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

[Steven A. Gustafson]

petegray wrote:

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

Or consider, what future historians would be able to deduce about what
is happening to English at the present time, if the only evidence they
had in front of them are:

--- languages developing from spoken English;
--- edited literary texts; and
--- a handful of surviving examples of graffiti.

The graffiti would likelier contain more clues to the way English is
changing than the literary texts would, since the grammar and syntax of
written English have changed little since Samuel Johnson's day.
(Johnson might think that -USA Today- was written in baby-talk, but he
probably could point to few serious errors in grammar or syntax.
Quaere: does the spread of the -USA Today- or Strunk & White prose
styles indicate that the syntax of "classical" English is becoming
unintelligible to a major segment of contemporary readers?)

This is essentially what we have when we consider Latin from our
perspective.  We are largely dependent on a handful of texts, from Cato
the Elder to Petronius Arbiter, that partly escaped the hands of
normalizing editors; and on collections of graffiti and similar (and
also unedited) sources, in order to get a glimpse of how Latin was
actually used by native speakers.  Our only other windows are the
Romance languages.

Whether these remains actually convey a reasonable sample of actual
Latin usage by native speakers can be debated endlessly.  It remains the
case that they're all we got.  To argue about whether Vulgar Latin is
the sister, daughter, or first cousin once removed of Classical Latin is
rather like wondering whether Kerouac's prose is descended from
Johnsonese.

--
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.