Yves Cortez

'Guest' : « Sermons are not like Pater Noster recited by habitude, but relatively complicated texts written in order to inform and educate the simple people. For this purpose Gregor has simplified classical Latin, but he did not had to use any Proto-Italian-Romance in the year 600 to make people understand his sermons. So Romance did not exist yet in 600. Supposing that many people were bilingual Latin/Proto-Romance is too hypothetical for me, even today Romance speakers tend to be monolingual. »

Tu es complètement à côté de la plaque. La question n'est pas de savoir si les autorités ecclésiastiques utilisaient une transcription de l'ororoman antiquo-médiéval parlé par les peuples romanophones pour diffuser la propagande césaro-chrétienne (puis chrétienne) puisque la réponse est connue : c'est non. Du moins jusqu'à ce qu'on retrouve les vestiges des premières tentatives d'écriture phonétique de l'ororoman par des non-romanophones vers le VIIIe ou IXe siècle. De toute façon, c'est le néolatin pseudo-classique qui a servi de norme écrite pour l'élite lettrée avant, pendant et après l'intrusion des langues romanes en tant que vernaculaires d'écrit.

Par contre la question de savoir si les romanophones comprenaient les sermons rédigés et lus dans un latin néoclassique à la sauce carolingienne a certainement dû finir par se poser.




Zorro : « The question remains: where the hell is this phantastic "non-Latin Italic" language coming from, where are the proofs? »

Tant qu'on ne retrouvera pas d'écrit, il n'y aura pas de preuve. Mais il y a de grandes chances qu'on ne retrouve jamais de preuve car seuls le latin et le grec jouissaient du statut de scriptolangues officielles (et plus tard l'arabe en Hispanie médiévale). Mais il n'existe aucune preuve non plus que les peuples de l'Empire romain, y compris les Romains, parlaient latin et non pas l'« italien ancien » de Cortez.

Tout ce qu'on peut dire c'est qu'il existait chez les lettrés romains de l'Antiquité une diglossie latin-grec. Ce qui n'exclut pas une diglossie roman-latin chez les illettrés.

Cortez mentionnait deux exemples intéressants sur la cohabitation scriptolangue/orolangue.
Dans l'Algérie actuelle, la seule langue officielle est l'arabe classique. Le vernaculaire algérien, pourtant majoritaire, ne jouit d'aucun statut. Le berbère est reconnu comme langue nationale. L'écrit est réservé à l'arabe classique et au français. Si des archéologues du XXVe siècle venaient faire des fouilles en Algérie, ils retrouveraient des écrits en arabe classique, en français (20 à 25 millions d'Algériens sont francophones) et sans doute en berbère, et pratiquement rien sur le vernaculaire algérien pourtant ultramajoritaire.
Le second exemple c'est la coexistence de l'araméen (la langue maternelle de Jésus) et de l'hébreu (la langue paternelle de Jésus) en Palestine antique. L'essentiel de la production littéraire se faisait en hébreu mais l'essentiel de l'activité orale se faisait en araméen.

"Tant qu'on ne retrouvera pas d'écrit, il n'y aura pas de preuve....
...Mais il n'existe aucune preuve non plus que les peuples de l'Empire romain, y compris les Romains, parlaient latin et non pas l'« italien ancien » de Cortez. "

There have been found hundreds of written proofs of the existence, morphology and vocabulary of the Germanic languages from year 100 AD onward.

And regarding the Basque language, that was also present then:
Wikipedia says:
"
Latin inscriptions [written in Basque language] in Aquitania preserve a number of words with cognates in proto-Basque, for instance the personal names Nescato and Cison (neskato and gizon mean "young girl" and "man" respectively in modern Basque[3]). This proposed language is called "Aquitanian" and was presumably spoken before the Romans brought Latin to the western Pyrenees. Roman neglect of this hinterland allowed Aquitanian Basque to survive while the Iberian and Tartessian languages died out. Basque did come to acquire some Latin vocabulary, both before and after the Latin of the area developed into Gascon (a branch of Occitan) in the northeast, Navarrese-Aragonese Romance in the southeast, and Castilian in the southwest.

