Vulgar Latin

“ As for popular Latin, it has never ceased to exist. It is the language of France, Spain, Italy, Roumania, and all the Romance countries to-day. Its history has been unbroken from the founding of Rome to the present time. Various scholars have tried to determine the date before which we shall call the popular speech vulgar Latin, and after which it may better be styled French or Spanish or Italian, as the case may be. Some would fix the dividing line in the early part of the eighth century A.D., when phonetic changes common to all parts of the Roman world would cease to occur. ”

“ The most important morphological developments are common to all, or nearly all, the Romance languages. They may therefore be ascribed, in their early stages, to Vulgar Latin, although direct evidence of their beginnings is scanty.
1. DECLENSION. NOUNS.
89. (1) During the late Vulgar Latin and early Romance period neuter nouns gradually became masculine; this change was doubtless due in part to phonetic developments which obliterated distinctive endings: dōnum > dọn, m.; nōmen > nọm, m. Mare, however, became almost always feminine in Gaul: la mar. ”

“ A learned Benedictine [AJ] first starts the conjecture, and then maintains it against the attacks of an anonymous writer, that the vulgar Latin became the universal language of Gaul immediately after Caesar's conquest, and that its corruption, with very little mixture of the original language of the country, gradually produced the Romance towards the eighth century. ”

“ The population of this country is educationally divided by the letter h into three classes, which we may describe as the confident, the anxious, and the indifferent. The same division existed in imperial Rome, where educated people sounded the aspirate, which completely disappeared from the every-day language of the lower classes, the so-called Vulgar Latin, from which the Romance languages are descended, so far as their working vocabulary is concerned. ”

“ For, in the first place, if it had been a Latin servant he would be not a subject but a sovereign, in nobility, in virtue, and in beauty; in nobility, because the Latin is perpetual and incorruptible; the language of the vulgar is unstable and corruptible. Hence we see in the ancient writings of the Latin Comedies and Tragedies that they cannot change, being the same Latin that we now have; this happens not with our native tongue, which, being home-made, changes at pleasure. ”

“ The noblest product of the Latin mind is the Roman law, which is the foundation of almost all modern codes. With all their discernment of justice and love of order, the Romans, however, were too often hard and cruel. Their history is stained here and there with acts of unexampled atrocity. In private life, too, when the rigor of self-control gave way, they sunk into extremes of vulgar sensuality. ”

“ The philologists of the Renaissance period were often very learned men, but they had no knowledge of the phonetic laws by which sound change is governed. Nor were they aware of the existence of Vulgar Latin, which is, to a much greater extent than classical Latin, the parent of the Romance languages. Sometimes a philologist had a pet theory which the facts were made to fit. Hellenists like Henri Estienne believed in the [186] Greek origin of the French language, and Périon even derived maison from the Gk. ”

“ Thus speech, which is ordained to express human thought, has virtue when it does that; and most virtue is in the speech which does it most. Hence, forasmuch as the Latin reveals many things conceived in the mind which the vulgar tongue cannot express, even as those know who have the use of either language, its virtue is far greater than that of the vulgar tongue. ”

“ Effect of modern languages.Even after Rome had suffered her great discomfiture on the scientific question respecting the motion of the earth, the conquering party was not unwilling to veil its thoughts in the Latin tongue, partly because it thereby insured a more numerous class of intelligent readers, and partly because ecclesiastical authority was now disposed to overlook what must otherwise be treated as offensive, since to write in Latin was obviously a pledge of abstaining from an appeal to the vulgar. ”

“ His standard authors in Latin prose are Cicero, Livy, Pliny, Frontinus and Orosius. His knowledge of Greek was practically nil. Latin was the language of his political treatise, De Monarchia, and even that of his defence of the vulgar tongue, De Vulgari Eloquio. He is, in a limited sense, a precursor of the Renaissance, but he is far more truly to be regarded as the crowning representative of the spirit of the middle ages.
(iv.) The Modern Age.— (a) Our fourth period is ushered in by the age of the Revival of Learning in Italy (c. 1350–1527) . ”

“ In conclusion I should like to say that it has been my aim throughout to adhere to what is best in Roman literature, and to omit passages the choice of which can only be justified by regarding their literary form apart from their moral value. Latin literature contains so much that is at once excellent in style and noble in thought that it seems a grave mistake to exalt the one at the expense of the other. ”

“ I have been inclining to the belief that Terence, Virgil, and Horace have done damage to the Latin language, or at least to our taste; just as Pope was the ruin of English poetry so long as he was allowed to dictate the style and cadences. In Plautus, Lucretius, and Catullus the language has a flexibility and the metres a freedom which (as I think) academicians and schoolmasters have not duly appreciated, and which ought to impart to us (when we do do anything so absurd as to write foreign verses) a freedom at which we have not generally aimed. ”

“ II. A review of the revival of Augustan diction in a long list of humanists proves nothing specific concerning imitation, much concerning pride in humanistic Latin. Scholars, however, are not well paid. Doctors and lawyers write bad Latin. Teachers are incompetent. The vernacular has come even into the schools; and even Cicero is translated. Let us all combine to save Latin style. ”

“ The clever boys are, as a rule, well provided for; but, even for them, the methods of this book have been found to be the shortest road to accuracy and style in translation. Moreover by this means they have gained a firsthand acquaintance with Latin literature and the sources of Roman history.
It is impossible here to enter into ‘the question of the close and striking correspondence between the history, the literature, and the language of Rome. It was not until the history of Rome threw its mantle over her poetry that the dignity of the poet was recognised and acknowledged. ”

