Latin Linguistics: An Introduction [1 ed.] 9783111166575, 9783111172002, 9783111173542

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Wolfgang David Cirilo de Melo Latin Linguistics

Wolfgang David Cirilo de Melo

Latin Linguistics

An Introduction

ISBN 978-3-11-116657-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-117200-2 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-117354-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023944650 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Aga7ta/iStock/Getty Images Plus Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgments The word glamour started as an alternative form of grammar in eighteenth-century Scottish English. Grammar had come to mean not just ‘grammar’ in the narrow sense, but ‘obscure learning’, often with overtones of magic. Glamour, then, was a kind of enchantment before it acquired its more mundane meaning of ‘attractive quality’. I hope that this book will teach my readers about grammar in the modern, narrow meaning, but also that it will help them to make sense of some of the seemingly obscure details and peculiarities of Latin. I am not deluded enough to believe that this work will hold my readers spellbound in the literal meaning, but I would be delighted if, beyond mere utility, they were to find in it elements that are attractive and entertaining. The idea for this project came from Patrick Finglass, one of the editors of the series Key Perspctives on Classical Research. I wrote a draft of the book in 2022, while I was on sabbatical leave. During that time, I profited enormously from feedback that I received when presenting individual chunks of this work. I am particularly grateful to Marcus Deufert, who invited me to Leipzig, to Mateusz Stróżyński and Łukasz Berger, who invited me to Poznań, and to Adam Gitner and Manfred Flieger, who made me scholar in residence at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae; the academics and students I met on these occasions made me rethink many aspects of my work and inspired me tremendously. Since this book is especially meant for students, I wanted their feedback before submission. The Ancient World Research Cluster at Wolfson College, Oxford, generously provided me with funds to pay three Oxford-based graduate readers, Althea Sovani, Maxwell Hardy, and Imogen Stead. Vincent Graf at Leipzig was my fourth, unpaid reader. The comments I received from all four were incredibly helpful and generous; their impact will be felt throughout the work. Another doctoral student from Oxford, Yu-Xian Claire Huang, created the image of the organs of speech in chapter 2. I am deeply grateful to all of them. The team at De Gruyter have been extremely helpful. My special thanks go to Carlo Vessella, Anne Hiller, and Suruthi Manogarane. I would also like to thank my friends and family, who have been supportive throughout, especially my wife and my daughter. I dedicate this book to the memory of my father, who loved languages. Oxford, 17 April 2023

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Contents Acknowledgments

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Chapter 1 1 By Way of Introduction 1.1 Periodization 2 1.1.1 Archaic Latin 3 1.1.2 Early Latin 4 1.1.3 Classical Latin 5 1.1.4 ‘Silver Latin’ 5 1.1.5 The Archaists 6 1.1.6 Late and Medieval Latin 7 1.2 Synchrony and Diachrony 8 1.3 The Comparative Method and Indo-European 1.4 Corpus Methods 13 1.5 Register and Style 17 1.6 How to Use This Book 19 1.7 Further Reading 19

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Chapter 2 Phonetics and Phonology 21 2.1 Sounds and Spelling 21 2.1.1 Describing Sounds 21 2.1.2 Phonetics Versus Phonology 25 2.1.3 Reconstructing Pronunciation 26 2.1.4 What We Can and Cannot Do 30 2.1.5 Excursus: nē … quidem ‘Not Even’ 32 2.1.6 From Sound to Letter: Is the Perfect Script Phonemic? 2.1.7 Latin Orthography 41 2.1.8 Roman Writers on Orthography 43 2.2 Sound Change: From Indo-European to Latin 46 2.2.1 Actuation 46 2.2.2 Rhotacism 47 2.2.3 Dissimilation 49 2.2.4 Vowel Weakening and Syncope 50 2.2.5 Developments of Diphthongs 52 2.2.6 Voiced Aspirates 53 2.2.7 Laryngeals 55 2.3 Sound Change: From Latin to the Romance Languages

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Contents

2.3.1 2.3.2 2.3.3 2.3.4 2.3.5 2.3.6 2.4

Vulgar Latin, Proto-Romance, Diglossia Vulgar Latin Vowel Changes 60 Vulgar Latin Consonant Changes 62 From Latin to Italian 63 The Spread of Sound Change 64 The Limits of Reconstruction 65 Further Reading 67

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Chapter 3 69 Morphology 3.1 Basic Concepts 69 3.1.1 Words and Morphemes 69 3.1.2 Compounding, Derivation, Inflection 71 3.1.3 Morphological Models, Frequency Effects, and Mental Processing 3.2 Synchronic Problems of Morphology 77 3.2.1 Compounding 77 3.2.2 Derivation 78 3.2.3 Inflection 83 3.3 Morphological Developments: From Indo-European to Latin 84 3.3.1 Case Syncretism 84 3.3.2 The Merger of Aorist and Perfect 86 3.3.3 Future Perfect and Perfect Subjunctive 90 3.3.4 Changes of Conjugation Class 92 3.4 Morphological Developments: From Latin to Romance 94 3.4.1 Reduction of Nominal Morphology 94 3.4.2 Verbal Morphology: Restructuring, Not Simplification 98 3.4.3 What Makes Morphology Stable or Unstable? 101 3.5 Excursus: Grammatical Gender in Latin 103 3.6 Further Reading 107 Chapter 4 Syntax 108 4.1 The Case System 109 4.1.1 The Verb Phrase 110 4.1.2 The Noun Phrase 118 4.1.3 The Genitive of Personal Pronouns 121 4.2 Tense and Aspect 126 4.2.1 The Classical Tense System and the Sequence of Tenses 4.2.2 The Rise of the Forms in -ūrus 132 4.2.3 The Sigmatic Future in Plautus and Terence 136

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4.3 4.3.1 4.3.2 4.3.3 4.4 4.4.1 4.4.2 4.4.3 4.5 4.5.1 4.5.2 4.5.3 4.6

143 Pragmatic Influences on Syntactic Patterns A Footnote on Indirect Speech 143 Constructions Influencing Each Other 145 Reanalysis and Grammaticalization 149 Word Order 153 Clitics 154 Other Issues 157 From Wackernagel to the Tobler-Mussafia Rule 162 Complementation 164 Factum est ut Versus bene factum est quod 164 Motivation, Not Predictability: Consecutive ut-Clauses in the Subjunctive 168 The Accusative-and-Infinitive Construction and Its Replacement with quod 170 Further Reading 173

