Organization: http://groups.google.com
Newsgroups: alt.language.latin
Date: 28 Nov 2005 16:15:52 -0800
Subject: Re: what does 'cognite' mean?
f you're going to patronize me, at least get your facts right. Jerome
was born 347, Fortunatus 530; I don't see how this translates to 'a
mere hundred years'.
It doesn't (Jerome, 347-420; Boethius, 480-524; Fortunatus 540-600), but the
point is that there is no evidence that they spoke anything other than some
variety of Latin. If by another language you mean a variety of Latin which
differed from what they wrote, so what? We know that the educated written
language differed significantly from the common speech. Aside from regional
evidence from inscriptions, we have the testimonia of individuals like
Cicero (I've quoted the texts elsewhere on this list) who discusses several
trends in common parlance. There were varieties of common speech which
preserved elements of rustic diction, with features of Oscan, Umbrian,
Samnite, Faliscian, etc. There were varieties (e.g., the Ciceronian example
of the speech of patrician Roman matrons), as we know from De Oratore, which
preserved archaic or Plautine features.
Now to return to Jerome, Boethius and Fortunatus. Jerome appears to have
come from a well off Christian family in Dalmatia. He came to Rome at an
early age (no later than twelve) and received what was for the time an
excellent classical education (from the likes of Donatus). If memory serves
me, we have it from him that on his first trip to the East (373 at Antioch,
375 at Chalcis) Latin was his only language. However one chooses to
interpret this, it would not have been unusual for one of his social status
(as in late republican times) to have been speaking from childhood a purer
Latin than the street variety. In fact we do know that his formal education
began in Dalmatia. As for Boethius (who has often been designated - not
without justification - 'the last classical author'), he was the son of a
consul and of consular rank himself. Except for Greek, in which he was
expert, we have, to the best of my knowledge, no attestations of him
speaking another language. While he was trained in rhetoric and the other
arts at Ravenna, it would not have been unusual for a person of his rank and
distinction to have grown up exposed to a more refined standard of latinity,
The same may be said of Fortunatus, a Venetian who was a poet, a courtier, a
diplomat, a scholar, and a cleric. That cultivation of classical standards
of Latinity persisted well past late antiquity is perhaps best attested by
the late example of the Neniae of Pontanus, a collection of Latin lullabies
and nursery songs which he wrote for his children, especially his little
boy, Luciolus.In a like vein we have the somewhat eccentric and similarly
late account of Montaigne who tells us that he spoke Latin before he spoke
French.
Regarding the time frame for our three Veteres Christiani: I guess you got
me. I was more effusive than precise. Nevertheless, Boethius' floruit would
have been within 100-120 years of Jerome's death, and Fortunatus' within
150. At any rate both of the latter flourished within the terminus of what
is often considered the period during which Vulgar Latin was still
interregionally intelligible and commonly undifferentiated from 'Latin' in
public understanding and use (somewhere in the early 7th century, with ca.
600 A.D. often offered as a convenient but not ironclad cutoof date; the
eighth or ninth century by some other authorities, with the Carolingian
decree at the Council of Tours (813) approving, for the sake of
intelligibility, sermons in the so called rustica Romana lingua being cited
as evidence for the later date). While I wouldn't dispute that either of our
authors might have understood the common speech - whatever that might have
been if it had been something other than some form of Latin - I likewise see
no reason or justification to deny them the simultaneous access to and
nurturing in the more educated variety of Latinity, a Latinity, I venture,
which would have been the prerogative of class and which would not have been
foreign to Jerome, whose Latin exhibited such purity that he tells us of a
dream in which he was reproached for being Ciceronianus rather than
Christianus.
The Middle Ages, on the other hand, are struggling. They no
longer think in the ways, or about the things, that the
Romans did. The vocabulary and syntax are no longer natural
to them. That has several effects.
For example, they use real Latin words in strange ways (like
this 'cognite', if I have understood it). They introduce
words from their own languages, disguised with Latin endings
- we had 'jomannus' for 'yeoman' a little while ago. They
invent simplified new versions of the language; for example,
a version of Latin devised for Aristotle to be translated
into.
(I nourish the suspicion that this had a big effect on the
understanding of Aristotle and people's attitudes to him. He
wrote in a language with a background and common usage. When
translated into an artificial one that had neither, his
works must have lost much of their connection with life and
reality.)
It is defensible to say such a language is not Latin but
(say) pidgin Latin, like 'mipela', or 'number one pickanin
him blong Missus Quin' (which is the Prince of Wales, if I
have it right). None the worse for that, but not the same
language.
Regarding the pidginization of mediaeval Latin, it is certainly a phenomenon
to be reckoned with, and we have ample written evidence that grammarians and
monastics in late antiquity and the middle ages were aware of and addressed
the situation. I suppose the most famous examples are the earlier Appendix
Probi and the Later Glosses of Reichenau. Regarding borrowings from other
languages, well, that's something that occurs in the history of languages. A
very famous and celebrated Roman legion had a name thought to be borrowed
from Celtic (the famous Alauda). As far as the 'naturalness' of the
vocabulary and syntax go, I think it varies with what 'them' you're
referring to. If inscriptions are any indication, the phenomenon reaches
pretty far back, even into what we like to think of as the 'best period'.
That having been said, it would be a mistake to hold that the barbarisms and
solecisms of, for instance, a Gregory of Tours, set the standard of
Latinity for late antiquity any more than errors in spelling, quantity,
grammar found in inscriptions do so for the Augustan age. There are too many
examples of very good Latin that contravene this. As examples I might cite
Boethius, Einhard, Lupus, Hildebert of Lavardin, Abelard, etc. In the period
spanned by these authors one will find prose written to classical standards,
as well as verse composed in the classical (quantitative) and the
contemporary (accentual/syllabic) modes.
