63 Colloquial and Li.. - Ganino.com

66 eleanor dickey
in the ordinary conversational speech of any group or period. Chahoud
has made it fairly clear that some such ‘colloquialisms’ were in fact literary
creations that did not occur in conversation, but it is far from clear that
authors such as Hofmann would have agreed that they were therefore not
colloquial, as Hofmann’s basic definition of colloquialism had to do with
internal characteristics of language rather than how or where it was actually
used.
This last viewpoint on the colloquial is one that we might be tempted
to rule out at once on the basis of Clackson’s chapter, but there are two
reasons for caution in this direction. This type of colloquial language is in
essence what the vast majority of previous scholarship has been looking for
in Latin, and while it is often convenient to dismiss the majority of previous
scholarship on any given question, doing so is usually unwise. Additionally,
knowing that some words and usages fit syntactic criteria of colloquialism
but were apparently used only in literary works does not tell us how Romans
perceived those words and usages. Just as it is possible to invent, for onetime
use in a literary work, an insult that sounds low-register (cf. Dickey
2002: 16, 172), it is possible for the writer of a literary work to invent a word
or usage that sounds conversational. Some syntactic colloquialisms might
fall into this category. If Roman authors deliberately invented words or
usages that were supposed to resemble actual conversational language, such
‘literary colloquialisms’ are an interesting phenomenon in their own right.
We would not want to confuse them with features of actual conversational
language, but it is not impossible that we could learn something by studying
them in the context of that language.
Colloquial Latin, then, could be any of a very wide range of things. There
is no basis for deciding between them, as no evidence can be brought to
bear where there is no common ground for argument; any decision as to
which of these things ‘colloquial Latin’ is must be arbitrary. And as there is
no advantage to supporting a particular definition of the term if the choice
of definition is purely arbitrary, we cannot define colloquial Latin.
But it is essential to remove the imprecision and contradiction that have
so far plagued the search for colloquial Latin. That can be done without
arbitrariness by stating that any one characteristic may be postulated as
the basis for defining colloquial Latin, but that no further characteristics
should be tied to it without convincing proof of a real and necessary
connection between them. In other words, it is legitimate to look for colloquial
Latin starting from the premise that colloquial Latin is the Latin
used conversationally by the upper (or lower) classes during the Republic,
or that colloquial Latin is Latin with certain syntactic characteristics, or to