Chapter 5 174 Dialectal Variation, Language Contact, and Sondersprachen 5.1 Dialects 174 5.1.1 The Nature of Our Evidence 175 5.1.2 Dialect Grouping 177 5.1.3 Dialect Words 181 5.1.4 The Life Cycle of Dialects 182 5.2 Latin in Contact with Other Languages 184 5.2.1 Some Theoretical Concepts 184 5.2.2 Greek in Plautus 187 5.2.3 Greek in Cicero 190 5.2.4 Non-Elite Monolingual Texts with Interference 191 5.2.5 A Typology of Bilingual Inscriptions 193 5.3 Sondersprachen 195 5.3.1 The Diversity of Christian Latin 195 5.3.2 Creating a Christian Vocabulary 197 5.3.3 Christian Syntax? 200 5.3.4 Excursus: Varro’s Grammatical Terminology 202 5.4 Conclusions 203 5.5 Further Reading 204

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Chapter 6 Pragmatics 6.1 6.1.1 6.1.2 6.1.3 6.1.4 6.1.5 6.2 6.2.1 6.2.2 6.2.3 6.2.4 6.3 6.3.1 6.3.2 6.3.3 6.4 6.5

205 Common Topics 205 Grice’s ‘Maxims of Conversation’ 206 Flouting the Maxims 207 Implicatures and Presupposition 210 211 Syntactic Consequences The Pervasive Nature of Pragmatics 212 Explicitness and Stylistic Choices 213 Ellipsis and Anaphora 213 Periodic Style 214 Other Types of Style 216 What Can We Learn from this? 218 Politeness 218 The Brown-Levinson Model 219 Plautine Examples 220 Forms of Address 224 Pragmatics as Language in Action 228 Further Reading 228

Chapter 7 Sociolinguistics 229 7.1 Attitudes to Accents 230 7.1.1 Why Do People Have Accents? 230 7.1.2 Aspiration and the au / ō Distinction 231 233 7.1.3 The City and the Countryside 7.1.4 Ancient Accentism 234 7.1.5 Ancient Descriptions of Accents 234 7.1.6 Accent Anxiety 235 7.2 Female Speech 237 7.2.1 Women in Roman Comedy 239 7.2.2 Ancient Writers on Female Language 241 7.2.3 Four Text Samples 242 7.2.4 Where Does This Leave Us? 248 7.3 The Rise of the Grammarians 249 7.3.1 The Different Branches of Ancient Grammar 7.3.2 The Status of the Grammarians and Their Art 7.3.3 A Tale of Two Servii 253 7.4 Some Final Thoughts 255 7.5 Further Reading 255

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Contents

Chapter 8 Three Texts 8.1 8.1.1 8.1.2 8.1.3 8.1.4 8.1.5 8.1.6 8.2 8.2.1 8.2.2 8.2.3 8.2.4 8.2.5 8.2.6 8.3 8.3.1 8.3.2 8.3.3 8.3.4 8.3.5 8.3.6 8.3.7 8.3.8

256 An Early Faliscan Inscription 256 The Secondary Inscription (BA 3) 257 The Problematic Text 257 Vmom 258 259 Earlier Interpretations Letters and Sounds Again, Plus Some Morphology Where Does This Leave Us? 261 A Passage from the Bellum Hispaniense 261 Background 262 A Passage from Caesar 263 An Excerpt from the Bellum Hispaniense 266 Language Notes 266 Earlier Assessments 268 Conclusion 270 A Paraphrase of Cato by Gellius 271 The Text 272 Morphology 273 Lexical Choices 274 Grammatical Words 276 Coordination 277 Syntax 277 Pragmatics 278 Conclusions 279

References

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Index of Passages Index of Words General Index

289 295 303

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Chapter 1 By Way of Introduction There is an abundance of introductions to linguistics; there is also an abundance of Latin grammars. However, what my students often complain about is the absence of an introduction to linguistics geared towards Latinists. For syntax, I usually recommend that they should read Pinkster 1990, still excellent after three decades, and I have similar recommendations for other areas of linguistics, but my students are right in saying that there is no straightforward introduction to Latin linguistics as a whole. My book is meant as an answer to that need. That also explains what this book is and what it is not. It is not meant as a handbook: none of the topics dealt with can be discussed extensively here. The reader looking for a very specific answer to a very specific problem will more often than not be disappointed. Those trying to find out whether the form danunt ‘they give’ is a deliberate archaism in Plautus, characteristic of specific contexts or speakers, will not find a ready-made solution here. Then what can this book offer the reader? In the first place, it is meant as an introduction to the main areas of linguistics, geared specifically towards students of Latin, who will usually have no need to learn about autosegmental phonology or the principles-and-parameters approach to syntax, but who may be frustrated when their textbooks on phonology do not mention how we reconstruct the pronunciation of an ancient language, or when their introductions to syntax are so Anglo-centric that they blithely ignore the fact that many languages have more flexible and more pragmatically driven word order patterns. Each of these main areas of linguistics would deserve a book in its own right, but can only be given a short chapter here. My book is therefore meant as an invitation to engage with the central themes of these areas and to read further. At the end of each chapter I provide a very selective list of references; rather than being exhaustive or citing the latest works, I have focused on those books and articles which I have found particularly helpful in my own teaching experience. More experienced linguists may find some of the angles I take a tad unusual. For instance, in the chapter on phonology I devote a fair amount of space to questions of Latin orthography. I do so on purpose. On the one hand, I want to demonstrate that Latin linguistics has not reached its final destination and that there is still a great deal of work that can be done. And on the other, I wish to give the beginner insights into topics that are often neglected in typical introductory textbooks. But above all, I want to give my readers a guide to how we know what we know, and how we can find out more. I want them to understand why language is the way