In June 2006, archaeologists at the site of Iruña-Veleia discovered an epigraphic set with a series of 270 Basque inscriptions and drawings from the third century.[4] Some of the words and phrases found were "urdin" (blue), "zuri" (white), "gori" (red), "edan" (drink) "ian" (eat), "lo" (sleep), "iesus iose ata ta mirian ama" (Jesus [with] the father Joseph and the mother Mary), and "geure ata zutan" (Our father in you). Further analysis of this discovery could show that the Basque language is more stable than previously thought.[
"

Iberian can also be prooved by written inscriptions:
"
The Iberian scripts are the Paleohispanic scripts that were used to represent the extinct Iberian language. Most of them are typologically very unusual in that they are semi-syllabic rather than purely alphabetic. The oldest Iberian inscriptions date to the 4th or possibly the 5th century BC, and the latest from end of the 1st century BC or possibly the beginning of the 1st century AD.
"
The same goes for Travis´s Faliscan, Oscan or Umbrian:
"
The Italic languages are first attested in *writing* from Umbrian and Faliscan inscriptions dating to the 7th century BC. The alphabets used are based on the Old Italic alphabet, which is itself based on the Greek alphabet. The Italic languages themselves show minor influence from the Etruscan and somewhat more from the Ancient Greek languages."


And a "Proto-Italian/Proto-Romance" language (not any attested Proto-Italic, nor a Latin dialect or a vernacular Latin, but, as Cortez states, a language of its own with its own vocabulary, e.g. "guerra" for Latin "bellum") in the middle of the heavily alphabetized imperium romanum, spoken by the masses, has left no written inscriptions?

with all this speculation going on about guerra, I'm surprised that no one has yet tried somehow to 'make' a descent from bellum work, considering all this ridiculousness (...pound of salt, please)

*bella (fem. form of 'bellum') > *vella (alt. of *bella) > *verra (alt. of *vella) > gwerra

I'm disappointed!

bella (fem. form of 'bellum')

That doesn't exist. Bellum is neuter. I'm dissapointed. You are ignorant.

<<bella (fem. form of 'bellum')

That doesn't exist. Bellum is neuter. I'm dissapointed. You are ignorant. >>

LOL, that's the point

If bellum had evolved in the Romance languages it would had followed the same steps as similar words:

Templum (neuter) -> templo (masculine)

Bellum (neuter) -> bello (masculine)

Bellum -> bella is completely inconsistent with the evolution of Latin words into Romance ones.

<<If bellum had evolved in the Romance languages it would had followed the same steps as similar words:

Templum (neuter) -> templo (masculine)

Bellum (neuter) -> bello (masculine)

Bellum -> bella is completely inconsistent with the evolution of Latin words into Romance ones. >>

Wow. Tell us all something we don't already kn-...nevermind. You failed to grasp the entire point of what I was saying. Great IQ there, Genius!

Bueller?...
Bueller?...
Bueller?...

...?

What you said was a stupidity. That's all.

<<What you said was a stupidity. That's all. >>

To you I'm sure it was : )


you know, one consistent fact about IE languages is the one word can be triplicated into three distinct words by changing the gender (cf. OE leod (masc) = person; leod (fem) = people group/ethnicity).

This is consistent with daughter languages that show stems that are cognate, but are of differing genders (OE steorra (masc) = Latin stella (fem) - "star")

So with all the hypotheticizing going on, it's not beyond reason to suggest an unattested form *bella for , yes, neuter bellum. Please people, try a little to think outside of your box[heads]!

by the way, for future reference, an asterisk [*] beside a word denotes that it is hypothetical...pure Genius : )

>>And a "Proto-Italian/Proto-Romance" language (not any attested Proto-Italic, nor a Latin dialect or a vernacular Latin, but, as Cortez states, a language of its own with its own vocabulary, e.g. "guerra" for Latin "bellum") in the middle of the heavily alphabetized imperium romanum, spoken by the masses, has left no written inscriptions?<<

What is attested is errors in written classical Latin which reflect how Latin at the time was *actually* spoken by the general public at the time. This is how things such as the loss of accusative /m/ can be dated (in that case to the Republican period). At the same time, such does not really give an accurate picture of how what was effectively Proto-Romance was spoken, as such generally still try to (unsuccessfully) emulate classical Latin, but it does indicate that that which was actuallly spoken was not really classical Latin per se.

