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Vulgar Latin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| ewomahony Diglot Groupie England Joined 5582 days ago 91 posts - 115 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian, French, Afrikaans | Message 1 of 9 03 April 2010 at 3:26am | IP Logged |
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Many learners of the Latin language say that they learn this language so as to gain a rough understanding of all Romance languages.
But would they not be better advised to learn Vulgar Latin if they wish to understand the Romance languages? Have you ever considered learning/learnt Vulgar Latin? Is it difficult? Incidently, are resources hard to come by considering the fact that it was generally a spoken language? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Johntm Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5422 days ago 616 posts - 725 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 9 03 April 2010 at 5:11am | IP Logged |
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Vulgar Latin would be better, but there aren't many written records of it because most plebians (poor Romans) couldn't write. If I could I'd rather learn Vulgar Latin than Classical (I take it in school and HATE it).
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| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5447 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 3 of 9 03 April 2010 at 7:13am | IP Logged |
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The British National Archives has a short course in the Latin used in court documents and such from 1086-1733. It's obviously not the same as what everyday people were speaking in the streets of Paris or Rome, or whatever, but it's a pretty good intro to how the language was being used formally at a later period.
It can be found here: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/latin/beginners/default.h tm There's an advanced course that follows. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6470 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 4 of 9 03 April 2010 at 11:23am | IP Logged |
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We don't know much at all about what Vulgar Latin was like. Literally the only evidence
of it that we have are some graffitti and of course the things that Roman scholars wrote about the language. We do not have enough to make a course in Vulgar Latin! Without conjectures, that is. The professor hired by Mel Gibson to provide the Vulgar Latin phrases for "The Passion of the Christ" had to assume and invent a lot, especially since Vulgar Latin would have differed greatly between the different parts of the Roman Empire. Considering such changes as "mater" (mother) becoming "mère" in French, it is not clear in how far Vulgar Latin could help you learn the modern Romance languages. It is clear that Classical Latin can help you learn all Western European languages including English, because all the later borrowings (words like maternal, altitude, computer, convivial, oral, and thousands more) are taken from Classical Latin. Edited by Sprachprofi on 03 April 2010 at 11:27am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6272 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 5 of 9 03 April 2010 at 12:29pm | IP Logged |
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It is a little hard to tell at what point Vulgar Latin ended and the Romance languages began. Some of the people writing in the earliest phases of the latter probably were trying to write Latin, but language shift and their ignorance of the classical version meant it wasn't, really. This is an area where the less well-educated give us more clues than the better educated, but unfortunately not enough. The phonetic spellings used in wall writings and so on by the uneducated give a few hints on how Latin was actually spoken.
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| vilas Pentaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6960 days ago 531 posts - 722 votes Speaks: Spanish, Italian*, English, French, Portuguese | Message 6 of 9 03 April 2010 at 6:45pm | IP Logged |
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Car Ewomahony tu no necessita studiar latin vulgar pro apprender linguas romances modernes. Si tu comprende iste scripte tu pote facilmente apprender interlingua que es un forma de latine moderne. Ille es aunque propedeutic pro aprender spaniol, Italiano, francese, portuguese e roumaniano. www.interlingua.com
Tu pote aunque vider iste metodos de aprendimento simultaneo de linguas romances http://www.romanicaintercom.com/ http://sites.google.com/site/neolatino/ http://www.galanet.eu http://www.eurocomresearch.net/kurs/englisch.htm http://www.cafepedagogique.net/lemensuel/lenseignant/langues vivantes/portugais/Pages/2004/56_Comprendreleslanguesromanes .aspx 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 9 05 April 2010 at 7:24pm | IP Logged |
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I have been reading intermittently in one of the few Classical books that to some extent is said to represent Vulgar Latin, namely Satyricon by Petronius. And the language certainly is simpler and interspersed with words that may not have been used in other more highbrow works. However my general impression is not that this is true spoken Latin, but rather a literary version of it, in much the same way as there is a difference between really highbrow and more relaxed writings in French, - which still are far from ressembling informal spoken French. Maybe only the graffitti on Pompeian walls can be seen as 'vox populi'.
The number of texts from the transitional period betwen (Vulgar) Latin and the Medieval Romance languages is also limited, but I have given some exemples in an old thread about Latin & today’s Romance languages (message 6). I think that it is clear that all the examples quoted there are quite far from highbrow Classical Latin (even the one in old Sardic), but they are also quite far from the language of Petronius. Whatever Vulgar Latin was - and my guess is that it stood in the same relationship to literary Latin as spoken French does to written French of today - we don't have the resources really to learn it as a separate language. We can make some educated guesses based on (simple) written Latin and etymologies of words in the Romance languages. But as Astérix in Latin shows the result can be quite convincing. Edited by Iversen on 06 April 2010 at 9:52am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 8 of 9 05 April 2010 at 9:39pm | IP Logged |
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Some people even reject the notion of "Vulgar Latin" in favour of "Vulgar Latins". The idea is that once the Roman kingdom started to expand into an empire, the population was far too diverse and dispersed to support anything approaching uniformity in language.
This idea can be compared with English in much of the former British Empire. Australia, New Zealand, the USA and parts of South Africa (mostly the Cape), maintain dialects that differ little from the English spoken in the UK, but these were colonised lands occupied mostly by settlers. Let's look at areas populated with conquered peoples. Johannesburg English is fairly strongly affected by Afrikaans, even though Afrikaans and English are relatively close. In India, English has been strongly affected in terms of grammar and phonology from Hindi, its distant cousin. In sub-Saharan Africa, where it displaced or sits alongside practically unrelated languages*, English has changed drastically in phonology, but not always so strongly in grammar. Where we have mixed groups (settlements of slaves from diverse backgrounds), creoles have formed that are at times unrecognisable as derivatives of English. The British Empire lasted no longer than the Roman Empire, and communications were poorer in those times, so there was less of a centralising force for language. Britain moved into Africa and India, various other empires and religious movements had already brought some degree of linguistic unity, while the same is not true of much of the European part of the Roman Empire (Greece the obvious exception). By that token it seems likely that Latin would have experienced greater pressures than English, and even if we had more records of Vulgar Latin, it would probably consist of documents that would not have looked like the same language. * I'm of the belief that all languages have some common ancestor, just as all humans have some common ancestor, hence "practically unrelated languages". 1 person has voted this message useful |
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