It would be interesting to know how much this was a feature of everyday Latin versus how much it may have been essentially a constructed language used only by highly-educated people.
Would a Roman farmer in the field even understand that sentence? Would it sound natural to them? Would they ever speak it?
The disconnect between literary language and everyday language is sometimes relatively high even in today's world of mass education, where every child is forced to learn the literary language of their country regardless of the actual language spoken in their region. In societies where this wasn't the norm, the literary language may have been significantly more divorced from the natural language which it derives from, allowing much more complex rules to be invented for it...
I think there certainly would have been a distinction, since even vulgar English, with its much more limited grammar, has education/class distinctions in how grammar is applied.
In many English communities, using the subjunctive case would mark the speaker as being "posh," as would using I/me/my "correctly" ("me and me gran had supper").
I think the average uneducated citizen would similarly note someone as "posh" if they heard them using the pluperfect subjunctive, and, unlike a modern English speaker who has been immersed in "correct" English through the ever-present media of today, they might not actually understand the sense correctly.
In the past the divide between the educated and the illiterate was indeed extreme, and so was the difference between the written and the generally spoken ("vulgar") language, let alone local dialects.
Would a Roman farmer in the field even understand that sentence? Would it sound natural to them? Would they ever speak it?
The disconnect between literary language and everyday language is sometimes relatively high even in today's world of mass education, where every child is forced to learn the literary language of their country regardless of the actual language spoken in their region. In societies where this wasn't the norm, the literary language may have been significantly more divorced from the natural language which it derives from, allowing much more complex rules to be invented for it...