'Guest' : « There have been found hundreds of written proofs of the existence, morphology and vocabulary of the Germanic languages from year 100 AD onward. [...] And a "Proto-Italian/Proto-Romance" language (not any attested Proto-Italic, nor a Latin dialect or a vernacular Latin, but, as Cortez states, a language of its own with its own vocabulary, e.g. "guerra" for Latin "bellum") in the middle of the heavily alphabetized imperium romanum, spoken by the masses, has left no written inscriptions? ».

Oui, c'est parfaitement plausible quand on tient compte de deux facteurs :

1] illettrisme quasi-universel → on ne peut écrire dans sa langue maternelle quand on ne sait pas écrire ;

2] existence de deux scriptolangues universalisantes → le grec et le latin monopolisaient l'essentiel de la production écrite du monde méditerranéen antique.

Le monde germanique ancien satisfait à la condition 1] mais pas à la 2] : dan sl'espace germanophone antique, il n'existait pas de scriptolangue germanique aussi puissante que le latin ou le grec.

Sinon, voir plus haut : Algérie + araméen.





'Guest' : « bella (fem. form of 'bellum')
That doesn't exist. Bellum is neuter. I'm dissapointed. You are ignorant. »

Tu parles d'ignorance un peu vite...

Il existe des substantifs latins dont le genre grammatical est le neutre : <folium> (nom. sg.), <folia> (nom. pl.). Le nominatif pluriel du neutre grammatical a été réinterprété en nominatif singulier du féminin grammatical : Fr <feuille> (fém.), It <foglia> (fém.) etc. Le changement de genre grammatical n'a rien d'exceptionnel.

greg:
"
Le monde germanique ancien satisfait à la condition 1] mais pas à la 2] : dan sl'espace germanophone antique, il n'existait pas de scriptolangue germanique aussi puissante que le latin ou le grec.
"

You missed the point
Still the Germanic culture (as well as the Basque, Iberian etc.) being widely analphabetized as you stress, was able to produce hundreds of written proofs of the existence, morphology and vocabulary of the Germanic languages from year 100 AD onward. Proto Romance´s first written text appeared 842....

>>You missed the point
Still the Germanic culture (as well as the Basque, Iberian etc.) being widely analphabetized as you stress, was able to produce hundreds of written proofs of the existence, morphology and vocabulary of the Germanic languages from year 100 AD onward. Proto Romance´s first written text appeared 842....<<

Mind you that that is no proof that Proto-Romance did not exist far before then. The matter is that Proto-Romance already existed alongside classical Latin and, later, Late Latin, which was used for practically all writing, whereas the Germanic languages had no such diglossia. This is just like with Arabic, where the vast majority of writing in such today is in Modern Standard Arabic, yet the vast majority of the actual population does not speak MSA at all but rather speaks many different and very often non-crossintelligible Arabic varieties which are quite far from it.

'Guest' : « You missed the point
Still the Germanic culture (as well as the Basque, Iberian etc.) being widely analphabetized as you stress, was able to produce hundreds of written proofs of the existence, morphology and vocabulary of the Germanic languages from year 100 AD onward. Proto Romance´s first written text appeared 842.... ».

Relis ce que vient d'écrire Travis car c'est toi qui es à côté de la question : jusqu'à une période avancée du moyen-âge, les lettrés romanophones écrivaient exclusivement en grec ou en latin car ces deux scriptolangues étaient sans rivales (avant l'arrivée de l'arabe en Hispanie). Ces mêmes lettrés romanophones ont ensuite promu l'usage des scriptovernaculaires (Oc & Oïl par exemple).

Il ne faut surtout pas confondre orolangue et scriptolangue. Les romanophones illettrés n'utilisaient pas la scriptolangue. Les lettrés ont graduellement diversifié leur production écrite : [scriptolatin exclusif ↔ orovernaculaire] (état n° 1) → [scritpovernaculaire ↔ orovernaculaire] + [scriptolatin] (état n° 2).

L'état n° 2 correspond aussi au monde germanophone. Je pense que l'état n° 1 devait être résiduel chez les Germaniques, contrairement au monde roman.