscan, Faliscan, Sabellian, Volscian, Oscan, Messapic and finally Sicel |
Perhaps you can check these assumptions:
1. None of these languages exist with the exception of
2. Etruscan -- which appears to have been a non-Romance language and
3. Sicilian, which like Sard and Corse, are on islands and therefore their languages are sufficiently distinguishable from Italian to be considered distinct languages. |
Hello, Mick.
I think that all of these languages of course existed. Instead of calling them 'languages', let's call them dialects and patois. However, they were really various and distinctive, as in France, in Spain, etc. They all became the numerous dialects and tongues of modern Italy. Vulgar Etruscan has just become Tuscan, Lepontic has become Piemontian, etc.
I wonder why you're not interested by the dialects. For me, they are the (almost) living evidence of the antiquity of our modern languages. But perhaps the case of the British dialects cannot be compared with the French, Spanish, Italian ones ?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I think you misunderstand orthodoxy's position. They think these are genuine discrete languages, it used to be "Celtic" but they are a bit vaguer these days. Etruscan is slightly different since there are actual inscriptions (which don't seem to resemble anything else).
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | I think you misunderstand orthodoxy's position. They think these are genuine discrete languages, it used to be "Celtic" but they are a bit vaguer these days. Etruscan is slightly different since there are actual inscriptions (which don't seem to resemble anything else). |
I don't know what is orthodoxy's position nowadays, but it's true that there were a lot of little states, with their own dialects, their own alphabets, at the time of the birth of Rome (and after). And it was as difficult for a Venetian to understand an Etruscan as it has been for a Norman to understand a Provençal or for a Catalan to understand a Celtiberian.
Must we call these languages dialects or idioms ? In any case, all of them were (are) based on a common grammar and, at a lower rate, on a common vocabulary.
About the Etruscan language, I once met a shrewd man who told me this sound advice : - Consider that what it is is what it was, unless there's evidence to the contrary. - I don't think that antique inscriptions are evidence of what the Etruscans were speaking. How could such a prestigious civilisation, settled in such an attractive area, have disintegrated like this ?
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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I was glancing at a book on Spanish language and the author claims that Spanish evolved from an 'older', more Classical, form of Latin which owes less to the later 'Vulgar Latin', due to the fact that the Romans were in Spain long before they incorporated the rest of Europe into their empire.
I doubt this somewhat glib assertion as a) the Romans took at least a couple of hundred years to colonise the whole country (apart from the NW region) anyway and b) languages continue to evolve regardless of when the conquerors arrived, so Latin would be no exception surely?
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| I was glancing at a book on Spanish language and the author claims that Spanish evolved from an 'older', more Classical, form of Latin which owes less to the later 'Vulgar Latin', due to the fact that the Romans were in Spain long before they incorporated the rest of Europe into their empire. |
A marvellous contradiction.
(1) The Romans got to work on the Spanish peasantry straight away... and must have been breathing down their necks constantly to get the whole populace to know the difference between Romanes eunt domus and Romani ite domum.
(2) The Spanish peasantry got to work on Latin straight away, morphing it into a markedly different language... far from the offices of the Imperial Linguistic Correction Service.
So the Romans managed to be in 2 places at once. You gotta hand it to 'em.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The idea advanced in THOBR is that all pre-literate societies (or functionally post-literate ones of 'Dark Ages') are of the same general type and size: they extend roughly as far as one man can conveniently send orders -- say, fifty miles in every direction. This then constitutes 'a tribe' and has its own name and, eventually, a dialect of sorts (or perhaps we might even say 'accent'). This really quite simple pattern of course leads historians and palaeolinguists into all kinds of trials and tribulations since these names may or may not enter the historical record, and thus may or may not get elevated to the status of states, peoples, languages etc. It all depends on how much material is around to 'make a story'.
Problems worsen when another mob comes along and may or may not superimpose their own administrative pattern on what is pre-existing. Spain is an excellent example of what we would expect since even now we can see in the various kingdoms (Castille, Leon, Aragon, Portugal etc) that same pattern, though whether these reflect pre-Roman or post-Roman realities I could not say.
So, yes, there is a Spanish peasantry speaking various Hispano-Lusitanian dialects but they only become 'Spanish' peasants by quirks of later nation-state building.
The question of a lingua franca is a different one (and one that sends historians and palaeolinguists off barking up a quite different set of trees). Clearly, the Hispano-Lusitanian population does not need a lingua franca since their trading patterns are hardly likely to be greater than their area of functional comprehensibility but Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Celts etc have much longer-distance fish to fry.
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Lepontic, Raetic, Venetic, Logurian, Picene, Umbrian, Etruscan, Faliscan, Sabellian, Volscian, Oscan, Messapic and finally Sicel |
Perhaps you can check these assumptions:
1. None of these languages exist with the exception of
2. Etruscan -- which appears to have been a non-Romance language and
3. Sicilian, which like Sard and Corse, are on islands and therefore their languages are sufficiently distinguishable from Italian to be considered distinct languages. |
(a) In 180BC the Oscan city of Cunae applied to the Roman Senate for permission to use Latin as its official language instead of Oscan. I have no idea what Oscan was actually like but we can reasonably assume that it really existed.
(b) Sicel is mentioned by either Herodotus or Thucydides in the context of (I think) the founding of colonies by Corinth at Syracuse or Catania ("Trooble up at t'mill" sort of stuff)
(c) Raetic (Rhaetic), Venetic and Umbrian are all recognised today as Italian dialects but I cannot comment on the degree of relatedness between the new and the ancient.
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| alincthun wrote: | | I don't think that antique inscriptions are evidence of what the Etruscans were speaking. How could such a prestigious civilisation, settled in such an attractive area, have disintegrated like this ? |
There are something like 13,000 Etruscan "documents" (i.e. all written records including epigraphic and numismatic inscriptions) discovered/collected so far. So I would say they do present a fair idea of what the Etruscans were speaking, at least about a limited range of topics.
The Etruscan civilisation seems not so much to have disintegrated but rather to have merged with the Roman/Latin. It is well known that the first kings of Rome were Etruscan but, even after their expulsion and the proclamation of the republic, Etruscan nobility pop up amid the Roman patricians and an Etruscan identity continues to exist. For example even as late as the first century AD the Emperor Claudius' wife is noted as an Etruscan. In fact Claudius apparently wrote a multi-volume history of the Etruscan people which, unhappily, has not survived.
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