Latin fieri and the Romance verb ‘to be’. Thoughts on the problem of “standard language bias” in historical reconstruction

Abstract This study examines the history of reflexes of Latin fieri ‘become’ in Romance, focusing particularly on Romanian, where this verb provides the subjunctive and some other forms of the verb ‘be’. Contrary to general assumptions, I offer comparative-historical evidence from other Daco-Romance varieties and from other branches of Romance that, in the earliest Daco-Romance, fieri had a different paradigmatic distribution from that of modern Romanian, and that most (conceivably all) forms of the subjunctive of this verb are in origin present indicative forms, which probably still conserved into early Daco-Romance the meaning ‘to become’. I argue that these findings demonstrate how our understanding of the mechanisms of language change is liable to be distorted by a “standard language bias” whereby, in the process of linguistic reconstruction, structures most familiar to us from the standard languages are tacitly or explicitly assumed to be ‘basic’ and ‘normal’. In illustration of this claim I will also sketch some other examples from Romance languages of the undesirable effects of such bias, showing how it can lead to misunderstandings of the history of the standard languages themselves, as well as of the history of their cognate varieties.