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BeardieMcBeard
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To your list of reading you might add Solodow’s Latin Alive, which is more accessible to a general reader than most—if not all—of the other things on your list.

To simplify somewhat: it has to do with the kind of thing that was written in the “vulgar” languages, which tended to be thought of as low-class. So, think love stories, people abducted by pirates, etc. Because these were the things that were written in the “Romance” languages—as opposed to the high-class, literary