Latin was the (what we now would call) âlingua francaâ of Western Europe for centuries, including all the Middle Ages and up until the 19th century, but in completely different circles than Sabir.
Latin was the language of intellectuals, in which (upper class) people wrote the laws and about philosophy, science, theology, even literature. Latin, being a dead language, had to be learnt, meaning that only those who could afford a good education knew it. This was in Western Europe (and later in the territories colonised by Western European countries, like America). At the same time, the literary language in Northern Africa and the Levant was Classical Arabic, and in the beginning in Eastern Europe it was Greek.
Latin was used in prestigious situations in which the âvulgar languageâ (the languages spoken by the people: Catalan, French, Occitan, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Sicilian, Neapolitan, etc) did not seem adequate. It doesnât have as much to do with communicating with people with a different native language but who also speak Latin like you, but it was about the prestige of the situation.
Lingua franca (Sabir) was the opposite. It was a pidgin, an simplified language which sailors, pirates, slaves, merchants and other sea-people learnt by hearing it and by trying to communicate with people whose mother language was different than theirs. And Sabir was not specific to Western Europe, it was specific to the Mediterranean: Southern Europe (especially South-Western Europe), Northern Africa and the Levant (Western Asia).
Grammar is one of the aspects that shows a clear difference between Latin and Sabir. Latinâs grammar is complicated. It has different cases which are lost in the modern languages that derive from Latin (except for Romanian) which makes it difficult for us, it also has 3 grammatical genders and complex grammatical structures.
On the other hand, Sabirâs grammar is simple. As an example of this: it only has 1 verb tense. No matter what you want to say, you have no future, no past, no present, the only verb tense was the one equivalent to infinitive in Romance languages.
(To be precise, it developed a past and future tense but it was only in the 17th century, when Sabir was going through a âgolden ageâ for its use, especially because of the fact that Algerian pirates where also having their âgolden ageâ kidnapping Southern Europeans to sell them as slaves, and so many Christian and Jewish slaves whose mother language wasnât Arabic nor Amazigh lived in Northern Africa. It was amongst these people that it developed a past and future tense, in a process that is called âcriollisationâ in which a language that formerly was a pidgin and thus nobodyâs mother tongue starts to become the mother tongue of people, and so it becomes what is called a âcreoleâ. But it never got many tenses, nor any grammatical cases nor complex structures like Latin.)
There are a few documents written in Sabir that are still preserved nowadays. The earliest one is a portulan chart (a kind of nautical chart with indications about sailing in the Mediterranean and the harbours) written in the year 1296, and the latest one is a document from Djerba (Tunisia) written in 1891.
But these seem to be exceptions, and Sabir was mainly an oral language: the opposite of Latin in these centuries, which was a written language (spoken by priests and some erudites, but mostly written) and in which thousands of books and legal documents were written in.
So, to sum up (because I start talking and never shut up đ
), the people who published in Latin would never have published the same in Sabir, because Latin was the prestigious language understood by those they were aiming at (people with a good education, or at least people who knew how to read), and in the same way you would not have heard the Maltese and Algerian pirates talk to their slaves or the outlaws from South-West Europe who had escaped to Northern Africa speak in Latin.
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