The freedmen, talking to eachother at Trimalchio's table, use a language which is not quite similar to the language, usually found in Latin literature of the period in which the 'Satyricon' has been dated. The language of these freedmen can be identified as 'vulgar Latin', or at least as Petronius' use of 'vulgar Latin'. The author depicts these personae as people talking in 'their own' language.In relation to this language, this first article in a series of three will deal with the subject of 'vulgar Latin' and what is known of it.

With 'vulgar Latin', in a broad sense, all Latin language is meant, which doesn't fit into the scheme made by the Latin grammar, used in the literature of the 1st century BCE and the 1st century A.D. Of course, this is quite a large and unprecise definition, but it clearly states the way research related to the remains of 'vulgar Latin' has been executed over the last centuries. More closely described, we are talking about the 'vulgar' version of archaic and classical Latin (which mainly is the Latin of the 1st century before and after the birth of Christ), the way it has been handed down to us through all kinds of inscriptions, graffiti and (semi-)literal texts. De Romans themselves, predominantly Cicero in some of his letters to his close friends, spoke in relation to this speech of sermo plebeius or sermo cottidianus(1).

A house in Pompeii. Many ancient graffiti were found in houses like this one. To the right: brick graffiti in ancient Ostia.

Rome hasn't always been a world power with a largely setup rule, a splendid culture and literature. It once began als a small place, a settlement of farmers and shepherds, who kept themselves busy with everyday things and spoke an everyday language. Although some utterances of literature have began rather early, probably from the 4th century BCE on, it has been the consequence of mainly two things that kicked off the development of Latin literature: a. the interaction with Greek culture and b. the growth of Roman political power during and after the Punic Wars and the conquest of the Hellenic and Hellenistic world. From that period on, a development of the Latin language into two directions becomes visible: the development of an official (i.e. formal and literal) language, with a grammar and syntax and the development of a colloquial language, a 'vulgar' language, which was not used in Court, the Senate, at political meetings or in formal or literal writings, but at home, within the family or among friends.

Classicism, i.e. the development of classical Latin (also formerly referred to as the Latin of Caesar and Cicero), has, to some extent, had a great influence on the development of 'vulgar' Latin as its counterpart. L.R. Palmer calls this 'vulgar' Latin national speech and therefore doesn't refer to any ancient Italic dialect akin to Latin, but purely to the Latin folk speech(2). The polarization between formal and 'vulgar' Latin mainly developed around the grammar, syntax and vocabulary of the Latin language in general, which was at some point and to some extent regarded as correct or incorrect by the native speakers. Classicism was prodominantly striving for urbanitas (i.e. city manners, civilization) and elegantia (i.e. taste, refinement) of the language; everything in the Latin language which would not comply to urbanitas and elegantia would be regarded as peasantlike, blunt and therefore 'vulgar'.

In the 2st century BCE, the definition of "urbanitas et elegantia' in classical Latin had more or less reached its completion. Literature of that period more or less complied to the standards of formal Latin grammar and syntax (phaenomena, by the way, which had been adapted from the Greek language!) or were praise provided they complied to those standards. In the 1st century A.D., Latin literature became even more stylistic, due to the influence the Roman emperors had on it, both willingly and unwillingly (3). Writers such as Lucanus and Seneca uplifted classical Latin to even higher standards than they had been in the 1st century BCE.

Examples of literal Latin are abundant; this is not the case with examples of 'vulgar' Latin. Where are they to be found? We know which Roman or Latin scriptures can be counted as "Latin literature", but the 'vulgar' writings are not defined that way. In the same way, it is easy to point out the grammar and syntax of classical Latin, but there is no way to point out the grammar and syntax of 'vulgar' Latin that easily. Of course, thorough examination and research has been done on 'vulgar' Latin texts and various linguists made an analysis of it(4). The analyzed material is less large than the sources of classical Latin, but it's there and we can predominantly recognize 'vulgar' Latin if we compare it to classical Latin and find important discrepancies. What we find then as well, is the important relationship between 'vulgar' Latin words and sentences, especially those of the late Antiquity, and the origin of Romance languages. Some words from 'vulgar' Latin can be marked as clear forerunners of some French and Italian words. More about this, e.g. examples, will be given later on.

