The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

speech of the non-elite, and the term is employed with no true consensus as to its
interpretation. Notwithstanding the synchronic difficulties in such a term, it is also
problematic diachronically; works on Vulgar Latin tend to highlight certain features
indicative of the term, as though the spoken language were somehow petrified for centuries at
a time. Naturally this cannot be the case, as features now considered to be „vulgar‟ would no
doubt have come and gone quickly into a Roman‟s speech. In sum, to speak simply of
Vulgar Latin in opposition to Classical Latin ignores the sociolinguistic complexities that are
present in any language, and when combined with the negative image that the term
traditionally attracts, it is a typological domain best left alone: “the much-used term „Vulgar
Latin‟ is multivalent and best avoided” (Wright 1982: 52).
Of the terms mentioned above, the most popular are perhaps post-classical Latin, Late
Latin and Christian Latin. Importantly, the last term should not be treated as interchangeable
with the others: an author could be a Christian but write in the period of classical Latin, or
else be a pagan writer active within a predominantly Christian literary society.
The label of Late Latin is perhaps the most popularly attested, but attracts polemic on a
number of grounds. First, features which are seen as indicative of Late Latin are sometimes
found in other periods of Latin literature, but may be simply less frequent or rare. It is not
unknown, for example, for features of the earliest Latin writings to disappear in classical
prose, only to reappear in post-classical texts. This is a phenomenon referred to as the
„Classical Gap‟ (Coleman 1993). Included amongst examples of this could be the verb
fabulari, „to speak‟, found in some of the earliest Latin works, absent from classical texts, yet
present in Romance reflexes such as Sp. hablar and Ptg. falar (Palmer 1954: 171-172). It
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