Re: Latin and Oscan


phoglund@xxxxxx schrieb:

Marco Pagliero wrote:


I am sure Gallia was never speaking Latin, not in the first century and
not afterwards, because things don't go that way.

"Gaul", not "Gallia", if you don't mind. - Gaul certainly was never

Up to you, I don't mind.

speaking classical Latin, but do you insist the language must needs
have been _pidginized_? Isn't it plausible enough to postulate a
heavily colloquial and slangy kind of language which arrived to Gaul in
the mouths of the legionaries and, being far removed from Rome, was
never subject to the secondary standardizing influences of metropolitan
usage?

I cannot imagin that more than very few Gauls ever learnt very good
even the heavily colloquial and slangy kind of language of the
legionniares. (I don't mean the Gauls were stupid. I mean that normal
people never goes to school to learn perfectly the language of the
winners. Why should they?). But then the only possible result is a
pidgin.

And if you look how Englisch is spoken in India or Kenia, or how French
is spoken in Mauritius/Reunion or Guadelupe, you see what I mean. (And
again, I don't mean Kenians or Reunionnais to be stupid.)

Everytime an invading army has arrived somewhere, normal people didn't
go to school to learn the new language, but instead they invented a new
pidgin. It happens everywhere today (this example of the Hungarian I
don't understend myself, but it is clearly an exception), why should it
have been different in Gaul?

I don't postulate it, if you don't like the idea. But is there any
example of even colloquial Latin having been written by a Gaul? I don't
mean the small educated elite, able to write good Latin, and I don't
mean the stereotyped epigraphy
(http://www.bifrost.it/Antologia/Epigrafia.html), which was probably
learnt by heart. I mean the baker's and the shoemaker's language.

Marco P

.

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