Quasus dixit:
Nikolaos talks of an ‘idiom’, you talk of a ‘stage’. This all is so vague that I can hardly understand your point. I claim that it’s the same language with pecularities that I’ve listed above (where ‘ungrammatical’ means ‘ungrammatical from the point of view of classical language’). Perhaps we assert the same?
It's meaningful to speak of different stages of the Latin language and it's useful to do so as well, in the same way that we split the English language into Old English, Middle English and Modern English. Medieval Latin is Latin, but it is a different diachronic state of the language. If we agree on that, then we have no cause for disagreement.
Quasus dixit:
I wonder how you tell Recent Latin from Ciceronian. That is which are essential features of Recent Latin that differ it from Classical.
For example, in the Litterae Diurnae forum, this post:
Libri sunt boni si vides illos ut litteratura destinata pro liberis.
You can quite clearly tell that there's an English substratum here.
The books are good if you see them as literature intended for children.
In my opinion, Recent Latin is characterised by profound phonological/lexical/semantic/syntactical/all round grammatical influences by the current living languages and context today. It's Recent not only because we're using it in the 21st century, but because the language itself has been made Recent.
I've been reading scholarly works on Latin word order and particles. It's just emphasised to me that most users of Latin
don't use Latin as the Romans used to. Learners of Recent Latin do so entirely off grammars and books and so the current language really owes all of its structure to a select group of pedagogical books from the 19th century onwards. It's no surprise then that if a grammar from the 20th century says autem means 'but', that people will start to use it as if it's equivalent to 'but'. But Caroline Kroon, a linguist says that autem isn't like sed, but it's actually a marker of thematic discontinuity, marking the boundaries between one part of the text from the other. You could paraphrase it more accurately as 'now then' or 'so what about...?' or use intonation to indicate it. It may not be translatable at all.
Why should we trust those grammars and those 19th century scholars? Why is Allen and Greenbough's Latin the standard one, especially when they could have been wrong?