One observation on the medieval translations of Aristotle: the evidence
seems to be that Christian and Jewish scholars translated them into Arabic,
and that they were then translated out of the Arabic into Latin.
Regarding the degree of mastery of the language and its potential for
expression, this varied with the user, as dubtless it must have even in
classical times, with a range from the bizarre to the elegant (witness
Cicero, Pliny, Fronto or Livy, Tacitus, Velleius Paterculus), and this again
was recognized by a number of mediaeval authors. Abelard himself
distinguishes between the training and competence of the litteratus and the
magister, and criticizes the pretensions of the supposedly literate clergy,
and John of Salisbury writes both elegantly and insightfully on matters of
style, diction, proper use of words, and, of course, course of training,
etc.
From late antiquity through the high middle ages, up to the dawn of the
renaissance, Latin continued as a viable medium of communication - both
written and oral. It acquired new vocabulary, and influenced and was
influenced by the languages and events around it. A striking example of this
is the fabliau "De L'enfant Qui Fu Remis au Soleil" and its analogue from
the Cambridge Songs, Advertite,/omnes populi,/ridiculum/et audite,
quomodo/Suevum mulier/ et ipse illam/ defraudaret - Which was the chicken,
which the egg?
One of the first grammars we have of a vernacular language, the "Donatz
Provenzals", is written in Latin. Much later the viability of and sheer
endurance of Latin is again demonstrated by Jesuit grammars of Sanskrit and
Japanese. Similarly we have the Old Irish Glosses, which leads one to
speculate - not unfoundedly - on the question of bilingualism and the
historical provenance of Latin, which, I think, is not irrelevant, and is
not dealt justice by the claim that
I can only obtain reliable data about this language through documents
left by native speakers. After the native speakers were gone (or more
accurately, once their language had changed to the extent that they
needed to learn the language of their written documents as an L2), the
thing called 'Latin' is something of a mathematical abstraction based
on schoolmasters' grammar texts.
It is scarcely credible that the written literature of the classical bore
much resemblance to the daily speech. The canons of composition and word
formation persisted for a thousand years after Cicero - and in fact still
persist - and it seems hardly meaningful to suggest that the continuous use
of an admittedly artificial language becomes somehow more artificial in a
later period of its artificiality. As for Robert's statement that the
medieval writers had ceased to think as the Romans thought, I don't quite
understand the point. The "Romans" sucked up foreign gods, goods, women,
customs and the like with a voraciousness that - at least for me - raises
doubt concerning what it meant to 'think like a Roman'. Having said that, I
don't find it implausible that some species of "correct' (correct becoming
increasingly a category formed on largely written and school transmitted
canons) latin must have persistedfor so long that acquisition often did not
have to be through the vehicle of formal study. If we are to believe
Hildegarde, she acquired her proficiency in Latin through persistent use of
and exposure to the formal Liturgy. That she thought more like a medieval
christian woman than a Roman of whatever period doesn't seem to have much
bearing on the literary output, especially since each generation of Romans
seems, at least to me, to be in metamporhoses. Rome may be eternal, but she
certainly has not been immutable.
Roma vetusta fui, sed nunc nova Roma vocabor;
eruta ruderibus, culmen ad astra fero. (Hildebert of Lavardin)
This brings me, it seems, to my confession, which, at this point should come
as no surprise: I am not and never have been impressed with the supposed
utility of applying L1, L2 or native language categorizations to a language
like Latin which persisted as a living and viable - though every bit as
artificial as it must have been in so called 'Roman" times - medium of
communication long past the terminal points at which the spoken language had
evolved into more or less modern Romance languages (somw writers,
incidentally, trace the inception of ProtoRomance to ca. 150 B.C., which
gives one reason to hover in humility over the constructs of linguists and
the notion of "Romanness". The medieval monastic system being what it was,
there wee doubtless individuals, especially prior to the full florescence of
vernaculars, who felt more at home in Latin, whether it had been a first or
a second language, and who probably used it with such regularity that the
local dialect or vernacular seemed a 'foreign' or a 'second' language. They
were for all practical purposes fluent, 'native' speakers of Latin.
Beyond this, I also believe - common sense would seem to dictate it - that
primarily or secondarily acquired good spoken and written Latin probably
endured in refined enclaves well into the period of the romanticization of
that elusive construct we like to call 'Vulgar Latin' , so that the
distinctions of when and where it was a primary or secondary language are
for the most part shrouded in an obscurity onto which we hang a cloak of
more or less imprecise - but convenient - temporal and geographical
generalizations.
I guess I should finally touch briefly on the matter of 'contempt'. I have
reread my posts and find no evidence of it. Perhaps a certain levity and
flippancy which I am wont to display toward seemingly vatic effusions of
moral, epistemological, philological or otherwise theoretical certainty - or
other utterances transmitted through an amanuensis of Absolute Spirit -
might be misconstrued as contempt. However, it's not anything more than the
amusement of one at the threshold of dotage, so that, should you continue to
asseret that you are a linguist, and were I to respond - with a preliminary
genuflection, of course that, linguist though you may be, you also strike me
as something of a princox, I would only be - as they say in the schoolyards,
playgrounds and parks here at the edge of desolation - 'Yanking your chain'.
For you to take it otherwise would only, I fear, precipitate an irritation
which I probably would be loath to share:
hoc est cur palles? cur quis non prandeat hoc est?
Bob