Medievalists! Classicists! Share some of your hard-earned knowledge!

A reader near and dear to my heart writes with a request:

I'm trying to locate explicit complaints and criticisms of, or warnings/admonitions against, the use of archaisms in Latin writing (classical, late antique, medieval). I'm particularly interested in the ways that the grammatical & rhetorical traditions dealt with problems of archaic, historically obscure, or obsolete language--esp. poetic, literary, figurative language. I know that the use of archaisms in vernacular poetic writing comes up rather frequently in Renaissance discussions about style, but this is a bit late for my interests...

A second (related) question: Are there any Latin sources that address problem of linguistic change over time? (Again, I'm esp. interested in how/if this was addressed in the interpretative branches of grammar and rhetoric, and if these methods are passed on to later medieval grammatica, etc.)

Comments

[Adam Roberts]

Off the top of my head, I'd say the trend went the other ways: not deprecating archaisms but if anything celebrating them, exhorting people to a return to the purer style of the ancients. A quick internet search throws up Isidore of Seville's 7th century Etymologies, the first volume of which is on Latin grammar, style and rhetoric: it quotes endless examples of good usage from Silver Latin, Cicero, Augustus etc.; but Isidore's view of contemporary Latin is in a subsection called 'Barbarisms'.

[Adam Roberts]

To be clear: the ancients right back to the Greeks, and the Romans especially, dealt with the problem of historically obscure, or obsolete language by glossing it: that's what the scholia (the word is Cicero's coinage, you know) are, after all. So if you're reading Homer and you're puzzled by a word you check the adjoining scholium. Archaism, I'd say though, is a separate thing: nowadays it means 'copying the past' in a pejorative sense; but for the period you're talking about I don't believe that pejorative sense existed. Good Latinists were deliberately and designedly archaic, right through to the Renaissance.

In sum: the question of archaism is a separate one to the question of obscurity.

[Adam Roberts]

To be absolutely clear: I'm distressed by how pompous I sometimes sound.

[SEK]

Actually, sources close to me indicate your comments were very, very helpful.

[Karl Steel]

Latin sources, linguistic changes over time:

this is pathetic, but I'm sure there's a Vernacular source, in Chaucer, and I'm convinced it's in Troilus & Criseyde, and it's VERY VERY FAMOUS among the kinds of people I am.

And I can't for the life of me remember where it is.

[Tiruncula]

Coming late to this, I'm afraid, but I have a couple of not-quite-specific-enough suggestions. In the classical period, the people who comment most on archaisms are Varro and Cicero. Both interested themselves in the difference between inscriptional evidence and current (for them) usage and pronuniciation. Cicero was exquisitely aware of change in his own language and deployed archaism to subtle effect in his De re publica. I'd look at his rhetorical works for comments on these matters. In the early middle ages, my sense is that archaism per se was not a working analytical category, but grammarians were concerned to negotiate the distinctions among classical usage, patristic/scriptural usage, and what was current in their own day. The grammatical genre you need to look at to find this kind of discussion is treatises of the "De orthographia" type, which is to say works on usage.