"Vulgar Latin" is not a real thing.
Many features of Romance had their origins in high-register usage rather than that of the vulgus. Pre-Romance features which originated among the educated include adverbial -mente, a future formed with inf. + habēre and the suppletion of the monosyllabic forms of īre with corresponding forms from vādere.
Anyone who has been alive in a literate society knows that it is common for the uneducated to imitate the speech of the educated. That features presaging Romance have been almost exclusively sought in, or attributed to, basilectal "uneducated" usage says much about philological prejudices regarding Latin vis-à-vis Romance.
Furthermore, while it is often possible to tell what was going on in speech beneath the surface of the literary language, it is a mistake to attribute such features exclusively to the speech of the uneducated. As speakers of Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Welsh, Tamil and Finnish know well, there is no reason why an educated speaker might not write one thing but say another. Americans of all social classes use "to be like" in the sense "to say" but few will use it in writing except in the most informal contexts such as text messaging.
There is no reason at all to think that Emperor Hadrian had much use for the inflected passive when grumbling about the weather.
Many features of Romance had their origins in high-register usage rather than that of the vulgus. Pre-Romance features which originated among the educated include adverbial -mente, a future formed with inf. + habēre and the suppletion of the monosyllabic forms of īre with corresponding forms from vādere.
Anyone who has been alive in a literate society knows that it is common for the uneducated to imitate the speech of the educated. That features presaging Romance have been almost exclusively sought in, or attributed to, basilectal "uneducated" usage says much about philological prejudices regarding Latin vis-à-vis Romance.
Furthermore, while it is often possible to tell what was going on in speech beneath the surface of the literary language, it is a mistake to attribute such features exclusively to the speech of the uneducated. As speakers of Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Welsh, Tamil and Finnish know well, there is no reason why an educated speaker might not write one thing but say another. Americans of all social classes use "to be like" in the sense "to say" but few will use it in writing except in the most informal contexts such as text messaging.
There is no reason at all to think that Emperor Hadrian had much use for the inflected passive when grumbling about the weather.
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