Capitolo 23
The discoveries of Latinist belong to the dictionary of vernacular, not of formal, Latin.
This one illustration out of many it not only discloses the fact that the
Romantic languages will be connected with colloquial rather than with
the literary Latin, but it also shows as the line of investigation it opened from
Diez, and that followed from Woelfflin and his/her school, supplement each other.
From the use of the methods that you/they introduced these two researchers a great,
amount of material that is born on the subject under discussion has been
picked and reserved, and the characteristic represents some Latin of
the common people have been determined. That five have been found or you are
different and independent son-in-laws of the evidence can be used in to reconstruct
this form of discourse.
We naturally think first to the direct affirmations served as Latin writers.
These will be found in the writings of Cicero, Quintilian Seneca the
Rhetorician, Petronius, Aulus Gellius, Vitruvius and the Latin
grammarians. The professional teacher Quintilian is shocked to the
talked illiterate of the spectators in the theaters and circus. Likewise
a character in Petronius sends forth a warning against the words such people
use. Cicero openly delights in to use Latin every-day in his/her relative
letters, while the architect Vitruvius expresses the anxious ones they fear that him
you/he/she cannot be following the approved rules of the grammar. As we have noticed
above, very material that shows the differences among formal and
Latin colloquial that these writers have in mind, you/he/she can be gotten from
comparing, for example Cicero's Letters with his/her rhetorical jobs,
or the satirical joke of Seneca on the emperor Claudius with his philosophical
writings. A serious writer now and then it also has, occasion to use some
the popular Latin, but he suitably identifies him for us with an of excuse
sentence. This way St. Jerome protects, in his/her commentary on the epistle to the
Ephesians, says: "You don't look at a horse of gift in the mouth as the vernacular