The extent to which inscriptional evidence may serve as a source of "vulgar," i.e. spoken Latin
"Itis incumbent on Romance scholars to analyze and interpret their exceptionally full stock of linguistic material, using all methods of study at their disposal, working both backward and forward in time. Only thus will Romance linguistics be enabled to do what others expect of it: to serve no...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | deu |
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University of Ljubljana Press (Založba Univerze v Ljubljani)
1992-12-01
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| Series: | Linguistica |
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| Online Access: | https://journals.uni-lj.si/linguistica/article/view/4283 |
| Summary: | "Itis incumbent on Romance scholars to analyze and interpret their exceptionally full stock of linguistic material, using all methods of study at their disposal, working both backward and forward in time. Only thus will Romance linguistics be enabled to do what others expect of it: to serve not only as an end in itself but as a model and training-ground for workers in all fields of historical linguistics." Thus wrote the American scholar, Robert A. Hall, jr. some forty years ago in an essay on the recon struction of Proto-Romance. 1 Indeed, the researcher into the history of the Romance languages is faced with, on the one hand, the schemes of reconstruction (essentially based on the principles of the historical comparative method) and the often puzzling testimonies of reality found in the sources. Put in other terms, he has the choice of working with an abstract system represented by starred Latin forms that do not belong to any real language or the reality of the mass of postclassical written records that have come down to us to be analyzed and sifted through with a view to discovering evidences of trends toward Romance in phonology, morpho-syntax, and vocabulary. And while there are, no doubt, materials whose meaning in terms of future evolution of the Romance languages is difficult, if not impossible to discover, there is an abun dance of those that prelude the future. It is the attention to the future that, I believe, can give reality and life to the large number of forms collected from inscriptions, late writers, and other sources of so-called "Vulgar", i. e. non-literary Latin.
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| ISSN: | 0024-3922 2350-420X |