Re: [tied] Was proto-romance a pidgin?

--- Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:

> On Sun, 27 Apr 2003 06:58:25 -0700 (PDT), george
> knysh
> <gknysh@...> wrote:
>
> >GK: The point may have been made before, but
> I
> >gather that what this implies is that Proto-Romance
> >and Vulgar Latin (at some stage: which century?)
> are
> >one and the same?
>
> Yes. Vulgar Latin and Proto-Romance are virtually
> the same. One may
> distinguish them for a particular purpose (e.g.
> actually attested
> forms = VL, reconstructed forms = PR).

*****GK: I'm not too surprised that there should be a
measure of terminological equivocation here. In my
schooldays we were taught that modern "Romance"
languages fundamentally evolved from "popular Latin".
So I tended to identify this pl with "Vulgar Latin".
Actually the more precise scholarly notions of VL and
PR don't seem to seriously contradict my school
baggage. It seems to me, subject to correction as
always, that VL is simply a recorded variant (or
variants) of some versions of popular Latin, while PR
reconstructs early forms of those popular Latin
dialects which evolved into the modern languages. In
the process I assume that many dialects of popular
Latin simply disappeared, so in a sense both VL and PR
only give us a glimpse of something vaster.******

The "which

> century" question
> is more difficult to answer, as is the "where"
> question. In a sense,
> the modern Romance languages started to diverge from
> spoken Latin as
> soon as Latin started to be spoken in the provinces.
> That is why
> Sardinian seems to be derived from quite a different
> stage of
> Vulgar/spoken Latin than the other languages. In
> another sense, the
> influence of spoken Latin throughout the Empire kept
> the Romances more
> or less together until such influence stopped (with
> the breakdown of
> unified administration), and even then, written
> Latin continued (and
> continues) to have a certain influence on the
> Romance languages.
>
> =======================
> Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
> mcv@...
>

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