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it is, why Latin is the way it is. And I want them to gain a deeper awareness of the principles that explain how Latin functions synchronically and how and why it changes over time. I would consider it a great personal triumph if readers were to share in the joy that comes from a deeper understanding, from realizing that Latin grammar is more than an accumulation of dry and dusty rules. Latin linguistics should never be yet another subject that overstretched undergraduates have to force into a jam-packed schedule. Rather, I regard it as a key that can open a variety of doors: a tool that will simplify their grammar lessons, help with prose and verse composition, and aid literary analysis in ways that traditional lists of stylistic devices cannot. In the rest of this introduction, I will tackle a few themes that come up throughout the book: the periodization of Latin; the relationship between synchrony and diachrony; corpus methods; and linguistic register. Before I do so, however, a quick word on the marking of quantities is in order. Quintilian (inst. 1.7.2) considered it ineptissimum ‘very daft’ to mark every long vowel as long. However, Quintilian’s audience consisted of native speakers of Latin, while my book has a different audience and different pedagogical aspirations. I mark long vowels as long, even on closed syllables, but I leave short vowels largely unmarked (unless they are short because of iambic shortening or comparable processes). In poetry I do not indicate length on vowels that are elided, but in prose I do so because our ancient accounts of connected speech do not offer a unified view on which vowels were elided and which ones were not. I do not mark vowel length in inscriptions presented as numbered examples, but I offer a version with length marks underneath. Early Latin vowel quantities often differ from classical ones; for early Latin, I indicate the pronunciation of the period, but I do not mark synizesis and similar processes. At some point, quantities were lost in Latin. I still mark them in late texts, even if this is somewhat anachronistic, because many late authors clearly had classical aspirations and even wrote quantitative poetry as a mark of their learning.

1.1 Periodization In a language attested for as many centuries as Latin is, diachronic change is inevitable, and with it comes the need to divide the language into periods. Such divisions are by their very nature somewhat artificial because the change from one period to another is always a gradual one, and conservative linguistic features persist more easily in some literary genres than in others. Thus, the didactic epic that Lucretius (99–55 BC) wrote is linguistically indebted to Ennius and shows more obvious morphological archaisms than the comedies of Terence (died 159 BC). Periodization

1.1 Periodization

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should always be taken with several pinches of salt, not least because some of the traditional periodization is based on ancient political changes and literary trends rather than linguistic developments.

1.1.1 Archaic Latin In this book, I call ‘archaic Latin’ the inscriptional texts till around 240 BC, when Livius Andronicus ushered in the beginnings of Latin literature. Most of the archaic texts are very short, which makes them less suitable for syntactic study. The occasional syntactic feature that cannot be paralleled later on may be detected in such texts, but by and large scholarship focuses on spelling and pronunciation as well as morphology. The Praeneste fibula, from the first half of the seventh century, is our earliest Latin text:¹ (1) MANIOS:MED:FHE⋮FHAKED:NVMASIOI (CIL I2 . 3) Mānios mēd fefaked Numasiōi. ‘Manios (= Manius) has made me for Numasios (= Numerius).’ In the third century BC, the dialect of Praeneste (modern Palestrina) was mocked by Plautus and was therefore clearly distinct from Roman Latin. At this early period, however, forms which are not direct precursors of their later Latin equivalents need not be dialectal, since their geographical distribution is hard to ascertain; such forms may have existed in Rome, too, but may have been eliminated there (and elsewhere) later on, without leaving traces, since the early records of Latin are very limited. The Praeneste fibula is written from right to left, with double dots between words and, interestingly, a triple dot in FHE⋮FHAKED ‘has made’ between reduplication syllable and verb stem. Orthography and pronunciation are discussed in the next chapter; suffice it to say here that this inscription does not observe the C/K/Q convention² and that the digraph FH is used for /f / because in the early alphabet, F on its own would have been the Greek digamma, with a phonological value /w/. In such early inscriptions, there is no vowel weakening yet, hence the second-declension nominative in -os rather than -us or the -a- in Numasioi, classical Numeriō. This last word also shows that rhotacism has not yet happened, hence -s-

1 Discussion in Wachter 1987, 55–65. 2 Inscriptions following this convention use C before E and I, K before A, and Q before O and V; see also 2.1.7.

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Chapter 1 By Way of Introduction

instead of later -r-. Morphology is the subject of the third chapter. Here we can see an accusative mēd. Accusatives of this type, identical to the ablative, are an innovation of Latin-Faliscan that sets it apart from Osco-Umbrian.³ The second-declension dative in -ōi is inherited (compare Greek -ῳ); the classical form in -ō is a phonological variant that originally arose before consonant. The Latin perfect shows the merger of older perfect and aorist forms. Similar mergers happened in Osco-Umbrian, but after the breakup of the Proto-Italic unity. The verb form in our inscription, with a reduplicating perfect stem, but an aorist ending, shows that this merger happened before our earliest texts.

1.1.2 Early Latin When I speak of ‘early Latin’, I mean the texts from 240 BC till around 100 BC. The inscriptions of this period are longer, but our main evidence for this period comes from the comedies of Plautus and Terence and from Cato’s work on agriculture. The massive increase in corpus size allows us to study syntax and morphology in detail, but with two provisos: first, early inscriptions are often deliberately archaizing morphologically; and second, since our literary texts have come down to us in much later manuscripts, manuscripts which tend to modernize orthography and morphology, our study of early morphology is only secure in those areas where metre allows us to restore such forms reliably. Here is what a line from Plautus looks like in modern editions: (2) Si ex tē tacente fierī possem certiōr … (Plaut. Pseud. 3) ‘If I could get the information out of you while you’re silent …’ Plautus’ Pseudolus was first staged in 191 BC. If Plautus followed the orthographic conventions of the Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus, from 186 BC, he would have spelled this line like this:⁴ (3) Sei ex tēd tacente fierei posem certiōr … However, since the Senatus consultum used deliberately oldfashioned orthography, there is no guarantee that Plautus would have spelled his texts in the same way.

3 The Italic family is part of the larger Indo-European family; it falls into two distinct branches: Latin-Faliscan and Osco-Umbrian, the latter also called Sabellic. 4 For a discussion of the Senatus consultum, see Wachter 1989, 289–98.

1.1 Periodization

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1.1.3 Classical Latin ‘Classical Latin’, or, to use an outdated term, ‘golden Latin’, is used for the writings of the first century BC, especially for prose. Here is the opening of Cicero’s speech in defence of Roscius Amerinus:⁵ (4) Crēdō ego uōs, iūdicēs, mīrārī, quid sit, quod, cum tot summī ōrātōrēs hominēsque nōbilissimī sedeant, ego potissimum surrēxerim, is quī neque aetāte neque ingeniō neque auctōritāte sim cum hīs quī sedeant comparandus. (Cic. S. Rosc. 1) ‘I believe, judges, that you must be wondering why it should be that, when so many most exquisite orators and most noble men are sitting here, it should be I who have stood up, someone who cannot be compared in age or talent or authority to those sitting.’ Here we can see a typical Ciceronian period, with a neat chiasmus in the cum-clause and an ascending tricolon in the relative clause. Unemphatic ego is in the usual clitic position, while the second instance of ego is emphatic and stands clause-initially. I discuss periodic style in chapter 6. Here I will merely point out that this late Republican periodic style is by no means typical of all authors of the first century BC. Cicero and Caesar are its main exponents, but it is the vagaries of transmission that have given us so much of these authors, whereas many of their contemporaries, like Varro, had a broader view of style. Cicero and Caesar became highly influential stylistic models throughout the rest of antiquity, not least because Quintilian made them cornerstones of the rhetorical canon. As a side note, the poets who became stylistic models throughout antiquity were active slightly later than Cicero and Caesar: Virgil and Horace were already famous before Augustus, but had their most productive period under him, and Ovid’s œuvre only began during Augustus’ reign. The golden age of poetry is thus a little later than that of prose.

