St Jerome

Sheila Watts sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk
Thu Mar 4 09:10:54 UTC 1999


[ moderator snip ]

Peter and or Graham said that Jerome wrote 'bad Latin'. Well, I suppose as
Indo-Europeanists they don't feel obliged to know anything about
sociolinguistics. I responded to say that Jerome was aware that his Latin
fell short of Ciceronian standards, but that he had another agenda than
writing good Latin, i.e. writing a good biblical translation which would be
comprehensible and appealing to a lot of people. Maybe Peter and or Graham
think you can apply abstract prescriptivist standards to texts written in
the past, but I thought this was an attitude we had all agreed to leave
behind in the 19th century. In those days editors used to 'correct'the
language of medieval native speakers because of their (the editors') own
theories about what was right or wrong. What Peter and or Graham _meant_ to
say, I hope, was that Jerome's Latin, dating from the 4th century, gives us
some insights into how the language was changing at that time,  in that it
does not conform to the standards of the classical language.

Language change - something to do with language - something we're
interested in on this list, or am I wrong?

Sheila Watts
_______________________________________________________
Dr Sheila Watts
Newnham College
Cambridge CB3 9DF
United Kingdom

phone +44 1223 335816



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