Could people speaking vulgar Latin understand someone in classical Latin?
Gratias vobis!
Gratias vobis!
Vulgar latin speaker..
- Thread starter Hermes Trismegistus
- Start date
To a large extent yes, but how well would presumably have depended on the listener's intelligence and level of education, as well as on the complexity of the specific piece of classical Latin that they were reading (if they could read) or listening to. Basically it would have been similar to the ability of present-day speakers of English or any other language to understand formal or literary registers of that language.
At least that's what seem likely to me.
At least that's what seem likely to me.
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I would add that it would likely depend on when we're talking about. Vulgar Latin (a problematic term) wasn't a static language. At earlier times, it would have seemed that it was just a less formal or lower-class register of Latin, but in later times, they might not have been mutually comprehensible. When and where this break occurred has been the subject of a lot of research. Current thinking seems to push the date later and later, in that there is some reason to think that even as late as the seventh or eight century, people regarded Classical Latin as just the written form of the spoken idiom, and possibly pronounced it as such. In other words, they would have written, for example fidem but might have pronounced it as if written feidhe or something like it, assuming this theory is correct.
