Publisher's Synopsis
An excerpt from the Introduction:
1. DEFINITION OF THE SERMO PLEBEIUS.-Notwithstanding the strides made by modern philology toward a knowledge of the Roman "sermo plebeius," there is still a surprising lack of unanimity in regard to its nature and extent. The various and confusing senses in which different scholars have used and understood the terms "sermo plebeius, sermo cotidianus, lingua rustica, " etc., have been justly deplored by Ott, in his able article on modern researches in the field of Bible-Latin, and such inconsistency is not lessened by the attitude recently assumed by scholars like Bonnet, who maintains that Vulgar Latin, in the sense of a dialect distinct from the classic speech, never had an existence, save in the brain of a few savants, and Sittl, who similarly asserts that the whole structure with which the Romancists are now dealing is a pure creation of phantasy. In view of these conflicting opinions, it has seemed advisable at the outset to define carefully the position which will be maintained throughout the present work.
It may be regarded as an established doctrine that the Romance languages are the descendants, not of the classic Latin, as seen in Cicero and Caesar, but of the sermo plebeius, the speech of the common people, at Rome and in the provinces. The prevailing view of the relation existing between these two forms of speech is the one recently reiterated by Miodonski: that the sermo plebeius is neither the parent nor the offspring of the Classic Latin, but that the two developed side by side, as the twin product of the common speech of early Rome, the "prisca Latinitas." Accordingly, there is no question of two distinct and separate languages, but of two kindred dialects, which, while steadily diverging, continued to exert a more or less unconscious influence upon each other.
With the dawn of literature began the differentiation between the cultured and the popular speech. Too much weight cannot be given to the circumstance that the earliest development of a national literature was controlled by a foreign element: Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and Ennius were all natives of Magna Graecia, and even the Bellum Punicum, the first Roman epic of purely national interest, owed much to Greek sources. Classical Latin was largely shaped by these early poets, who strove, with a degree of success surprising in view of their difficult task, to adapt the somewhat unwieldy and heavy forms of archaic Latin to the ease and grace of their Greek models. It is true that Livius Andronicus and Naevius still retained for epic verse the primitive Saturnian metre, and with it much of the roughness and irregularity characteristic of an uncultured speech. It is Ennius, before all others, who succeeded in developing the natural resources of Latin along the lines of Greek literature, and without whom the high perfection of rhythm seen in the prose of Cicero and the artistic finish of the Augustan poetry would have been impossible. How far the style of these early poets was artificial is best seen by comparison with the plays of Plautus, who, although not wholly free from the influence of the literary tendency, gives a fairly true picture of the popular speech of his time, with all its advantages and imperfections."
