1.2 Notions of language change in Ancient Rome

So if it’s the form of speech that changes not the written form of language, then how do we know about any changes that take place in a language like Latin where we don’t have the spoken form? We only have the written form of Latin, we don’t have tape recordings from the ancient world or…

No, no, no, that’s quite right. In fact, there are ways of dealing with that. We know the Roman elite had really rather similar ideas to us about the written form of their language. They obviously thought it was the correct form of Latin, in the same way that we tend to think of written English as somehow representing the correct form of English. And they also believed that people who didn’t speak in that kind of way, the correct form, did so because they were lazy or stupid or foreign or whatever. But this is also the basis for finding out about deviations from this norm because the very same people, the roman elite sometimes poke fun at those who they think speak in a way that’s substandard or incorrect or lazy or whatever. There’s a very nice example in Catullus; it’s Poem 84, about a man called Arrius who doesn’t pronounce the H sound in the right words and adds an H sound to words which never had it or shouldn’t have it.

OK.

So it’s a kind of hyper correction. This chap doesn’t normally use H but he’s trying to sort of show off or integrate himself into a higher level of society by using H, but he hasn’t got a clue, really, where it should be and he makes mistakes and therefore sounds ridiculous to those who do know where the H, as it were, should be. But it’s not just things like that. There are lots of inscriptions, other documents written by people who didn’t have much education and therefore didn’t actually know how to write Latin correctly. And sometimes spelling mistakes, forms of words and so on, the shapes of sentences, even, can show quite a lot of what’s happening in the ordinary spoken language as opposed to the conventionalised high style written language. So it’s not a complete problem, we don’t get absolute access but there are ways of finding out.