Poe ruins everything

[epershand]

This morning in the shower I was wondering about the history of Latin scholarship. Presumably folks were running around ancient Rome using the ablative because it felt right and being innovative and playful with it for the heck of it. That's certainly the vibe I get from, say, Catullus or Ovid.

What, then, was the point when people decided it all needed to be codified into ridiculously elaborate rules to memorize, with distinctions, say, between the ablative of means, ablative of manner, dative of agent, etc? Was it during the middle ages when they were coming up with equally elaborate terminology for any metaphysical doubt one might possibly have? Or was it some folks in the Renaissance who looked back at all the Latin written during the middle ages and blushed at how embarrassingly straightforward it all was? (Not that Renaissance Latin is any less silly, grammatically speaking, but they at least *try*. Sort of.)

Which would be an interesting thing to research, I think. Except what actually happened then was that thinking about silly Latin from the middle ages totally diverted me and put the following mash-up poem in my head:

Bibat ille, bibat illa, bibat servus et ancilla
With the rhyming and the chiming of the
Bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells!

Comments

[via_ostiense]

Which medieval writers are you thinking of? Heloise is one of the most elegant stylists of any age, imo, and Abelard's not bad, either.

There are grammar commentaries as early as Caesar (De Analogia) and certainly by the 2nd century (Noctes Atticae). I have fuzzy memories of reading authors from the Republic or Empire writing about the ablative absolute, but those notes are in storage somewhere. :/

[eccentric_hat]

It could have happened whenever outsiders started learning Latin, couldn't it? Catullus and Ovid may have used the ablative because it felt right, but that wouldn't be good enough for a speaker of some vernacular who wanted to write like Catullus and Ovid, or just be able to read people like them.

Is the "bibat ille" line from Carmina Burana? I know I've come across it before, but Googling it turns up a bunch of unhelpful results.

[tei]

Wouldn't they have recognized their own usage of language through learning and teaching Greek? Since an educated Roman was expected to know Greek, and I really can't imagine a system of teaching Greek that doesn't involve declension charts and verb paradigms. (If one exists, can it be in my brain now, please?) And it's fairly easy to link grammatical features in Latin and Greek, so my guess is that it was codified pretty early, even if not in quite the same way that we codify it.

But then again I could be full of shit, since I don't actually know anything on the subject. I can recite "In Taberna" up to the part with the list of all the people who bibit, though.

[(Anonymous)]

I miss you! I miss being around people who wonder about the history of Latin scholarship while in the shower!

SK