Quote:
Originally Posted by Perikles
I think some clarification is needed here. This is really a question of definition of terms, but to challenge the idea that Vulgar Latin is not the root of Spanish is to go against well establish academic and linguistic concepts long accepted over the past century. Vulgar Latin is not an oxymoron, at least not in English.
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That idea is unchallengeable simply because "Vulgar Latin" was a name coined to label the sack where all the unexplained went.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Perikles
This label may not be to everyone's liking, but it is not just some vague unattested idea. To disgree with this is either a very individual interpretation or a confusion of terms.  |
There's a lot of research going on and a bunch of works published during the last 15 or 20 years even when the subject is elusive as written documents are mostly in Latin because that language was intended for written documents, while every day earlier Italian languages were ... just to speak. Certainly a matter for controversy, but anyway the ball is rolling.
I wonder what 'looked like' the famous apologue of Menenius Agrippa -who had recently defeated the Sabines- to the plebeians when they retreat to Mount Sacro. Such a speech might contain hints of what'd become three hundreds years later, in one hand, written, official, administrative Latin, and in the other hand, one of many lines of what'd become the """""Vulgar Latin""""" which was to overflow the boot's borders and seed what'd later come to be known as Romance languages. That's how they explain why Latin has no articles (like Sanskrit or modern Slave and Baltic languages) and some say "I need your el truck-o to go to the next el town-o" because Spanish looks like having not enough, or even English -which grammar looks like having been bulldozed by the force of the clashes of languages- has managed to keep a vestige of cases and declinations in the Saxon genitive while Spanish and the like have "lost" them -nobody lost what they never had-. Future tense in Latin replaced by a verbal periphrasis, it's possible, but, exactly the same in many Romance languages? It's a matter of debate but the periphrasis probably existed before any arms and wombs left the boot.
This is a nice subject. I'm on learning-mode about it and just as a non academic interest, so many mistakes can be attributed to me.