Latin verbal system: how perfect and aorist joined in the new perfect?

[Steven A. Gustafson]

s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca wrote:

> I do not dispute that Romance was born at an early date: what I dispute is
> the claim that its ancestor was a sister of Classical Latin --a language
> which, I quite agree, was not perfectly homogeneous. The au/o business is
> actually an excellent example of the early birth of Romance and its being
> a "daughter" of Classical Latin: while we indeed have evidence of
> the shift from /au/ to /o/ at an early date (Emperor Augustus himself is
> said to have regarded the pronunciation of his name with an initial /au/
> as pedantic), it is interesting to note that /au/ is preserved as such in
> many Romance languages today, and, more to the point, its distribution
> matches that of Classical Latin --take Romanian AUR "gold", LAUD "I
> praise" versus FOC "fire", DORM "I sleep", where the au/o distribution
> corresponds perfectly to that found in AURUM, LAUDEO, FOCUM and DORMIO.

/au/ was probably the last of the Latin diphthongs to go.  We can be
reasonably sure of that because in certain situations in both Spanish
and Italian, stressed /o/ was diphthongized {fuego, fuoco, uomo &c} but
that didn't happen when the /o/ resulted from CL /au/ {oro, not *uoro}.
And, as you say, it was preserved in Rumanian, and possibly in French,
much later than that.  Therefore /au/ > /o/ in Spanish and Italian must
have occurred after the diphthongization process was well underway.

This suggests, if it does not prove, that if Augustus thought that the
/au/ pronunciation of his title was obsolescent, that there already
existed a wide divergence between the written norm of CL, and the speech
of those Romans whose status in society gave them the clout to set
language norms.

And, if Augustus' ordinary speech was proto-Romance, this really
squeezes the time frame during which CL might have reasonably resembled
a spoken language.  Bear in mind that in 187 BC, the Latin of the
-Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus- was noticeably archaic and
pre-classical.  So were the epitaphs of the Gracchi in 121 BC or
thereabouts.  Of course, it might be expected to find archaic language
in epitaphs and laws.  Still, if folks spoke pre-Classical Latin in 121
BC, and Augustus was speaking proto-Romance when he died in 14 AD, the
time span in which classical Latin was the speech of ranking Romans
shrinks to less than a century.

I think that given this evidence, it may not be reasonable or fruitful
to wonder whether proto-Romance is a lineal descendent or a sister
tongue of CL; but it may indeed be reasonable to say that the written
norm of CL is somewhat archaizing and definitely artificial sample of
the actual river of Roman speech.  Indeed, the life of the classical
norm might owe much to the fact that Rome had an empire, and as such
Latin was a learned speech for many of the Empire's subjects, who
aspired to imitate a norm that was taught to them by schoolmasters.
Folks like Augustus, who spoke "Latin" as their mother tongue, felt far
less pressure to talk like Cicero; and they were the moving force in the
movement from classical Latin to proto-Romance.

--
Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law
Fox & Cotner:  PHONE (812) 945 9600   FAX (812) 945 9615
http://www.foxcotner.com

Amorem semel contraxi. Consanui, et morbi immunis sum.