1.1.4 ‘Silver Latin’ What is often called ‘silver Latin’ is the Latin of the first century AD, especially its prose. Since by this time, morphology and syntax had become fairly standardized,

5 The excellent commentary by Landgraf 1914 shows how this speech still contains many older elements that Cicero avoids in his later works.

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the authors of the silver age do not differ from those of the golden age to any appreciable extent. There are some lexical differences, and pronunciation keeps changing, but the latter is not reflected in inscriptions of a certain educational level. The main differences between literary authors of the late Republic and the early Empire are stylistic. Again, this will be discussed in more detail in chapter 6; here is the opening of a letter by Seneca (4 BC–AD 65) to Lucilius: (5) Libenter ex iīs quī ā tē ueniunt cognōuī familiāriter tē cum seruīs tuīs uīuere: hoc prūdentiam tuam, hoc ērudītiōnem decet. ‘Seruī sunt.’ Immō hominēs. ‘Seruī sunt.’ Immō contubernālēs. ‘Seruī sunt.’ Immō humilēs amīcī. ‘Seruī sunt.’ Immō cōnseruī, sī cōgitāuerīs tantundem in utrōsque licēre Fortūnae. (Sen. epist. 47.1) ‘I have heard with pleasure from those who come from you that you live on close terms with your slaves: that befits your wisdom, that befits your civilization. “They are slaves.” No, human beings. “They are slaves.” No, housemates. “They are slaves.” No, friends of lower standing. “They are slaves.” No, fellow slaves, if you consider that Fortune has the same power over both parties.’ Syntactically and lexically, this could have been written by Cicero. And yet the style is completely different. The first sentence is of moderate length and complexity, followed by an emphatic repetition or anaphora of hoc. But what really sets this passage apart from late Republican Latin is the poignant dialogue in which the imagined adversary keeps repeating seruī sunt ‘they are (merely) slaves’, and his interlocutor corrects him with successively stronger terms, advancing the slaves from fellow human beings to housemates, and then from friends to fellow slaves of Fortuna. Such short sententiae, with sharp contrasts, are the bread and butter of silver Latin.

1.1.5 The Archaists In the second century AD, a different literary fashion came into vogue among a small, elite group of scholarly writers: the so-called archaists focus less on the Latin of the late Republic and more on that of earlier authors. They mostly do not follow the elaborate periods of Cicero or Caesar, or the chiselled sententiae of Seneca or Tacitus, but largely prefer a straightforward sentence structure, with an emphasis on oldfashioned words and sometimes constructions which they encountered in their reading of the early Latin writers. The principal exponents of this period are Marcus Cornelius Fronto (100–160s), Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (124–170s), and Aulus Gellius (125–180s). Fronto, of Libyco-Berber origin, was the tutor of the

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Emperor Marcus Aurelius and is known to us through his ample correspondence. Apuleius, of Numidian Berber origin, wrote the only Roman novel that has come down to us in a complete state, the Metamorphoses (or Golden Ass), but also various other works; his style is perhaps the most rhetorical and exuberant among the three authors, with carefully constructed and somewhat baroque sentence structures. Gellius, a native of Rome, left us the Attic Nights, a kind of commonplace book collecting information on various subjects, but especially on issues of language. Here is a sample from Apuleius’ Metamorphoses: (6) Intereā Psȳchē cum suā sibi perspicuā pulchritūdine nūllum decoris suī frūctum percipit. (Apul. met. 4.32) ‘In the meantime, Psyche, with her outstanding beauty, does not receive any benefit of her prettiness.’ Apuleius is considered a great imitator of Plautus, yet, like the other archaists, he does not aim for exact reproduction, but rather, for general stylistic embellishment drawn from his favourite sources. In Plautus, the possessive suus is sometimes strengthened by the reflexive sibi, but this sibi is syntactically redundant; it has become a marker of emphasis (‘his own’ rather than merely ‘his’).⁶ Apuleius picks up this Plautine construction, but does not always employ it in the Plautine way: here it is clearly not emphatic.

1.1.6 Late and Medieval Latin The centuries after the archaists constitute ‘late Latin’. Late Latin is even less of a unified entity than the periods that precede it. At this stage, it makes sense to speak of diglossia, a situation where the spoken vernacular diverges more and more from the educated language. Writers differ as to where they are situated on the spectrum between high and low varieties. An author like Boethius (480–524) can still write prose and verse that feel very classical, with few lexical items giving away that he actually writes just before the beginning of the Middle Ages. Other authors are much closer to the vernacular, and some, like Augustine (354–430), can vary their registers with ease, depending on who they are writing for. Medieval Latin is beyond the scope of this work. While many writers of the period are eloquent and highly competent, they are no longer native speakers of Latin. In some of them, the interference from whatever vernaculars they speak is striking.

6 Discussion in de Melo 2010a.

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With the Renaissance, the Latin of the classical period becomes a stylistic ideal again. And on this note, let us turn to the intricate relationship between synchrony and diachrony.

