Vulgar Latin is any of the "nonstandard" (as opposed to "classical") forms of Latin from which the Romance languages developed. The word "Vulgar" in this usage comes from the Latin for "common," as Vulgar Latin was the spoken language, and not from the English word meaning crude or objectionable. Works written in Latin during classical times used Classical Latin rather than Vulgar Latin (originally called sermo vulgaris), with very few exceptions (most notably sections of Gaius Petronius' Satyricon). Because of its nonstandard nature, vulgar Latin had no official orthography. Vulgar Latin is sometimes also called colloquial Latin, or Common Romance (particularly in the late stage). In Renaissance Latin, vulgar Latin was called vulgare Latinum or Latinum vulgare.
The broad term Vulgar Latin should not be confused with the more specific term Proto-Romance, which refers specifically to the theoretical common ancestor to the modern Romance languages. As such Proto-Romance may have been only one of the Vulgar Latin languages and only a very late stage of that language branch.
Read more about Vulgar Latin: Proto-Romance, Origin of The Term, Sources, History, Vocabulary, Phonology
Famous quotes containing the words vulgar and/or latin:
“The vulgar look upon a man, who is reckoned a fine speaker, as a phenomenon, a supernatural being, and endowed with some peculiar gift of Heaven; they stare at him, if he walks in the park, and cry, that is he. You will, I am sure, view him in a juster light, and nulla formidine. You will consider him only as a man of good sense, who adorns common thoughts with the graces of elocution, and the elegancy of style. The miracle will then cease.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“But these young scholars, who invade our hills,
Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
And travelling often in the cut he makes,
Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not
And all their botany is Latin names.
The old men studied magic in the flowers.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)