This naturally brings us to consider the historical relations of literary
and colloquial Latin. In explaining them it has often been assumed that
colloquial Latin is a degenerate form of literary Latin, or that the
latter is a refined type of the former. Both these theories are equally
false. Neither is derived from the other. The true state of the case has
never been better put than by Schuchardt, who says: "Vulgar Latin stands
with reference to formal Latin in no derivative relation, in no paternal
relation, but they stand side by side. It is true that vulgar Latin came
from a Latin with fuller and freer forms, but it did not come from formal
Latin. It is true that formal Latin came from a Latin of a more popular
and a cruder character, but it did not come from vulgar Latin. In the
original speech of the people, preliterary Latin (the prisca Latinitas),
is to be found the origin of both; they were twin brothers."

Of this preliterary Latin we have no record. The best we can do is to
infer what its characteristics were from the earliest fragments of the
language which have come down to us, from the laws of the Twelve Tables,
for instance, from the religious and legal formulæ preserved to us by
Varro, Cicero, Livy, and others, from proverbs and popular sayings. It
would take us too far afield to analyze these documents here, but it may
be observed that we notice in them, among other characteristics, an
indifference to strict grammatical structure, not that subordination of
clauses to a main clause which comes only from an appreciation of the
logical relation of ideas to one another, but a co-ordination of clauses,
the heaping up of synonymous words, a tendency to use the analytical
rather than the synthetical form of expression, and a lack of fixity in
the forms of words and in inflectional endings. To illustrate some of
these traits in a single example, an early law reads "if [he] shall have
committed a theft by night, if [he] shall have killed him, let him be