1.2 Synchrony and Diachrony Linguists generally make a distinction between the synchronic and diachronic study of language. Synchrony examines a snapshot of the language and comes up with rules that explain the system as it stands; and diachrony looks at language change over time, trying to find larger patterns. This neat separation is important on a conceptual level, but not always sustainable on a practical one. If we think of the prohibitive construction nē + perfect subjunctive, ‘don’t do X’, we can see the problems: synchronically, this usage is hard to explain, as the perfect subjunctive normally indicates an event that happened at an earlier time, and while diachronically this perfect subjunctive continues a non-past modal form of an aorist, classical Latin does not have such an aspectual system any longer. Synchronic exceptions can often be explained diachronically, but the learner of Latin, whether it be a child in antiquity or an adult in this day and age, still has to learn such patterns as irregularities. The distinction between synchrony and diachrony is often hard to make because diachronic change is normally already embryonically present in synchronic variation. A few examples from early Latin must suffice. In Plautus, the perfect of ferre ‘to carry’ is tetulī, a regular reduplicated form, but in compounds, syncope led to dereduplication long before Plautus, hence adferre ‘to bring towards’ with a perfect adtulī (from earlier ∗ad-tetulei). In classical Latin, the perfect of ferre is tulī, based on the compounds. But between these two points in time, we find Terence, who shows variation between tetulī and tulī. This morphological variation seems to be driven by the age of speakers: non-reduplicated forms are found fifteen times and are used by all character types, including four times by old men; but reduplicated forms are used only twice, both times by old men (Andr. 808 and 832). There are not enough data to prove that Terence could not put reduplicated forms into the mouths of younger speakers, but the situation is at least suggestive, especially when we take into account other morphological features that Terence uses to characterize old men (details in Maltby 1979). Age is not the only factor that drives morphological variation. In Plautus, archaic futures of the type faxit ‘he will have done’ are disproportionately frequent in conditional clauses. This is presumably in imitation of old legal texts like the Twelve Tables, going back to a time when such futures were still more common; but since legal texts are particularly rich in conditional clauses, later authors associated such

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old forms especially with conditional clauses and retained them there as a feature of conservative registers. Synchronic variation can of course also be syntactic in nature. Again it makes sense to look at a prehistoric starting-point and a classical end-point before taking a snapshot of early Latin. In classical Latin, a distinction is made between real, potential, and unreal conditionals: real ‘if I do’, in the indicative, leaves it open whether I will or will not do something; potential ‘if I should do’, in the present subjunctive, adds some doubt; and unreal ‘if I did’, in the imperfect subjunctive, indicates that I am in fact not doing anything. In the unreal, a distinction is made between present unreal (imperfect subjunctive) and past unreal (pluperfect subjunctive). Whether something is presented as real or potential, or as potential or unreal, is partly up to the speaker. In one of his dialogues on oratory, Cicero asks Brutus if he would still be able to speak if the audience deserted him: (7) Quid tū, Brūte? Possēsne, sī tē ut Cūriōnem quondam contiō relīquisset? (Cic. Brut. 192) ‘How about you, Brutus? Would you be able to speak if the assembly had left you, as it had once left Curio?’ To which Brutus replies: (8) Ego uērō, inquit ille, ut mē tibi indicem, in eīs etiam causīs, in quibus omnis rēs nōbīs cum iūdicibus est, nōn cum populō, tamen sī ā corōnā relictus sim, nōn queam dīcere. (Cic. Brut. 192) ‘To be frank with you, he said, even in those trials in which we only have to deal with the judges, not with the people, I should not be able to speak if I had been left alone by my audience.’ In his question, Cicero uses the unreal imperfect and pluperfect subjunctives, a polite move to indicate that he cannot imagine that such a situation would befall his friend. But when Brutus replies, he uses the potential perfect and present subjunctives, equally politely, so as not to appear too self-confident. Before our literary records start, the situation seems to have been different. The distinction between potential and unreal was not yet made, and the real indicative was opposed to a subjunctive that was open to different interpretations. The nonpast potential / unreal was expressed through the present subjunctive, while the past was expressed through the imperfect subjunctive (more on this in 3.4.2). In Plautus and Terence, we are in a stage of transition: the present unreal can be rendered by the present or imperfect subjunctive, and the past unreal can be

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Chapter 1 By Way of Introduction

rendered by the imperfect or pluperfect subjunctive. Thus, the earlier system and the classical system co-exist, and the imperfect subjunctive is ambiguous: (9) Nam si is ualuissēt, iam prīdem quōquō possēt mitterēt. (Plaut. Curc. 700) ‘For if he had been well, he would have sent you wherever he could long ago.’ The speaker is addressing a young girl who had been owned by a pimp. The pimp had been unwell in the past; the counterfactual past is rendered by the pluperfect ualuissēt. But the other two past counterfactuals are rendered by the imperfect subjunctives possēt and mitterēt. The system is clearly mixed, although it is conceivable that Plautus is using the pluperfect subjunctive here not just in order to express counterfactuality, but also temporal anteriority to the other past unreal forms. The final example of variation concerns iambic shortening, a phenomenon whereby a sequence of a light syllable followed by a heavy one can count metrically as two light syllables. The heavy syllable that is made light may contain a long vowel or be heavy by position. This shortening process is dependent on formality: spoken iambic lines are, on average, less formal than recitative in ‘long verses’, which is in turn less formal than song in varied metres. The less formal a passage is, the more iambic shortening we find.⁷ Iambic shortening does not survive as a productive phonological process, but high-frequency words retain their shortened forms in classical Latin, where they have become normal: egŏ ‘I’ next to the much rarer egō, mihĭ ‘for me’ next to the much rarer mihī, and so on. Modŏ ‘only, just’, originally a shortened form of the ablative modō ‘in measure’, has become a separate lexeme, while the ablative retains its long vowel that is expected within the paradigm. Let us now delve further into diachrony.

1.3 The Comparative Method and Indo-European If we want to go back in time as far as possible, the diachronic study of Latin need not end with our earliest texts, thanks to the comparative method established in the nineteenth century. This method enables us to reconstruct earlier, prehistoric stages of Latin, at least in phonology and morphology.

7 Plaut. Amph. 723. There is one major exception, to be discussed briefly in the next chapter: anapaestic metres have particularly strict requirements with regard to acceptable word shapes and verse incisions, and often this means that Plautus, like a metrical Procrustes, has to make unruly words fit in through excessive iambic shortening.

