Action et réaction de la parole latinophone : démocratisation et unification, IIIe-Ve siècles

Abstract

The change in culture induced by Christianity inflected the course of the evolution of Latin, in itself natural and unavoidable: a process rooted in the communicative exchanges between speakers. Studying the late Latin speaking area starting from the linguistic realities of the Christian pastoral, within the framework of a theory of action/reaction, helps to fill gaps both in the history of culture and in the history of language. From the triple convergence of biblical Latin, uncultivated Latin and cultivated Latin, a language of general communication was born, the sermo humilis. Literate speakers inflected their speaking in response to the requirements of vertical communication from litterati to illitterati. The idioms of biblical Latin which passed into the Latin of Augustine are far from being vulgarisms; we can detect active individual contributions to the creation of this language, which contribute to a collective development following the internal logic of the language and converging in regular and complex systems. Such a process is the precise opposite of linguistic “decadence”; the linguistic evolution in reponse to the barbarism of the speakers, has, in reality, constituted a work of democratisation developing the potentialities of classical spoken Latin. The sermo humilis regulated conflicts and compromises between the different levels (retrospective or prospective) of spoken Latin. The new expression – periphrastic – of the grammatical future, even the invention of a new mode – the conditional – are analysed in relation to new mentalities: the new future makes present the salvation to come and plays a role of temporal attraction. It is no surprise that a chronological coincidence exists between the archaeology of monuments (the cult of saints, the burial ad sanctos) and the archaeology of language. The context favours a democratisation of speech, a unifying factor in spoken Latin even before the passage to “late spoken Latin 2”.