63 Colloquial and Li.. - Ganino.com

Colloquial language in literary studies 55
common in conversation in the nineteenth century would not have the
same effect as the use of a feature that was common in conversation of the
writer’s own time.
In Latin, however, we do not have native-speaker awareness of language
change to guide us, and thus application of the criterion of currency
jeopardises the confidence that the other definitions give us of our ability
to recover colloquial language. Even supposing Hofmann’s criteria to be
entirely accurate in their identification of language that was at some point
colloquial, they cannot tell us whether the term was still colloquial at
the time it was used in any given text where we meet it. Recognising
the difficulty thus raised, Adams gives his own suggestions for identifying
colloquialisms:
The identification of a colloquialism...depends largely on its distribution in
extant Latin: a usage with a typical ‘colloquial’ distribution in Republican Latin
might occur in Plautus, Terence, possibly farce and/or mime, and Cicero’s letters
and/or earliest speeches. If it then remains rare in literature but turns up in the
Romance languages, it might seem to fit the bill nicely ...There are, however,
many factors that can determine the restricted distribution of a usage apart from
any colloquial quality that it might have. (Adams et al. 2005: 7 n. 8)
This prescription, however, is in some ways a reversion to the timelessness
of colloquialisms supposed by other scholars. It seems to imply that in order
to be colloquial at any point in the history of Latin a word or usage would
have to remain colloquial throughout nearly a thousand years of that
history. This restriction seems unnecessary, but on another level Adams’s
point is important: if one wants to know whether a usage was colloquial in
(say) the Augustan age, establishing its colloquial status in early Latin is not
enough. One also needs to show that the usage had not in the meantime
gone out of fashion and thereby developed an archaic flavour.
3 evidence
I now move to a discussion of the types of source that have supplied scholars
with stylistic indicators for the colloquialness of a text (or features of it),
and of the extent to which such criteria may or may not be usefully applied
to the evaluation of register.
3.1 Types of source
There are three sources one can use to obtain information on colloquial
Latin: the Latin of non-literary texts such as private letters, curse tablets,