1.3 The Comparative Method and Indo-European

11

One big discovery in the nineteenth century was that sound change is by and large regular.⁸ This enables scholars to examine cognates in a number of languages that are related to each other, for instance Latin pēs, Greek πούς, Old English fōt, all meaning ‘foot’, or Latin pater, Greek πατήρ, Old English fæder, all meaning ‘father’. What we are looking for is comparable meanings as well as sound correspondences, such as that between Latin p-, Greek p-, and Old English f-. The sounds need not be identical, but the correspondences must be regular. Thus, if next to Latin p- and Greek p- we find Old English p- rather than f- in a word of comparable meaning, the English word cannot be used in a cognate set; Old English panne ‘pan’ stands next to Latin patina ‘pan’, but it is not a word inherited from the parent language, but rather, it is a loan from Latin (and indeed Latin patina is in turn a loan from Greek πατάνη ‘plate, dish’). Sound change is not only exceptionless, it also follows specific paths; a change from p to f is fairly common, while a change from f to p would be unusual. By establishing a typology of sound changes in languages with long attested histories, we can attempt to reconstruct ancestral sounds for prehistoric language stages. For example, our cognate sets with Latin p-, Greek p-, and Old English f- allow us to reconstruct an ancestral ∗p- (the asterisk marks a reconstructed sound or form); not because two languages have p- and only one has f-, or because the two languages with p- are attested earlier, but because the sound change p > f is a normal one.⁹ We can then try to establish a family tree based on sound changes shared by some, but not all, daughter languages; however, we need to be cautious: since sound changes follow common paths, it is not unusual for two languages to undergo the same sound changes independently. Thus, intervocalic -s- turned into -r- in Latin, and the same sound change happened in Umbrian, a closely related language. However, we know that Oscan and Umbrian are more closely related to each other than they are to Latin, and Oscan does not undergo the change of -s- to -r-; and indeed the Latin sound change can be dated to the mid-fourth century BC, long after Latin and Osco-Umbrian went their own, separate ways. It follows that s became r independently in Latin and Umbrian. Shared sound changes are therefore not enough for creating a family tree; ideally they are backed up by shared morphological innovations, because morphological change is far less regular, which makes shared innovations less likely to be independent of each other.¹⁰ Oscan and Umbrian share many sound changes, for

8 The reasons for this are discussed in 2.2.1 and 2.3.5. 9 Of course phonological reconstruction has its limitations; see 2.3.6. 10 We will be looking at aspects of the reconstruction of the case system in 3.3.1, and at aspects of the verb system in 3.3.2. General principles of morphological change are discussed in 3.4.3.

12

Chapter 1 By Way of Introduction

instance the change of *kw to p (Oscan pídum¹¹ and Umbrian pirse ‘what’ next to Latin quid); they also share morphological innovations, such as the extension of the third-declension genitive ending -eís to second-declension nouns. Latin, on the other hand, shares many innovations in phonology and morphology with Faliscan. And these four languages together share phonological and morphological innovations that set them apart from Greek or Old English, which are more distantly related. The most distant ancestor of Latin we can reconstruct is Proto-Indo-European. The first branch to split of from Indo-European was the Anatolian branch, developing into languages like Hittite and Luwian; the second branch to separate was Tocharian. The three families to leave last were Indo-Iranian (with Sanskrit on the Indic side and Old Persian and Avestan on the Iranian side), Greek, and Balto-Slavic (with Lithuanian on the Baltic side and Old Church Slavonic on the Slavic side). Other language families split off somewhere in between: Germanic, Celtic, and Italic. Italic then split into Osco-Umbrian and Latin-Faliscan. The comparative method was developed for Indo-European, but it works for any language family: scholars have had great success in reconstructing ProtoSemitic, Proto-Bantu, and many others. The principles and techniques of the comparative method are universally applicable. The comparative method was developed at the same time as stemmatic analysis in textual criticism and the theory of evolution in biology. In all of these, family trees are established based on shared innovations. Archaic retentions, on the other hand, matter very little because their survival could be due to chance. The ancestors of whales were land mammals that had front legs and hind legs. The front legs developed into flippers, and shared flipper shapes can help us to establish a family tree for whales, as these are shared innovations. The back legs disappeared over time, but whale skeletons still show rudiments of these; however, comparing these rudiments does not help us with the family tree, as two species of whale may have retained a little more than other species independently of each other. Similarly, retained phonological or morphological archaisms do not help us with a linguistic family tree. And sadly, syntax does not help us at all, because syntactic change follows more complicated, idiosyncratic paths. On this note, let us return to the historical period and to our methods for studying languages without native speakers.

11 Oscan and Umbrian are written in a variety of scripts. Boldface is traditionally used for transliterations of the ‘native’ alphabets.

1.4 Corpus Methods

13

1.4 Corpus Methods Latin linguistics has to make use of the methods of corpus linguistics. This is unavoidable for a language which is no longer spoken natively and whose history spans more than a millennium. However, the methods of modern corpus linguistics were developed through the study of English, and not everything that works for English works equally well for Latin. Corpus linguists often discuss types of corpora; the ideal text corpus ought to be balanced and representative, but representativeness is quite difficult to define. So-called ‘snapshot corpora’ focus on a specific period and try to be balanced from the outset, while ‘monitor corpora’ keep increasing over time, in the hope that they would balance themselves out naturally. For the Latin linguist, the discussion of what to include in a corpus seems like an unaffordable luxury. Our corpora are mostly ‘opportunistic corpora’ insofar as we do not have enough material to be picky and have to use whatever is available for a given period. If we want to study early Latin from before 100 BC, there is an inevitable bias towards comedy; Plautus makes up 60% of this corpus, and Terence a further 15%. However, if a phenomenon is attested in Plautus and Terence, but not later on, it does not necessarily mean that it was a feature of early Latin that died out; it could also be a colloquialism that survived, but cannot be found in our later texts because they are predominantly more formal, and because no complete comedies written after Terence have survived. And even if we are merely looking at morphosyntax, a corpus may contain striking gaps. For instance, it has been noted that the pluperfect is rare in early Latin, and some scholars believe that the reason for this is that it is a relatively recently developed morphological category. We should be very careful with conclusions of this sort: if 75% of early Latin consists of comedy, perhaps the rarity of the pluperfect should not come as a surprise, because its meaning makes it most suitable for complex past narratives, which are hardly ever needed in comedy. Traditional classicists often look for key concepts, especially ones that are culturally significant, such as fidēs ‘(good) faith’ or mōrēs maiōrum ‘customs of the ancestors’. Corpus linguists can do the same, but more objectively: ‘To extract keywords, we need to test for significance every word that occurs in a corpus, comparing its frequency with that of the same word in a reference corpus. When looking for a word’s collocations, we test the significance of the co-occurrence frequency of that word and everything that appears near it once or more in the corpus’ (McEnery and Hardie 2012, 51). For collocations and formulae, raw frequency is not necessarily the determining factor; as McEnery and Hardie 2012, 206–7 point out, and at the is a very frequent combination, but not a formula, while on the other hand is much less frequent, but clearly a formula. What we are interested here is a high ‘mutual information score’: a collocation or formula has high combinatorial and

