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

[Stephane Goyette]

On Sun, 23 May 1999, petegray wrote:

> > as Witold Manczak has
> > argued, Vulgar Latin (or Proto-Romance, or however one cares to call the
> > ancestor of the Romance languages) is quite plainly a "daughter" of
> > Classical Latin (Not a "sister" as so many Romance scholars have argued).
>
> If so, how do you explain:
> (a) the Vulgar Latin use of forms and grammatical constructions not in
> Classical Latin, but which just happen to be identical to forms in earlier
> Latin?   If these are not derived from pre-classical Latin, is it just
> coincidence?   How much coincidence is too much coincidence?
> (b) the evidence for Vulgar Latin forms alongside Classical Latin at the
> same period?   For example, the well known -au- / -o- business (like it or
> not, in some words -o- is not classical, but is vulgar and contemporary with
> classical), or the evidence from the Satiricon and from inscriptions and
> such, showing pre-Romance forms even during the classical period.

First, a terminological clarification: by "Classical Latin" I mean the
written language used, roughly, from the time of Plautus to that of
Caesar. That later evidence, such as the Satiricon, should show
Romance-like traits is unsurprising.

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.

> Both of these seem to me to indicate that Romance developed from Latin
> actually spoken at the very time when Classical Latin was being written.

I agree that Vulgar Latin (or proto-Romance) was born at a very early
date, when Classical Latin was being written: this does not invalidate my
point.

> Like many languages, Latin had a sginficant divergence of written and spoken
> forms.    Classical Latin was really only the written form.

Such divergence is a result of the fact that spoken language changes,
while written language resists such change. However, there must originally
have been an identity between the spoken and the written language, and I
maintain that the ancestor of the Romance languages grew out of the spoken
language, represented in writing, which we call Classical Latin. That this
representation of the spoken language was not perfect is indubitable: but
I would challenge anyone to point to a single trait of the Romance
languages which is inexplicable through Classical Latin and requires one
to resort to pre-Classical Latin (as defined above).

Stephane Goyette.