Le latin classique existe-t-il?

Abstract

The point of this paper concerns a very common name, “Classical Latin”, and a less common question: what is exactly hiding behind this concept? It’s indeed common for specialists in various disciplines (literature, philology, linguistics, manuscript studies) to treat Classical Latin as an understood concept in their works. But when we search carefully for a typology of that supposed language entity, this concept appears rather shaky. Indeed, at the very core of the written Latin used by the best authors of the century always referred to as the “Classical” period (oddly metaphorized as the Golden Age, which is not really a linguistic criterion), we do find a lot of structures which disregard the alleged rules of Classical Latin. Moreover, these variant phenomena usually pop up as prototypical structures that will flourish in Late Latin before becoming grammaticalized in Early Romance. So what? The point is that to catch these phenomena we must spread the field of our search to all literary works (including Catullus, Virgil...). But what, precisely, is “Classical” Latin? Does any valid linguistic reason exist to divide Latin, as is usually done, on a scale of synchronic evaluation (saying that this is authorized Latin, but this is not) and on another of separate diachronic periods (here is the Golden Age, here is the silver age)? Within a sociolinguistic perspective “Classical” Latin does exist, but in the same way as any literary language does: it is closely related to speech and thus involved a lot of variation which lies outside the usual accepted ideological frames. This means that “Classical” (written) Latin already contains within itself several of the parameters which are supposedly extracted from Latin as a whole to build the mythical missing link with the Romance languages.

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