Where can we find evidences of 'vulgar' Latin? As we have seen, some sources in literature are very old, others are younger. The oldest sources of 'spoken' or 'vulgar' Latin in literature are to be found in theatre texts. The oldest form of Italic theatre, the Fabula Atellana was extremely 'folkish'. The story plots were made by the people, for the people. The language of this form of threatre is, obviously, the language of the common people. The coming of a Greek (i.e. Hellenistic) form of threatre, the so called New Comedy (with its Greek interpreters Maenander and Livius Andronicus and its Roman interpreters Plautus and Terentius) is te prelude of a more sophisticated style of theatre. Where the Atellana plays are about the rural society of very ancient Italic settlements, the New Comedy plays in the city and it shows more traces of urbanitas. Nevertheless, the New Comedy has it's 'vulgar' types and personae, like the inn-keeper, the prostitute and the opportunistic street sweep, who always manages to cling on kind of wealthy people, just to benefit from them. These types are kind of illiterate and they speak an illiterate language, which had to be recognized by the common people in the theatres. In the New Comedy, the story plots' level was not that high, either. Every citizen had to understand what the plays were about. Most of those comedies are from the 3rd and 3nd centuries BCE. From that period and from earlier times, we also have inscriptions, which give evidences of the way the language was spoken by the common people. Yet, as far as the comedies are concerned, we have to bear in mind that the language of these comedies is shaped into the form of metre, which has had its own specific influence on the medium, apart from the way the language was spoken by the common people. The youngest sources as far as dating is concerned are texts from the late Antiquity, the early Middle Ages and Early Christian texts. The Vulgata, the translation of the Bible into Latin, is a translation of Arameic and Greek texts, yet written in a Latin ehich had to be written or at least understood by the most common people in the Roman Empire. In these texts, the beginning of a Romance vocabulary is already visible. Everything in between those very old and relatively younger text evidences related to 'vulagr' Latin begins at the end of the 2nd century BCE and ends in the 4th century A.D. The amount of examples is quite big, but limited to a number of clear writings and cases, which will be described below. This article doesn't aim to give a closed analysis of 'vulgar' Latin, but it means to give a description of it; therefore, it will be described in a number of examples.

As has been said before, no real 'modus' can be given for 'vulgar' Latin. There is no constant grammar and syntax for 'vulgar' Latin as there is for literal Latin. 'vulgar' Latin can be recognized out of the aberrartions from the literal language, which have come about by the speech of the same people who were using the language in its -more or less- correct form. A great variety in these aberrations cannot really be given, since 'vulgar' Latin was the speech of the common people and not the language which was to be written down. Also, where there are traces of 'vulgar' Latin, these may have been altered and shaped up, like in the passages of Plautus' comedies or in other 'vulgar' passages in literature. Yet, these passages give us a clue of what 'vulgar' Latin may have been about. Secondly, there are differences, and these may have been large, of 'vulgar' Latin used near and in Rome and 'vulgar' Latin used in the Italian countryside. All kinds of social classes tended to use the 'vulgar tongue' in its own way. This was even the case for patrician families, choosing the side of the populares (the 'popular' faction) in Roman politics, like the famous or rather infamous politicia P. Claudius Pulcher. To link up with his populares ideals, he called himself P. Clodius Pulcher and chose to write his name like this. In his day, this was known as a 'vulgar' pronunciation of the name and so we know, that 'au' was pronounced as 'o' in 'vulgar' Latin. When these high class people used their 'vulgar' tongue is not known, for, unfortunately, we don't have any tape recordings of those people. Graffiti, in Pompeii for example, can give us a clue to which extent Latin was comprehended and used by which parts of the population. The graffiti in Pompeii, most of them dating about 10 years and less before the outburst of the volcano Vesuvius in 79 A.D., can be trusted as witnesses of 'vulgar' Latin, because Pompeii had been a Roman city for about 100 years, before it was laid to waste by the mountain's ashes. The Pompeian graffiti form an example of 'vulgar' Latin, yet no tendency to it.

This having been said, I finally come to the examples of 'vulgar Latin'.

I will start with examples of what Cicero called sermo plebeius, continuing with the language of the freedmen in Petronius' Satyricon, the focus of this article and finalize with the vulgarisms of the late Antiquity, which may have lead to the formation of various Romance languages.

