Talk:Vulgar Latin

message: the map couldn't be more lazy! its literally a map of the east and western roman empires. someone needs to change it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by FizzoXD (talk • contribs) 02:43, 4 June 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: At least in the area of Sicily and southern Italy, it's obvious that it's not just an east-west map. However, a source would be nice, of course. --Jotamar (talk) 19:30, 13 June 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  about the map shown where latin was spoken in the roman empire 

message: No time at all just now for me to update the article text with this and other works cited (e.g. Vincent 2016) in mind, but in case anyone does have time, I thought it might be useful to stick this note up bulletin board style. It's the conclusion (bold added for the nonce) of Kees Versteegh's 2021 article "The ghost of Vulgar Latin: History of a misnomer" in Historiographia Linguistica, 48.205-227. https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/hl.00091.ver
One might have expected that the problematic value of written documents for the reconstruction of the spoken language would have put a stop to the notion of an intermediate language, but the idea lingers that Vulgar Latin was an actual variety of the language, retrievable from the texts and helpful for the reconstruction of Proto-Romance.15 Significantly, the main conferences on this topic, organized since 1985 have retained the title of Latin vulgaire – Latin tardif, even though, as Väänänen (Väänänen 1981: 3) points out, one of the founders, Einar Löfstedt (1880–1955), admitted that one could never find an adequate definition for the notion of ‘Vulgar Latin’ (Löfstedt 1956 [1933]: II, 355). It is a notion that distracts from the dynamics of language acquisition in the provinces of the Roman empire. This is the fundamental insight that Cittadini and Bonamy contributed to the study of the Romance languages: what the inhabitants of the provinces were exposed to was the Latin of common soldiers and traders, often vulgar no doubt, but not the Vulgar Latin introduced by scholars to fill the gap between Latin and the Romance languages. For different reasons, each from his own perspective, Cittadini and Bonamy might have agreed with Vincent’s (2016) proposal to avoid all labels that suggest the existence of separate languages, in particular the term Vulgar Latin, and to stick to the name Latin instead. Lloyd was right when he advocated discarding the term once and for all. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 20:05, 22 July 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Versteegh: Lloyd was right when he advocated discarding the term [Vulgar Latin] once and for all 

message: Quite rightly marked clarification needed. What is that supposed to mean to a linguistically naive reader? The examples given are of suppletion, which creates complexity, rather than simplifying. --  Also needing rectification in the paragraphs on suppletion (where the term is never mentioned) is the apparent assumption that conjugated verb forms are somehow derived from or responsible to the infinitive. "In Spanish and Portuguese ire and vadere merged into the verb ir", "Italian instead merged vadere and ambitare into the verb andare"? Unless ir and andare are intended as glosses of the basic meaning 'go', this is nonsense, serving only to reinforce the notion of supremacy of the infinitive. This and more might be cleaned up most efficiently and informatively with a subsection Suppletion, beginning with a statement that in Romance, verbs meaning 'go' are especially subject to it (perhaps noting also English go/wend). For starters, perusal of Aski 1995 would be helpful (Aski, Janice. 1995. Verbal suppletion: an analysis of Italian, French, and Spanish 'to go'. Linguistics 33. 403-432). Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 17:01, 14 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  many cases of verbs merging as complex subtleties in Latin were reduced to simplified verbs in Romance