Editing Vulgar Latin (section)

==History of the Vulgar Latin controversy==
During the [[Classical antiquity|Classical period]], Roman authors referred to the informal, everyday variety of their own language as ''sermo plebeius'' or ''sermo vulgaris'', meaning "common speech".<ref>{{harvnb|Elcock|1960|p=20}}</ref> This could simply refer to unadorned speech without the use of rhetoric, or even plain speaking. The modern usage of the term Vulgar Latin dates to the [[Renaissance]], when [[Italians|Italian]] thinkers began to theorize that [[Italian language|their own language]] originated in a sort of "corrupted" Latin that they assumed formed an entity distinct from the literary [[Classical Latin|Classical]] variety, though opinions differed greatly on the nature of this "vulgar" dialect.<ref>{{harvnb|Eskhult|2018}}, §6</ref>

The early 19th-century French linguist [[François Just Marie Raynouard|François-Just-Marie Raynouard]] is often regarded as the father of modern [[Romance philology]]. Observing that the Romance languages have many features in common that are not found in Latin, at least not in "proper" or Classical Latin, he concluded that the former must have all had some common ancestor (which he believed most closely resembled [[Old Occitan]]) that replaced Latin some time before the year 1000. This he dubbed ''la langue romane'' or "the Romance language".<ref>{{harvnb|Posner|1996|p=3|ps={{sp}}He [Raynouard] discerned in the Romance languages common features that could not all be ascribed to Latin heritage, and therefore postulated a common ancestor, ''la langue romane'', that he believed replaced Latin before AD 1000, and which most nearly resembled the language of the troubadors (now called Old Occitan, or Old Provençal).}}</ref> 

The first truly modern treatise on Romance linguistics and the first to apply the [[comparative method]] was [[Friedrich Christian Diez]]'s seminal ''Grammar of the Romance Languages''.<ref>{{harvnb|Herman|2000|p=1}}</ref> Researchers such as [[Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke]] characterised Vulgar Latin as to a great extent a separate language, that was more or less distinct from the written form. To Meyer-Lübke, the spoken Vulgar form was the genuine and continuous form, while Classical Latin was a kind of artificial idealised language imposed upon it; thus Romance languages were derived from the "real" Vulgar form, which had to be reconstructed from remaining evidence.<ref>{{harvnb|Herman|2000|p=5}}</ref> Others that followed this approach divided Vulgar from Classical Latin by education or class. Other views of "Vulgar Latin" include defining it as uneducated speech, slang, or in effect, [[Proto-Romance]].<ref>{{harvnb|Lloyd|1979|pp=110–122}}</ref>

The result is that the term "Vulgar Latin" is regarded by some modern philologists as essentially meaningless, but unfortunately very persistent:

<blockquote>the continued use of "Vulgar Latin" is not only no aid to thought, but is, on the contrary, a positive barrier to a clear understanding of Latin and Romance.<ref>{{harvnb|Lloyd|1979|p=120}}</ref>...<br><br>I wish it were possible to hope the term might fall out of use. Many scholars have stated that "Vulgar Latin" is a useless and dangerously misleading term ... To abandon it once and for all can only benefit scholarship.<ref>{{harvnb|Lloyd|1979|p=122}}</ref></blockquote>

Lloyd called to replace the use of "Vulgar Latin" with a series of more precise definitions, such as the spoken Latin of a particular time and place. 

Research in the twentieth century has in any case shifted the view to consider the differences between written and spoken Latin in more moderate terms. Just as in modern languages, speech patterns are different from written forms, and vary with education, the same can be said of Latin. For instance, philologist József Herman agrees that the term is problematic, and therefore limits it in his work to mean the innovations and changes that turn up in spoken or written Latin that were relatively uninfluenced by educated forms of Latin. Herman states: <blockquote>it is completely clear from the texts during the time that Latin was a living language, there was never an unbridgeable gap between the written and spoken, nor between the language of the social elites and that of the middle, lower, or disadvantaged groups of the same society.<ref>{{harvnb|Herman|2000|p=5}}</ref></blockquote>
Herman also makes it clear that Vulgar Latin, in this view, is a varied and unstable phenomenon, crossing many centuries of usage where any generalisations are bound to cover up variations and differences.