The fact is that they are bad Latin, and well-understood to be such. It doesn't matter that most of the mistakes would later become standard in Romance. When speaking a language, you need to correctly identify it, and identify the standards that bind it together. In the same way, ‘lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate’ is great Italian, but crappy Latin. We are therefore speaking a very bad version of Middle English, and an even worse version of Old English. But every now and again, the language changes so much that a new label needs to be applied to it. No, we (or I, at least) are not speaking bad English, because ‘English’ without adjectives refers to standard Modern English. Perhaps it's because people will politely transcribe you as saying ‘nuclear’ even if you are George Bush and you've actually said ‘nucular’. Virtually nobody would suggest that your grammar should be based on anything but the Classical period, and yet people tend to think that it's OK to let things slide with pronunciation. By all means, pick up a mediæval neologism here and there, where the Classical lexicon had nothing to express a certain concept, but don't use it to excuse this bloke who speaks in a half-American, half-Italian accent. If you seek to speak ‘Latin’, you are necessarily freezing the language in time and adopting all the linguistic practices of that time. The only thing that corresponds to that description is the Romance languages. You can't talk of it's natural, evolved, living form in 2009. I even noticed that he said ‘lavorare’ in Italian, instead of ‘labōrāre’. He is halfway to actually saying the damn word in Italian ( ‘chiese’). Saying ‘echlejziej’ instead of ‘ecclesiæ’ simply isn't ‘equally valid’. This is why there has been, for hundreds of years now, and getting stronger all the time, the concept that if you want to call the language you speak ‘Latin’ as opposed to ‘Italian’ or suchlike, you need to adhere to the standards, and not make excuses for your foreign accent. At first it was subtle, but today, in 2009, it has got to the point where if you speak Latin with no respect for the standards established when it was the living language of Rome, you will be barely comprehensible to someone with a different mother tongue. The vernacular tongue of each speaker tainted his use of the Classical language that he was trying to speak. Yes, Latin was alive - in the form of the Romance languages. Someone will say that it's all equally valid. It doesn't matter whether you're discussing education, flower-arranging, or raping babies. Post-modern relativism seems to lead certain people to believe that the appropriate thing to do when any thing is criticised is to step in and say that both points of view are equally valid. Click to expand.I find that any argument that ends in ‘equally valid’ is sure to be politically correct bullpoo.
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