14

Chapter 1 By Way of Introduction

transitional probabilities. And at the is frequent simply because its constituent parts are frequent, but and is not more commonly combined with at than with other elements. The situation is different with on the other hand: after the first three words, hand is extremely likely. Collocational studies can give us insights that native-speaker intuitions cannot. For example, nouns which have a literal and a metaphorical meaning typically combine them with different adjectives or verbs, so that there are very few genuinely ambiguous contexts. Thus, a financial price may be high, but a metaphorical price is typically heavy.¹² Similarly, corpus frequency does not necessarily correspond to prototypicality: the prototypical bird is perhaps the robin, because when English speakers are asked to draw a bird, they most frequently draw a robin; however, that does not entail that in a representative text corpus, a disproportionately large number of tokens of bird refers to the robin. The issue is particularly relevant to lexicographers, who want to present learners with the most frequent meanings, but also with the prototypical ones.¹³ A somewhat uncomfortable lesson from corpus linguistics is what Sinclair 1991, 110 calls the ‘idiom principle’. Most language teaching focuses on rules of morphology and syntax, and on a neat and regular system; but an intimate knowledge of this system does not necessarily enable one to write idiomatically. Competent speakers and writers have access to a large number of semi-fixed expressions which cannot really be altered and which constitute, in effect, single choices, even if in principle they could be analysed and segmented into smaller chunks. Such idioms are

12 When a literal and a metaphorical meaning are combined, rhetoricians speak of a zeugma; the effect is jarring and typically intended as humorous. Compare, from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone: She wore a pink dressing gown and a frown. I have doubts about Ladd’s claim (2008, 300) that literal and metaphorical meanings can sometimes be distinguished because the latter are deaccented. He provides an example in which one friend asks another whether everything is fine after an operation. We may then hear a response such as Don’t talk to me about it! I’d like to strángle the butcher!, where deaccented butcher refers to the surgeon. On the other hand, Don’t talk to me about it! I’d like to strangle the bútcher! sounds strange because accented butcher has to be taken literally and cannot refer to the surgeon. The difference is indeed obvious, but I believe that it has less to do with metaphorical and literal meanings, and more to do with the fact that here the metaphorical butcher is contextually given, while the literal butcher constitutes new information. 13 Incidentally, the differences between literal and metaphorical meanings can sometimes also have diachronic repercussions: Latin caput ‘head’ has both literal and metaphorical meanings, but it is only in the literal meaning that the word is replaced by testa over time; hence French tête ‘head (of the body)’, but chef ‘head (of an organization)’.

1.4 Corpus Methods

15

acquired through long-term exposure and cannot easily be learned in the same way as grammar rules.¹⁴ As I pointed out at the start of this section, modern corpus linguistics is intricately linked with the study of English. In the UK, the founding fathers were Randolph Quirk at UCL, Geoffrey Leech at Lancaster, and John Sinclair at Birmingham. These universities, along with Liverpool and Nottingham, are still outstanding centres for corpus research. However, English is structurally very different from Latin. Because of its minimal amount of inflectional morphology and its relatively fixed word order, English corpora need a great deal less markup than Latin ones before they can be analysed using computers, and English collocations are much easier to determine reliably. Corpus linguists working on morphosyntax do ‘factor analysis’: they examine different morphosyntactic variables and try to find out which ones co-occur consistently; these co-occurrences then need to be explained because there may or may not be causal connections. For example, in Latin accusative-and-infinitive constructions, the subject accusative can be left out; this happens particularly commonly in the future active and the perfect passive. Here we have a clear co-occurrence. We can now look for causal connections; the most plausible explanation for this phenomenon is that future active and perfect passive infinitives contain participles, which are marked for gender and number, and this morphological marking makes it easier to retrieve a subject accusative that has been left out. Let us look at a concrete example of a corpus analysis (de Melo 2009). In the fourth conjugation, early Latin has, in addition to the classical imperfect audiēbam ‘I heard’ and the classical future audiam ‘I shall hear’, the oldfashioned imperfect audībam and future audībō.¹⁵ Such oldfashioned forms also occur in classical Latin, but rarely, and often only for metrical convenience: (10) Dīxerat. Audībat iam dūdum uerba querentis Līber, ut ā tergō forte secūtus erat. (Ov. fast. 3.507-8) ‘She finished speaking. Liber had been hearing the words of the upset woman for a while already, since he had happened to follow her from behind.’

14 Idioms are then often subject to fossilization; Cato often says sānum faciēt ‘it will make healthy’ with a fixed, non-agreeing adjective, as in huiusce modī ulcera omnia haec sānum faciēt ‘this will make all ulcers (neuter plural) of this type healthy (neuter singular)’. Compare also the fossilization of English sort of, as in these householdy sort of spells (with plural these; from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). 15 In this shortened account, I leave out the discussion of the imperfect aiēbam / aibam ‘I said’, which does not belong to the fourth conjugation and behaves somewhat differently.

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Chapter 1 By Way of Introduction

(11) Et spatia annōrum et longa interualla profundī lēnībunt tacitō uolnera nostra sinū. (Prop. 3.21.31-2) ‘The passage of years and the long distance of the deep sea will alleviate the wounds in my silent breast.’ Audībat in (10) stands in a hexameter, while lēnībunt in (11) is in a pentameter. The classical forms audiēbat and lēnient would be unmetrical, which explains the choice of the older forms. In Plautus and Terence, on the other hand, such imperfects and simple futures seem to be quite common. Plautus has seventeen oldfashioned imperfects, whereas Terence has thirteen; and Plautus has forty-six oldfashioned futures, whereas Terence has eleven. Can we therefore say that such forms are still normal in these two authors? Raw figures can be deceptive. Such forms stand out for us because we all start our philological training with the classical language. The classical forms which also occur in Plautus and Terence will stick out less. We need a proper corpus count before we can pronounce judgment. Let us begin with the imperfect: next to the 17 oldfashioned forms, Plautus has only 3 classical ones; the picture is essentially the same in Terence, where next to the 13 oldfashioned forms we find only 2 classical ones. The oldfashioned forms thus make up 85% of the total in Plautus and 86.67% in Terence. The oldfashioned forms are still normal in our two authors, while the few classical ones are the odd ones out and are potentially stylistically marked. This should not come as too much of a surprise. The original imperfect suffix was *-bā-, and it attached directly to the verb stem, hence amā-bā-s ‘you were in love’, monē-bā-s ‘you admonished’, and audī-bā-s. Since the second conjugation is frequent, at some point a reanalysis happened, and speakers felt that the imperfect suffix was *-ēbā- rather than ∗-bā-. This led to the replacement of audībās by audiēbās, but in Plautus and Terence, this process is still in its infancy in the fourth conjugation. In the third conjugation, by contrast, it finished before Plautus and Terence, who always have agēbās ‘you drove’ and faciēbās ‘you made’ rather than forms with ∗-ĕ-. The process never extended to the first conjugation, presumably because it is the most frequent and productive conjugation. We can now turn to the simple future. Plautus has 46 oldfashioned forms, but 184 classical ones. And Terence has 11 oldfashioned forms, but 72 classical ones. The classical forms thus constitute 80% of the total in Plautus and 86.75% of the total in Terence. What is going on? Clearly, the oldfashioned imperfects and futures do not behave alike. The oldfashioned imperfect is still normal in early Latin, but the oldfashioned future is disappearing as early as Plautus, with further signs of fossilization in Terence. Of

