Talk:Vulgar Latin

about the map shown where latin was spoken in the roman empire
the map couldn't be more lazy! its literally a map of the east and western roman empires. someone needs to change it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by FizzoXD (talk • contribs) 02:43, 4 June 2021 (UTC)
 * At least in the area of Sicily and southern Italy, it's obvious that it's not just an east-west map. However, a source would be nice, of course. --Jotamar (talk) 19:30, 13 June 2021 (UTC)

Lexical drift/shift
it does not make sense to say that words were "replaced with [...] native semantic shifts". The words were not replaced: their meanings simply changed. Semantic shift, which is covered in a dedicated section below, is not the same thing as the loss of a word. The Nicodene (talk) 01:11, 18 June 2021 (UTC)


 * I suppose you might be referring to the fact that words were often replaced by other words that had experienced semantic shifts, e.g. urbem 'city' was replaced by civitatem, which had shifted from 'citizenry' to 'city'. I will add a note that mentions that. The Nicodene (talk) 01:33, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes. Os, for example, is lost, replaced by bucca (once presumably 'cheek') for the meaning 'mouth'. Happens all the time, although the completeness of the replacement can be quite variable, as in testa replacing caput -- both alive and well in Italian as 'head', chef pretty much only figurative in French, having given way to tête as literal 'head'. In any case, it can make perfect sense, and be perfectly true, to say that loss can result from native semantic shift (or dodge the causation trap by saying loss can accompany shift), if that's what happened. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 15:50, 18 June 2021 (UTC)


 * It's not "replacement" then, at the Vulgar Latin or 'Proto-Romance' level, if both words survive widely, but rather competition. I deliberately avoided claiming, for instance, that "causa [replaced] res", as you have in the most recent edit, because res survives quite widely in Romance. The Nicodene (talk) 16:56, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
 * (I didn't touch causa/res in any edit.) There's no claim whatsoever that semantic shift necessitates loss. The world has to be reported as it actually is. In the case of os/bucca, os was lost, bucca replaced it. In the case of testa/caput, outcomes vary widely, and establishing the status in VL would take a good bit of digging. But that sort of thing is of interest, too: St Jerome appears to use testa to refer to a skull used as drinking vessel, i.e. a possible snapshot of "Latin becoming Romance" and how it happened. But back to the larger point: the vocabulary section would be free to be more informative if it didn't start out with loss pure and simple. Partial replacements, specializations, etc. illustrate the richer texture of reality and offer more insight into VL > Romance. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 17:30, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Ah, I thought you were 93.146.44.130.
 * It seems we don't actually disagree on anything other than some bits of phrasing.
 * I agree that the section would benefit from an additional subsection on semantic specialization or other topics. There is some more information on the dedicated page (Lexical changes from Classical Latin to Proto-Romance), but that too could use elaboration. I welcome any such efforts.
 * At the moment I am more focused on rewriting the 'grammar' section of this wiki page, as it is the last remaining section that is undersourced/in urgent need of revision. Perhaps then we can finally remove the banner that has been sitting on the top of the page since 2012. The Nicodene (talk) 18:09, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't know which banner you mean. Also, agreed that the "grammar" section is much too verbose, but it's far from being the only one that's in urgent need of revision. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 22:57, 6 July 2021 (UTC)
 * The banner that reads 'this article needs additional citations for verification'.
 * What about the other sections calls for urgent revision? Their content has by now been cited and vetted for accuracy, as far as I can tell. The Nicodene (talk) 23:42, 6 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Every section needs work, starting with the lead: "Vulgar Latin, also known as Popular[1] or Colloquial Latin,[2] is non-literary Latin spoken from the Late Roman Republic onwards." Really? The registers and sociolects that exist in any society didn't exist before the Late Roman Republic? Every section has conspicuous problems both conceptual and factual. Origins of the term, for example, gives short shrift to origins of the term, then wanders off to speak of Raynouard and Diez for reasons unexplained, yet presents nothing of the many decades of disagreement about the term's meaning and the wisdom of using it. Etc. My guess is that the article won't begin to come into the informative shape that it should have until all who contribute read and understand Paul Lloyd's 1979 article. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 02:54, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
 * "Since Vulgar Latin as so defined is in essence the spoken language of people who were scarcely influenced at all by the literary tradition, we can talk of the existence of Vulgar Latin only from the time when that literary tradition was first instituted, that is, at least from the last centuries of the Roman Republic." (Herman 2000: 7)
 * If you would like to expand on the origins of the term, please do so. My main concern right now is making sure what the article contains is at least cited and accurate. The Nicodene (talk) 09:01, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Having just now read through Lloyd's article, I must say that I wholeheartedly agree with it. I have more than once fantasized about simply tearing down this entire Wiki page, leaving only a condensed commentary similar to Lloyd's as a sort of epitaph. The Nicodene (talk) 09:50, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
 * No time at present, so very briefly, topics separated by //. The quote from Herman is not solely his opinion, but it's not everyone's, and it's too narrow for purposes of the lead. The point is "normal" registers in the speech of the masses, containing features for various reasons not normally used in formal oratory or in literary contexts. I.e. Spoken Latin, pure and simple. (Cicero himself was from the boondocks; it's a pretty safe bet that he had command of a wide range of registers and used them appropriately.) // Not clear that removing the other citations from the lead improves citation or accuracy. // The Origins section could be re-cast as History of the term, thus allowing description of its use/conceptualization over time, down to Lloyd's conclusions. // No time to compile a list now, but every section needs an objective check. Just going down the list, Sources, for example, has a glaring hole: non-Classical features widely shared by Romance languages. // The Vulgar Latin articles in Italian, French and Spanish are very useful as touchstones. They have their problems, too (e.g. substratomania in Italian), but some content is handled much better than in the English article. Well worth reviewing them, sifting wheat from chaff. // I sympathize with the frustration of tackling the term. But it's real and not fading as fast as one might hope, thus important to make the contents as accurate and updated as possible. // So much more, but must run. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 16:13, 9 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I've made some changes along these lines to the lead and the discussion of the term. I hope they are ok but please do review. Jim Killock (talk) 11:40, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

