Unless one is a professional philologist he feels little interest in the language of the common people. Its peculiarities in pronunciation, syntax, phraseology, and the use of words we are inclined to avoid in our own speech, because they mark a lack of cultivation. We test them by the standards of polite society, and ignore them, or condemn them, or laugh at them as abnormal or illogical or indicative of ignorance. So far as literature goes, the speech of the common people has little interest for us because it is not the recognized literary medium. These two reasons have prevented the average man of cultivated tastes from giving much attention to the way in which the masses speak, and only the professional student has occupied himself with their language. This is unfortunate because the speech of the common people has many points of interest, and, instead of being illogical, is usually much more rigid in its adherence to its own accepted principles than formal speech is, which is likely to be influenced by convention or conventional associations. To take an illustration of what I have in mind, the ending -s is the common mark in English of a plural form. For instance, "caps," "maps," "lines," and "places" are plurals, and the corresponding singular forms are "cap," "map," "line," and "place." Consequently, granted the underlying premise, it is a perfectly logical and eminently scientific process from the forms "relapse" (pronounced, of course, "relaps") and "species" to postulate a corresponding singular, and speak of "a relap" and "a specie," as a negro of my acquaintance regularly does. "Scrope" and "lept," as preterites of "scrape" and "leap," are correctly formed on the analogy of "broke" and "crept," but are not used in polite society.
So far as English, German, or French go, a certain degree of general interest has been stimulated lately in the form which they take in every-day life by two very different agencies, by the popular articles of students of language, and by realistic and dialect novels. But for our knowledge of the Latin of the common people we lack these two all-important sources of information. It occurred to only two Roman writers, Petronius and Apuleius, to amuse their countrymen by writing realistic stories, or stories with realistic features, and the Roman grammarian felt an even greater contempt for popular Latin or a greater indifference to it than we feel to-day. This feeling was shared, as we know, by the great humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the revival of interest in the Greek and Latin languages and literatures begins. Petrarch, Poggio Bracciolini, and the other great leaders in the movement were concerned with the literary aspects of the classics, and the scholars of succeeding generations, so far as they studied the language, confined their attention to that of the great Latin stylists. The first student to conceive of the existence of popular Latin as a form of speech which differed from formal literary Latin, seems to have been the French scholar, Henri Étienne. In a little pamphlet on the language and style of Plautus, written toward the end of the sixteenth century, he noted the likeness between French and the language of the Latin dramatist, without, however, clearly perceiving that the reason for this similarity lay in the fact that the comedies of Plautus reflect the spoken language of his time, and that French and the other Romance languages have developed out of this, rather than from literary Latin. Not until the middle of the eighteenth century was this truth clearly recognized, and then almost simultaneously on both sides of the Rhine.
It was left for the nineteenth century, however, to furnish scientific proof of the correctness of this hypothesis, and it was a fitting thing that the existence of an unbroken line of connection between popular Latin of the third century before our era, and the Romance languages of the nineteenth century, should have been established at the same time by a Latinist engaged in the study of Plautus, and a Romance philologist working upward toward Latin. The Latin scholar was Ritschl, who showed that the deviations from the formal standard which one finds in Plautus are not anomalies or mistakes, but specimens of colloquial Latin which can be traced down into the later period. The Romance philologist was Diez, who found that certain forms and words, especially those from the vocabulary of every-day life, which are common to many of the Romance languages, are not to be found in serious Latin literature at all, but occur only in those compositions, like comedy, satire, or the realistic romance, which reflect the speech of the every-day man. This discovery made it clear that the Romance languages are related to folk Latin, not to literary Latin. It is sixty years since the study of vulgar Latin was put on a scientific basis by the investigations of these two men, and during that period the Latinist and the Romance philologist have joined hands in extending our knowledge of it. From the Latin side a great impetus was given to the work by the foundation in 1884 of Wölfflin's Archiv für lateinische Lexikographie und Grammatik. This periodical, as is well known, was intended to prepare the way for the publication of the Latin Thesaurus, which the five German Academies are now bringing out.
One of its primary purposes, as its title indicates, was to investigate the history of Latin words, and in its first number the editor called attention to the importance of knowing the pieces of literature in which each Latin word or locution occurred. The results have been very illuminating. Some words or constructions or phrases are to be found, for instance, only in comedy, satire, and the romance. They are evidently peculiar to vulgar Latin. Others are freely used in these types of literature, but sparingly employed in historical or rhetorical works. Here again a shade of difference is noticeable between formal and familiar usage. The method of the Latinist then is essentially one of comparison and contrast. When, for instance, he finds the word equus regularly used by serious writers for "horse," but caballus employed in that sense in the colloquial compositions of Lucilius, Horace, and Petronius, he comes to the conclusion that caballus belongs to the vocabulary of every-day life, that it is our "nag."