Sermo plebeius

In a letter to a person named Herennius (ad Herennium, 4.14), Cicero describes an argument between two men bathing in the thermae. One of them is being called names and yelled at so badly, that he turns red like a beet. Cicero describes the scene in his letter using a language, which differs at some points from the literary 'golden' Latin of his age. He uses the dativus exclamationis (f.e.: ecce mihi exclamare incipit), which has always seemed quite common to literary Latin, but which is now believed to have been derived from 'vulgar' Latin more than we thought(5). Cicero and other authors of his age used this dativus to make their writings more vivid. The perfectum historicum or sometimes called aoristic perfectum, like 'dixit' ("he said") is in 'vulgar' Latin more often replaced by constructions like 'dicere coepit' ("he started saying"/"he went to say"). Texts with 'vulgar' Latin show, that the constructions in literary Latin, which are most feared by grammar students (accusativus cum infinitivo, nominativus cum infinitivo, nominativus cum participio, gerundium and gerundivum), don't occur that much in 'vulgar' Latin, so we may conclude that these constuctions weren't used that often in the Latin spoken in the street. In 'vulgar' Latin, words written in literary Latin with a -u-, are often written with an -o-, f.e.: adulescens in literary Latin is written in 'vulgar' Latin as adolescens. As we have seen above, the familyname Claudius was 'vulgarily' pronounced as Clodius and the family branch of the Pulchri (P.Claudius Pulcher and his sister Claudia) decided to write their names in the 'vulgar' style. In his letter to Herennius, Cicero uses a word for 'ear' which derives from the classical Latin word auris, namely oricula (a writing derivation from auricula).'Oricula' is a typical 'vulgar' word, which modelled for the formation of certain Italian and French words (i.e words in Romance Languages): from 'oricula' the Italian "orecchio" and the French "oreille" have derived.

It happens that we get information from (semi-)scientific works from Antiquity about the way the earliest forms of Latin literature have influenced the development of 'vulgar' Latin. Through Varro (L.L. 7.84) we know that in the Fabula Atellana (vide supra) different forms of the futurum (i.e. future tense) were used than in regular Latin literature, e.g. vivebo instead of vivam; dicebo instead of dicam. In general, we can say that in the Fabula Atellana 3rd conjugation futura looked like 2nd conjugation futura. Substantive nouns like particulo and manduco (after "manducare": to eat a lot) existed and verba inchoativa like gallulascere (after the diminutive noun "gallulus", i.e. little rooster), meaning "to turn red" and which was used instead of rubescere, pubescere, roborascere ("to turn red, to be ashamed of oneself"). Some verbs were made after substantive nouns, like praelumbare, incoxare (i.e. "to limp"). Graecisms and partial Graecisms crept into popular speech, like rhetorissare ("to speak like a rhetor") and dicteria ("wise things"). Sometimes, a plural accusative instead of the required plural nominative is used in cases of the 1st declension.

As we have seen already, Cicero used sermo plebeius or sermo cotidianus probably at home, but also in letters, mostly in letters to very close friends, like his best friend Atticus. Through letters like these, we have evidence that "popular speech" or a sort of 'vulgar' Latin was also used as informal language in the highest regions of the Roman society. Cicero is not only using 'vulgar' words and sentence constructions (often only after having proposed to use the sermo plebeius to the friend he wrote his letter to, but also uses "shortened" sentences and remarks, probably only for him and his friend to be understood to the full potential.

These sentences can often only be fully understood and proprely translated, if we (try to) reconstruct the (political or personal) climate and historical context (if any available) in which they had to be or could have been placed. These phrases can be compared to a telephone conversation, in which we can only hear one part of the conversation: "What? How so? If that is correct, I can only hope that everything will turn out to be fine.."

In his letter to Atticus (ad Atticum, 12.1) Cicero writes his best friend:

"Quid ergo opus erat epistula? Quid cum coram sumus et garrimus quicquid in buccam?"

Translation (by Tanaquil Sergius): "What kind of work was the letter then? What [are we going to do] when we are together and chat about something?"

This kind of language is rather popular, as an experienced Latin literator can see; especially the term "garrire in buccam" for "loqui" is obvious. The word bucca is the vulgar version of the word os ("mouth"). The word bucca has evolved in Italian into the word "bocca" and in French into the word "bouche".

to be continued...

Notes:

(1) Ep. ad Herennium. 4.14; ad Atticum 12.1 et alibi.

(2) L.R. Palmer, The Latin Language, London, 1977, p.148.

(3) E.g. the fact that Senatorial and Comitium Plebis politics had become less and less important, the ability of speaking in public (ars oratoria) and various forms of literature, like historiography, had shifted from the republican meaning of handling politics and writing down political facts to the imperial meaning of praise and propaganda.

(4) L.R. Palmer, op. cit. See the source lists at the end of the book.

(5) L.R. Palmer, op. cit.

Literature:

L.R. Palmer, The Latin Language, London, 1977, p. 148-180.

E. Courtney, A Companion to Petronius, Oxford, 2001, passim.

B.K. Harvey, Roman Lives: Ancient Roman Life as Illustrated by Latin Inscriptions, Kent State University, 2004, passim.

Links:

Life in Pompeii

Pompeian Inscriptions and Graffiti

Ancient Pompeian Graffiti