Re: [tied] (unknown)

Dear Torsten,

Of course Latin was a normally stratified language. The educated classes used "everyday speech" (sermo cotidianus) or "colloquial Latin" in informal situations. It differed from "high" Classical Latin (sermo classicus) in a number of respects: lexically (frequent use of diminutives and other colourful derivatives, interjections, and Greek loans), syntactically (free word order) and perhaps phonetically as well. There were also numerous varieties of "plebeian speech" (sermo plebeius) used by the common people. Those used in the Late Empire, both in Italy and in the provinces, are known collectively as the "lingua Romana" (= "Vulgar Latin"), the strongly diversified ancestral basis of the Romance languages. There's no reason to doubt that many of the features associated with Vulgar Latin existed in the sermo plebeius of much earlier periods. Some of them spread into colloquial educated Latin quite early, including monophthongisations like au > o: or ae

> e: (whether elocutionists liked them or not), loss of unstressed penult

vowels (speculum > spec'lum), weakening and loss of final -m, etc. Which "rustic" forms represent loans taken from Faliscan, Oscan, Umbrian, etc. and which came from substandard dialects or sociolects of Latin itself may be difficult to decide, mainly because early plebeian Latin is poorly documented.

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: Torsten Pedersen

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, December 27, 2000 11:12 PM

Subject: [tied] (unknown)

Some deviant roots in Latin are traditionally explained as influenced or coming from some neighbouring Italic language (I can only remember "ruber" vs. "rufus", I forget which one is proper Latin and which is "dialectal" or "rustic"). Is it possible that this "alternate source" is not a nearby Italic language, but the language of the plebeians (vs. the patricians)? The conflict between these groups, as I recall it, plays a prominent role in early Roman history. There is an account, the source of which I have forgotten, of a late Roman emperor being told by his rhetorics tutor not to use "o" for proper Latin "au" (as in vulgar Latin). Also, Suetonius mentions that an ancestor of the emperor Claudius, Clodius, had the office of plebeian tribune. This would seem to indicate that "o" for "au" existed very early as a "plebeianism". So, my question is: Is "the plebeian language" the "other source" for Latin?