The line of reasoning which the Romance philologist follows in his study of vulgar Latin is equally convincing. The existence of a large number of words and idioms in French, Spanish, Italian, and the other Romance languages can be explained only in one of three ways. All these different languages may have hit on the same word or phrase to express an idea, or these words and idioms may have been borrowed from one language by the others, or they may come from a common origin. The first hypothesis is unthinkable. The second is almost as impossible. Undoubtedly French, for instance, borrowed some words from Spanish, and Spanish from Portuguese. It would be conceivable that a few words originating in Spain should pass into France, and thence into Italy, but it is quite beyond belief that the large element which the languages from Spain to Roumania have in common should have passed by borrowing over such a wide territory. It is clear that this common element is inherited from Latin, out of which all the Romance languages are derived. Out of the words, endings, idioms, and constructions which French, Spanish, Italian, and the other tongues of southern Europe have in common, it would be possible, within certain limits, to reconstruct the parent speech, but fortunately we are not limited to this material alone. At this point the Latinist and the Romance philologist join hands. To take up again the illustration already used, the student of the Romance languages finds the word for "horse" in Italian is cavallo, in Spanish caballo, in French cheval, in Roumanian cal, and so on. Evidently all these forms have come from caballus, which the Latinist finds belongs to the vocabulary of vulgar, not of formal, Latin. This one illustration out of many not only discloses the fact that the Romance languages are to be connected with colloquial rather than with literary Latin, but it also shows how the line of investigation opened by Diez, and that followed by Wölfflin and his school, supplement each other. By the use of the methods which these two scholars introduced, a large amount of material bearing on the subject under discussion has been collected and classified, and the characteristic features of the Latin of the common people have been determined. It has been found that five or six different and independent kinds of evidence may be used in reconstructing this form of speech.
We naturally think first of the direct statements made by Latin writers. These are to 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 at the illiterate speech of the spectators in the theatres and circus. Similarly a character in Petronius utters a warning against the words such people use. Cicero openly delights in using every-day Latin in his familiar letters, while the architect Vitruvius expresses the anxious fear that he may not be following the accepted rules of grammar. As we have noticed above, a great deal of material showing the differences between formal and colloquial Latin which these writers have in mind, may be obtained by comparing, for instance, the Letters of Cicero with his rhetorical works, or Seneca's satirical skit on the Emperor Claudius with his philosophical writings. Now and then, too, a serious writer has occasion to use a bit of popular Latin, but he conveniently labels it for us with an apologetic phrase. Thus even St. Jerome, in his commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians, says: "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, as the vulgar proverb has it." To the ancient grammarians the "mistakes" and vulgarisms of popular speech were abhorrent, and they have fortunately branded lists of words and expressions which are not to be used by cultivated people. The evidence which may be had from the Romance languages, supplemented by Latin, not only contributes to our knowledge of the vocabulary of vulgar Latin, but it also shows us many common idioms and constructions which that form of speech had. Thus, "I will sing" in Italian is canterò (=cantar[e]-ho), in Spanish, cantaré (=cantar-he), in French, chanterai (=chanter-ai), and similar forms occur in some of the other Romance languages. These forms are evidently made up of the Latin infinitive cantare, depending on habeo ("I have to sing"). But the future in literary Latin was cantabo, formed by adding an ending, as we know, and with that the Romance future can have no connection. However, as a writer in the Archiv has pointed out,[18] just such analytical tense forms as are used in the Romance languages to-day are to be found in the popular Latin sermons of St. Jerome. From these idioms, common to Italian, French, and Spanish, then, we can reconstruct a Latin formation current among the common people. Finally a knowledge of the tendencies and practices of spoken English helps us to identify similar usages when we come upon them in our reading of Latin. When, for instance, the slave in a play of Plautus says: "Do you catch on" (tenes?), "I'll touch the old man for a loan" (tangam senem, etc.), or "I put it over him" (ei os sublevi) we recognize specimens of Latin slang, because all of the metaphors involved are in current use to-day. When one of the freedmen in Petronius remarks: "You ought not to do a good turn to nobody" (neminem nihil boni facere oportet) we see the same use of the double negative to which we are accustomed in illiterate English. The rapid survey which we have just made of the evidence bearing on the subject establishes beyond doubt the existence of a form of speech among the Romans which cannot be identified with literary Latin, but it has been held by some writers that the material for the study of it is scanty. However, an impartial examination of the facts ought not to lead one to this conclusion. On the Latin side the material includes the comedies of Plautus and Terence, and the comic fragments, the familiar odes of Catullus, the satires of Lucilius, Horace, and Seneca, and here and there of Persius and Juvenal, the familiar letters of Cicero, the romance of Petronius and that of Apuleius in part, the Vulgate and some of the Christian fathers, the Journey to Jerusalem of St. Ætheria, the glossaries, some technical books like Vitruvius and the veterinary treatise of Chiron, and the private inscriptions, notably epitaphs, the wall inscriptions of Pompeii, and the leaden tablets found buried in the ground on which illiterate people wrote curses upon their enemies.
