A Chronology of vulgar Latin.

Aus der Bibliothek von Prof. Wolfgang Haase, langj�igem Herausgeber der ANRW und des International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT) / From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - sehr guter Zustand / very good condition - Preface. -- Philologists have more or less consciously held to the opinion that the transition from Latin to Romance must have been a very gradual one. As documents do not show anything of the kind, but are, in the earlier period, of a Latin character with isolated Rom-ance-like features, then later Romance with isolated Latin-like features, it has been universally assumed that the former did not represent the reality; that the gradual evolution took place in the oral tongue without leaving any but scattered vestiges in the writings of the time. -- Yet, as we shall have occasion to note, all the phenomena contributory to the transformation of Latin into Romance appear in the Merovingian documents: formation of the oblique case, periphrastic future of various kinds, undermining of the Latin passive and creation of an analytic form, of new personal pronouns and articles out of the demonstrative, new Romance syntax, etc. They are all there. Their varying frequency occurs in great part according to chronological order, so that the more recent the document, up to 770, the more complex Romance features it possesses. They are all there. But they are not alone, they are immersed in a mass of more or less classical forms. These have misled the philologists into the view that the documents represented nothing real but a miserable attempt at writing classical Latin. As a matter of fact, they simply show how linguistic phenomena take place: in a fluctuating, vacillating manner in which the old and the new live side by side, coexist in a constantly shifting proportion, so that an observer would, very often, not be able to tell what the direction is. This is especially true in times of great transformation. -- A period similar to this one, but not identical by any means, is the XVIth century. It is the century when the old French rhythmical system underwent that most remarkable change which puts French in a class of its own among the important languages of western Europe. ISBN 9783806700060