Versteegh: Lloyd was right when he advocated discarding the term [Vulgar Latin] once and for all
No time at all just now for me to update the article text with this and other works cited (e.g. Vincent 2016) in mind, but in case anyone does have time, I thought it might be useful to stick this note up bulletin board style. It's the conclusion (bold added for the nonce) of Kees Versteegh's 2021 article "The ghost of Vulgar Latin: History of a misnomer" in Historiographia Linguistica, 48.205-227. https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/hl.00091.ver

One might have expected that the problematic value of written documents for the reconstruction of the spoken language would have put a stop to the notion of an intermediate language, but the idea lingers that Vulgar Latin was an actual variety of the language, retrievable from the texts and helpful for the reconstruction of Proto-Romance.15 Significantly, the main conferences on this topic, organized since 1985 have retained the title of Latin vulgaire – Latin tardif, even though, as Väänänen (Väänänen 1981: 3) points out, one of the founders, Einar Löfstedt (1880–1955), admitted that one could never find an adequate definition for the notion of ‘Vulgar Latin’ (Löfstedt 1956 [1933]: II, 355). It is a notion that distracts from the dynamics of language acquisition in the provinces of the Roman empire. This is the fundamental insight that Cittadini and Bonamy contributed to the study of the Romance languages: what the inhabitants of the provinces were exposed to was the Latin of common soldiers and traders, often vulgar no doubt, but not the Vulgar Latin introduced by scholars to fill the gap between Latin and the Romance languages. For different reasons, each from his own perspective, Cittadini and Bonamy might have agreed with '''Vincent’s (2016) proposal to avoid all labels that suggest the existence of separate languages, in particular the term Vulgar Latin, and to stick to the name Latin instead. Lloyd was right when he advocated discarding the term once and for all'''. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 20:05, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

many cases of verbs merging as complex subtleties in Latin were reduced to simplified verbs in Romance
Quite rightly marked clarification needed. What is that supposed to mean to a linguistically naive reader? The examples given are of suppletion, which creates complexity, rather than simplifying. -- Also needing rectification in the paragraphs on suppletion (where the term is never mentioned) is the apparent assumption that conjugated verb forms are somehow derived from or responsible to the infinitive. "In Spanish and Portuguese ire and vadere merged into the verb ir", "Italian instead merged vadere and ambitare into the verb andare"? Unless ir and andare are intended as glosses of the basic meaning 'go', this is nonsense, serving only to reinforce the notion of supremacy of the infinitive. This and more might be cleaned up most efficiently and informatively with a subsection Suppletion, beginning with a statement that in Romance, verbs meaning 'go' are especially subject to it (perhaps noting also English go/wend). For starters, perusal of Aski 1995 would be helpful (Aski, Janice. 1995. Verbal suppletion: an analysis of Italian, French, and Spanish 'to go'. Linguistics 33. 403-432). Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 17:01, 14 March 2024 (UTC)