It is clear that there has been preserved for the study of colloquial Latin a very large body of material, coming from a great variety of sources and running in point of time from Plautus in the third century B.C. to St. Ætheria in the latter part of the fourth century or later. It includes books by trained writers, like Horace and Petronius, who consciously adopt the Latin of every-day life, and productions by uneducated people, like St. Ætheria and the writers of epitaphs, who have unwittingly used it.
St. Jerome says somewhere of spoken Latin that "it changes constantly as you pass from one district to another, and from one period to another" (et ipsa Latinitas et regionibus cotidie mutatur et tempore). If he had added that it varies with circumstances also, he would have included the three factors which have most to do in influencing the development of any spoken language. We are made aware of the changes which time has brought about in colloquial English when we compare the conversations in Fielding with those in a present-day novel. When a spoken language is judged by the standard of the corresponding literary medium, in some of its aspects it proves to be conservative, in others progressive. It shows its conservative tendency by retaining many words and phrases which have passed out of literary use. The English of the Biglow Papers, when compared with the literary speech of the time, abundantly illustrates this fact. This conservative tendency is especially noticeable in districts remote from literary centres, and those of us who are familiar with the vernacular in Vermont or Maine will recall in it many quaint words and expressions which literature abandoned long ago. In Virginia locutions may be heard which have scarcely been current in literature since Shakespeare's time. Now, literary and colloquial Latin were probably drawn farther apart than the two corresponding forms of speech in English, because Latin writers tried to make the literary tongue as much like Greek in its form as possible, so that literary Latin would naturally have diverged more rapidly and more widely from conversational Latin than formal English has drawn away from colloquial English.
But a spoken language in its development is progressive as well as conservative. To certain modifying influences it is especially sensitive. It is fond of the concrete, picturesque, and novel, and has a high appreciation of humor. These tendencies lead it to invent many new words and expressions which must wait months, years, perhaps a generation, before they are accepted in literature. Sometimes they are never accepted. The history of such words as buncombe, dude, Mugwump, gerrymander, and joy-ride illustrate for English the fact that words of a certain kind meet a more hospitable reception in the spoken language than they do in literature. The writer of comedy or farce, the humorist, and the man in the street do not feel the constraint which the canons of good usage put on the serious writer. They coin new words or use old words in a new way or use new constructions without much hesitation. The extraordinary material progress of the modern world during the last century has undoubtedly stimulated this tendency in a remarkable way, but it would seem as if the Latin of the common people from the time of Plautus to that of Cicero must have been subjected to still more innovating influences than modern conversational English has. During this period the newly conquered territories in Spain, northern Africa, Greece, and Asia poured their slaves and traders into Italy, and added a great many words to the vocabulary of every-day life. The large admixture of Greek words and idioms in the language of Petronius in the first century of our era furnishes proof of this fact. A still greater influence must have been felt within the language itself by the stimulus to the imagination which the coming of these foreigners brought, with their new ideas, and their new ways of looking at things, their strange costumes, manners, and religions.
The second important factor which affects the spoken language is a difference in culture and training. The speech of the gentleman differs from that of the rustic. The conversational language of Terence, for instance, is on a higher plane than that of Plautus, while the characters in Plautus use better Latin than the freedmen in Petronius. The illiterate freedmen in Petronius speak very differently from the freemen in his story. Sometimes a particular occupation materially affects the speech of those who pursue it. All of us know something of the linguistic eccentricities of the London cabman, the Parisian thief, or the American hobo. This particular influence cannot be estimated so well for Latin because we lack sufficient material, but some progress has been made in detecting the peculiarities of Latin of the nursery, the camp, and the sea.