Latine loqui: Trends and Directions in the Crystallization of Classical Latin (review)

Few current philologists-linguists—certainly no latter-day omphaloscopic theorist—could have written such a book. Rosen’s competence derives (one may safely surmise) from a thorough schooling in traditional classical philology, which includes complete familiarity with Latin literary and grammatical works together with the relevant ancient and modern scholarship. (See the bibliography, 199–213, with over 300 titles, among them 17 by R—unhelpfully split into five pieces reflecting the main sections of the book.) The adverb Latine in the title refers to ‘good’ Classical Latin (CL) exemplified by Cicero and authors of his class. There exist of course records, albeit far from voluminous, of other kinds of Latin spread over many centuries: ‘The different dichotomies applicable to Latin—whether one prefers to speak in terms of registers or layers (Gebrauchssprache and literary expression, oral and written, rural and urban, provincial and metropolitan, special languages and general ones, etc.) aggregate for Latin, as we know it, around the two poles of the familiar, non-artistic (or colloquial-vulgar) and the formal, elaborate-literary discourse’ (15).

I had found it instructive to name the two basic types of discourse (R’s poles) Written Latin (WL), which includes full-fledged Classical Latin prevailing for about a century, the period of Golden Latinity, and Spoken Latin (SL), which is really Spoken Latins in view of the undoubtedly existing though sparsely attested local and social dialects. (See Pulgram 1950, reprinted 1986, 131–40). Of course, these two major kinds do occasionally interpenetrate one another, except for CL, whose purity was deemed inviolable. Rather than ‘poles’, WL and SL are stretches distinguished by their grammatical and stylistic properties. My SL, represented graphically by a slanted line running from the upper left to the lower right of the page, encompasses collectively all non-WL speeches, beginning with the earliest Latin records and concluding with the modern Romance dialects (if one regards, as surely one may, Romance as Modern Latin) which are classifiable into diasystems, with some of them evolving in turn their respective standard dialects through processes comparable to R’s crystallization. The WL line on my sketch emerges from SL during the third century BC in a horizontal direction that symbolizes the essentially and deliberately static nature of that idiom, a particularity which it shares with other Schriftsprachen. R quotes Wolfgang Schmid’s Nachwort in the Hofmann-Szantyr grammar (1965:132) that defines CL as an artfully constructed and grammatically arrested branch (N.B.) diverging from continually changing Latin—a phrasing that verbally accords with the graphic I had designed—to which a work on the history of the Latin language cannot devote more space than it does to the historically much more significant Vulgärlatein i.e. SL (198). R regrets this seeming neglect of CL in many historical grammars, chiding in particular Stolz, Debrunner, Schmid (1966:82) for arguing that the presentation of the Latin Schriftsprache, in both its poetic and prosaic employ, belongs chiefly to the spheres of stylistics and rhetoric (198). It seems to me, however, pace R, that this judgment is basically correct. In any event, R’s presentation does not engage in a description of CL as such, whether it does or does not have a history worth telling, but rather deals with the manner of its establishment; the result is a true historical investigation that goes well beyond stylistics and rhetoric. Certainly WL, especially CL, does not undergo a development matching in liveliness and historical significance that of SL. In fact, owing to the decline of education in the population of the post-Augustan empire and the gradual loss of native speakers, CL just peters out over the centuries, even though it was on occasion resuscitated to (almost) ancient glory (the so-called Carolingian renaissance in Charlemagne’s reign, overseen by the ecclesiastic Alcuin of York, comes to mind) and continued to serve efficiently as an international language to philosophers and scientists throughout the...