“ Perhaps we may regret the existence of this Roman religion, for it did its best to ruin a great poet. The sublimity of the language of Lucretius, when he can leave his attempts at scientific proof, the closeness of his observation, his enjoyment of life, of Nature, and his power of painting them, a certain largeness of touch, and noble amplitude of manner—these, with a burning sincerity, mark him above all others that smote the Latin lyre. ”

“ It was with my knowledge as with my passions: day after day I worked feverishly: whenever I met a passage such as the building of the bridge in Caesar, I refused to burden my memory with the dozens of new words because I thought, and still think, Latin comparatively unimportant: the nearest to a great man the Latins ever produced being Tacitus or Lucretius. ”

“ Others might brutalise or neglect the native speech, that true “open field” for charm and sway over men. He would make of it a serious study, weighing the precise power of every phrase and word, as though it were precious metal, disentangling the later associations and going back to the original and native sense of each,—restoring to full significance all its wealth of latent figurative expression, reviving or replacing its outworn or tarnished images. Latin literature and the Latin tongue were dying of routine and languor ”

“ In the third century before our era, a Roman could say audibo or audiam, contemplor or contemplo, senatus consultum or senati consultum. Thanks to the efforts of the scientific grammarian, and to the systematizing influence which Greek exerted upon literary Latin, most verbs were made deponent or active once for all, a given noun was permanently assigned to a particular declension, a verb to one conjugation, and the slight tendency which the language had to the analytical method of forming the moods and tenses was summarily checked. ”

“ If to know the main features of the classic pronunciation of Latin were impossible, then our obvious course would be to refuse the attempt; to regard the language as in reality dead, and to make no pretence of reading it. This is in fact what the English scholars generally do. But if we may know substantially the sounds of the tongue in which Cicero spoke and Horace sung, shall we give up the delights of the melody and the rhythm and content ourselves with the thought form? Poetry especially does not exist apart from sound ”

“ Latin was the common language of scholars and remained so even down to the days of Shakespeare. Even yet it is more nearly than any other tongue the universal language of the learned. The life of to-day is much nearer the life of ancient Rome than the lapse of centuries would lead one to suppose. You and I are Romans still in many ways, and if Cæsar and Cicero should appear among us, we should not find them, except for dress and language, much unlike men of to-day. ”

“ If I perceive in a man any evil, or vice, or temptation, I am transformed and I enter into him; I am penetrated with his pain.”
It must not be supposed that these poems were in the Latin language in every instance. Very few of the entire number are truly within our own sphere of research, and all those composed in Italian are accessible to us only through a French prose translation. ”

“ However, with three genders, five declensions for nouns, a fixed method of comparison for adjectives and adverbs, an elaborate system of pronouns, with active and deponent, regular and irregular verbs, four conjugations, and a complex synthetical method of forming the moods and tenses, the pitfalls for the unwary Roman were without number, as the present-day student of Latin can testify to his sorrow. That the man in the street, who had no newspaper to standardize his Latin, and little chance to learn it in school, did not make more mistakes is surprising. ”

“ The Latin written in that era which professors still persist in calling the Great Age, hardly stimulated Des Esseintes. With its carefully premeditated style, its sameness, its stripping of supple syntax, its poverty of color and nuance, this language, pruned of all the rugged and often rich expressions of the preceding ages, was confined to the enunciation of the majestic banalities, the empty commonplaces tiresomely reiterated by the rhetoricians and poets ”

“ The Latin language, so noble in itself, and dignified, assumes additional majesty in the periods of the Roman Consul, and adds an inexpressible beauty and loftiness to the natural sublimity of his sentiments. No writings, in fact, are so full of moral and intellectual grandeur as those of Cicero, none are more calculated to elevate and purify our nature—to inculcate the tu vero enitere, in the path of knowledge and virtue, and to excite not merely a fond desire, or idle longing, but strenuous efforts after immortality. ”

“ Could he show himself an idle scholar when he saw his parents wearing themselves out in order to supply the needs of their family? Moreover, as he rose from class to class, the love of learning increased within him. Latin ceased to be repulsive, and became even wholly sympathetic, when he found, in the fifth class, thanks to the genius of Virgil, that it dignified the humble joys of rural life by the emphasis of skilfully chosen words and brilliant colours of the poet:
By easy stages I came to Virgil, and was much smitten with Melibœus, Corydon, Menalcas, Damœtas, and the rest of them. ”

“ For exercising the intellectual faculties, and for awakening and developing a sense of the fundamental properties of a good style—namely, correctness, precision, and brevity of expression—there is no doubt that Latin with its limpid clearness, its rigorous precision, and its absolute definiteness of meaning, is a better object of study than Greek with its multitudinous forms and particles, the import of which is matter rather of skilled conjecture and artistic feeling than of logical analysis. ”

“ The emphatic dominance of quantity over speech went so far in controlling word-accent that about two centuries before Cicero it had drawn the accent to the penultimate vowel if that was long. Hence, in the sentence endings which so often consisted of weighty words, word-accent to a remarkable degree coincided with a natural quantitative utterance. Latin, therefore, lent itself to a rhythmical close of sentences, often combining word-stress and length of utterance in a way that Greek prose rhythm did not. ”

“ Thus the term Latin came to mean not so much a man of a certain stock as a man with a certain legal position, and so it continued for many centuries, while the new power rising to prominence in the world came to be known not as Latin, but as Roman. ”