La transition latino-romane : problèmes de la reconstruction

Abstract

SummaryProto-Romance linguistic transformations are partially hidden by the archaic style that char- acterizes Late Latin documents. However, these texts (e. g. chronicles) permit insights into the changes undergone by the oral language, because authors and scribes can reproduce unconsciously their own speech habits, already different from Classical standard. In our presentation, this curious duality is shown by the example of noun declension, which is undermined, but not yet completely eliminated, in 7th century Latin. A comparison is made between the so-called Fredegarius, a Merovingian chronicle, and an early French poem, the Eulalia Sequence, which manifests the last stage of the declension, just before its disappearance. The morphological change has its counterpart in the restructuration of the sentence: the neighbourhood of subject and verb becomes usual in the surface structure, and certain limitations are im- posed upon the freedom of word order. Thus, the reconstruction process we propose has two aspects: it is necessary to describe the diastratic variation at different moments of the history of Late Latin, and, on the other hand, the results need to be compared with the Early Romance linguistic systems. In this manner, reconstruction can show the coexistence of tradition and innovation in the language, a necessary condition of its normal functioning.