"We are fortunate in that most of the old, classical period Latin that has been preserved is not vulgar"

Well, I call that unfortunate. I don't mean that less of the literary stuff should have been preserved, but it's be great to have the vulgar stuff that the ordinary people spoke as well. The stuff that the Roman equivalents of the kind of people who made the songs we like singing would have used. The kind of stuff our own equivalents in Roman times would have spoken to each other in.

I always rather resent the years I spent learning Latin, and I never was able to speak it, and one reason for that is, I'm pretty sure, that the Latin they taught us - leaving aside the pronunciation, which isn't that important - wasn't what people used for talking at all. I think they'd have done much better to give us, as a foundation, the corrupted late Latin that it's possible to actually speak in.