I did a search to see if this has already been discussed, but I’m not sure if I was using the correct search terms.
Anyway, my mom is an amateur expert when it comes to ancient history (meaning she has lots of books on it and used to attend lectures, but she’s not an official scholar on the subject), and since I took Latin in school, the difference between Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin has come up. She told me that no one spoke Classical Latin, that was just what was used for literature, and that everyone, even someone highly educated like Caesar spoke Vulgar Latin. There’s obviously no way to literally know how Caesar spoke in everyday life…but it just doesn’t make much sense to me that someone highly educated like him would speak badly.
So relating that to English…my mom also told me that English has diverged into “vulgar” and “proper” much like Latin, and I can see her point…obviously very uneducated people do not speak proper English, however I feel that most educated people speak closely enough to how people write, that there’s not a noticeable difference. And obviously now, there are far more educated/literate people than there were in Caesar’s time.
So is my mom confused or telling the truth? I googled it and this wikipedia article implies that educated Romans DID look down on Vulgar Latin: Vulgar Latin - Wikipedia
She seems to think that she has better knowledge than the internet though (which could very well be true) and has asserted that the Straight Dope article on whether or not Caligula was crazy, is wrong.
And last of all, regarding whether or not I was using correct search terms, is there a word for a language that splits like this?
You can’t make such broad-based assertions without going into deep left field
Note that my statement above has colloquial elements in it which would be improper in a formalized review. Then try to specify what register it is in.
Neither Cicero nor Virgil spoke in the style in which they wrote. Nor, presumably, did they speak in the argot of the plebs, any more than William F. Buckley in conversation would use the language style of Archie Bunker.
IMO, the line which is being attempted to be drawn here is trying to put a clear-cut line down the middle of what is actually a very imperceptible series of shadings in a single spectrum of usage.
Does it? I scrolled through quickly and didn’t see it.
I don’t think of “vulgar” speech, in the classical sense, as being “speaking badly,” just everyday speaking.
I’m not sure that’s a recommendation for today’s “educated” people. Articulate writing isn’t exactly common. Or are you not conflating propriety with articulation?
This sentence in the first paragraph: “The educated population mainly responsible for classical Latin might also have spoken Vulgar Latin in certain contexts depending on their background.”
Other statements further down also give the impression that it was “trashy” Latin, such as
The final paragraph in the introduction discusses the difference between merely speaking Latin and speaking it well.
Anyway, I see the point you were also making, Polycarp**** in your first sentence.
And, Spark240, what precisely do you mean by articulate writing? Just writing that is easy to understand? I googled the phrase and came up with this: http://www.articulatemarketing.com/writing_training.htm. I know what articulate means…I just wanted to clarify that it wasn’t something else.
I am not a linguist in anyway (hence the need for me to ask this question). I realize there aren’t blatant clear cut lines in how people speak and I didn’t mean to give the impression that it has to be so black and white.
To elaborate further (on why I’m curious about this), when I took Latin one of my teachers said she learned how to speak it (we just did reading and writing in class) and my mom said that it was pointless to learn how to speak Latin (ignoring the fact that it’s a dead language) because “nobody” spoke how we were learning how to read and write it.
Caesar and Cicero in all likeliness wouldn’t have spoken as stylised as they wrote, but that does not mean they spoke exactly the same as an uneducated member of the plebs. I think that in their time there were some words were pronounced differently by the elite, for instance those with the sound represented by ‘ae’.
The term is diglossia. There are other examples in the article, but Chinese is one example where the spoken ‘dialect’ and the written language in standard Chinese can differ greatly. Diglossia is (was?) also common in some schools in Hong Kong, where spoken instructions are given in a mixture of Cantonese and English, but all written materials (textbooks, homeworks, etc) are exclusively in English.
I mean writing that is as easy to understand as possible, without sacrificing any detail of meaning.
Often, with respect to more-complex ideas, the requirements of precision will increase the demands upon the reader, but I still imagine that for any idea there is an ideal written expression which maximizes ease without losing content.
Ah I see. Sort of unrelated, but I remember reading a while ago that Al Gore was heading some initiative to re-write laws in more understandable language. I found this article about a new law that was passed by Obama requiring the IRS to write in a way that is understandable: New Law Requires IRS to Write Plainly | Accounting Today
It is difficult but not entirely impossible to get an idea of ancient speech. There’s a mosaic in Pompei which says “HAVE”. This is the only known case of the word. It should of course say “AVE” like everybody else had by their front door. The maker of the mosaic was illiterate or foreigner (or both) and made a mistake.
Such a mistake is easy to make if the local latin had already a weak h the same way many of its descendants have. It is important that the mistake is one letter too many. An omission could be explained several ways.
Mistakes in spelling are the most important source for finding differenres between spelling and pronounciation. They are few in this formal texts, but toilet walls provide much more material.
When you refer to “how Cicero spoke”, you also have to make a distinction between how he spoke when delivering an oration, and how he spoke casually with friends. It’s not at all implausible that his oratory was more formal than his conversation. It’s even possible that it was, at times, less formal than his conversation, if he was speaking to the masses and wished to paint a populist image of himself (many politicians will do similar things today).
Also fascinating is that the pronunciation of church latin differed from what we were taught in school (various consonants, etc.) although I can’t come up with a good example right now.
Plus remember - unlike today, there is no central body that states this is how French / English / latin is officially spoken or written. Language rules like grammar and spelling were likely ad-hoc and mostly referred to a small group of classics for sources. Add to that the limited literacy, and it’s a wonder the classics we have inherited are legible.
I have a book “The lisle Letters”, a edited collection (down from the 6 volume complete set) of corrspondence collected to investigate Lord Lisle, one of the last Plataganets, during the final paranoid years of Henry VIII’s reign. It’s a massive collection of daily household trivia, and one of the fascinating details is how varied the spelling is; to the point where even lord Lisle’s name is spelled a dozen different ways, probably depending on whim and accent of the writer.
Now consider an empire the size of the whole mediterranean, with heavily accented speakers from all over, and consider that “real latin as she is spoke in the senate” probably was the language of a relatively tiny clique of aristocratic social climbers.
The difference is probably most noticeable with the letter C, which is like the English “ch” in Church-Latin, but generally taught as like English “k” in classical Latin. So, for instance, Church Latin would say “dona nobis pachem”, while conventionally-taught classical Latin would say “dona nobis pakem”. The V is also different, with Church Latin rendering it the same way as English, as opposed to like an English W.