Vulgar
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The term vulgar originally meant "of the common people", from the Latin vulgus. The term is now commonly used to describe things that are, from the viewpoint of the person using the word, in bad taste, indecent, or profane.
In Medieval times, "vulgar" referred to texts written in a vernacular instead of the standard language of literature, science, and theology, Latin. During Late Antiquity "vulgar Latin" was used to refer to the vernacular dialects that sprang from Latin across the Roman Empire— the predecessors of the modern Romance languages. One of the earliest pieces of great European literature written in vulgar was Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
The major step in the liberation of academia from Latin was the Protestant Reformation which advocated giving Mass and reading from the Bible in vulgar languages. Following in the footsteps of the Reformation, some proponents of the scientific revolution began to establish the precedent for writing in vulgar. However, as understanding of one or more the classical languages had been a commonality among the educated in the Western World, this switch to the vulgar also had the effect of limiting the accessibility of texts. Scholars who did not share the native language of the author would have had access to the work had it been produced in one of the "universal" classical languages. Texts were just too expensive to produce in more than one language (with the exception of the Bible, since it was virtually guaranteed to sell). In effect, this ironically limited the spread of knowledge among the wider world of scholars, while marginally increasing the spread of knowledge among the uneducated in the authors' home country who shared use of the vulgar but often could not read it. It was not until wide-spread literacy, mass-produced print, and easy translation came about many years later that the vernacular became instrumental in the general spread of knowledge.