1.5 Register and Style

17

the 46 oldfashioned futures in Plautus, 21 (45.65%) belong to scīre ‘to know’, and of the 11 oldfashioned forms in Terence, 7 (63.63%) belong to this verb. Scīre is of course a frequent verb, but among the classical futures, the proportion is less striking: of the 184 classical forms in Plautus, 43 (23.37%) belong to scīre, and for Terence the figures are 72 classical forms, with 13 (18.06%) belonging to scīre. The reason why scīre behaves differently has to do with the function of -ī-, which is part of the actual verb root in scīre, but merely a stem formant in other fourth-conjugation verbs. Our first impression, then, that oldfashioned imperfects and futures were both common in Plautus and Terence, needs to be modified. They were indeed common in absolute terms, but a comparison with the classical types shows that the oldfashioned imperfect was still normal in early Latin, while the oldfashioned future was disappearing fast. Historically, there is also a significant difference between imperfect and simple future. The oldfashioned imperfect is the inherited form. The ‘oldfashioned’ future scībō, on the other hand, is an innovation based on amābō ‘I shall love’ and monēbō ‘I shall admonish’. In the simple future, the inherited forms are the classical ones (such as sciam), which continue Indo-European subjunctive formations. What looks like an oldfashioned future to us was in fact an innovation, but an innovation that was not successful and was already disappearing again in Plautus. This has consequences for stylistic analysis. From a classical perspective, both audībam and audībō are archaic. But what constitutes an archaism from the classical perspective need not be one from an early Latin point of view. In fact, audībam is still normal, while audībō also counts as an archaism from the lens of early Latin. This brings me to the next topic, stylistic analysis.

1.5 Register and Style Commentaries and grammars often assign specific linguistic phenomena to specific linguistic registers: a morpheme or construction may be labelled ‘archaic’, ‘formal’, ‘poetic’, ‘colloquial’, or a combination of these. Unfortunately, the criteria used in order to assess such phenomena are often not made explicit, and often they are based on nothing more concrete than intuitions gained from reading large amounts of Latin literature; such intuitions may well turn out to be correct, but as I hope my example of the early imperfect and simple future shows, they can also be misleading. The classic introduction to Latin colloquial language is Hofmann and Ricottilli 1985. Their method of seeking out colloquialisms is not unproblematic: after identifying colloquial phenomena in modern European languages, they look for similar ones in Latin. For example, morphological diminutives without their primary function are particularly common in modern Italian and German, partly in order

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Chapter 1 By Way of Introduction

to be affectionate, partly in order to express contempt, and partly for no special reason at all. To some extent, the situation is indeed comparable in Latin; note also how some Latin diminutives survive as Romance nouns without any trace of a diminutive function, such as auris ‘ear’ and Italian orecchio (from ∗auriculus¹⁶). The problem with this method is that there is no guarantee that what counts as colloquial in one language does so in another as well. Of course similar cognitive processes and constraints apply across languages, but a wider typological pool would have been needed for this method to work; the European languages in question belong to two major families only, Romance and Germanic, and have been in long-term contact leading to similar syntactic developments. That said, the Hofmann-Ricottilli method is still a useful heuristic: it may not allow us to identify colloquialisms reliably, but it can certainly help us to identify a pool of phenomena which could potentially be colloquial and which merit further study. The most reliable method for identifying stylistic phenomena is outlined in Hine 2005, who focuses on poeticism; but the method can be used, mutatis mutandis, for archaism, colloquialism, and so on. Hine examines Seneca the Younger, who left us a considerable corpus of prose as well as tragedies, making his work ideal for the scholar looking for poeticism, without the interference of other factors such as literary period and authorship. Hine argues that for a word to be poetic, three conditions need to be fulfilled: it has to be used exclusively, or almost exclusively, in poetry; there needs to be a prose synonym; and the tokens need to be frequent enough for this distribution to be statistically significant. We can see this clearly with gladius ‘sword’, ēnsis ‘sword’, and rēgīna ‘queen’. Gladius and ēnsis are used in the same meaning, but the former is restricted to prose, and the latter to verse. The words are both quite frequent. Ēnsis, then, is an obvious poeticism. Rēgīna is also restricted to Seneca’s tragedies; but in this case, there is no prose synonym, because queens are not a topic discussed in Seneca’s prose. That means that we cannot make any firm statements about the register of rēgīna based on Seneca’s works alone. However, the distribution test is not always straightforward in practice. We need to compare two corpora, corpora which ideally differ in only one variable: prose and verse of the same period, or colloquial texts and formal ones of the same period, or early prose and classical prose, and so on. If we can come back to Plautus and Terence, there are no complete comedies we can compare their works with, only fragments; and since these two authors make up 75% of early Latin, it often

16 Non-attested by-form of the regular diminutive auricula. We can see an instance of auricula without diminutive meaning already in Varro rust. 2.9.4, in a discussion of dogs: auriculīs magnīs ac flaccīs ‘with big and soft ears’; the first adjective proves that the diminutive has lost its function.

1.7 Further Reading

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becomes difficult to say whether a feature does not occur later on because it has fallen out of use, or whether it actually survives in colloquial registers for which later documentary evidence is less good. However, the situation is not hopeless: we can, as it were, compare Plautus with Plautus. Plautine language is not uniform: there are differences between the various stock characters, between spoken verse and song, between plain dialogue and parodies of laws, prayers, or military language. A purely Plautus-internal comparison can still yield valuable results, however cautious we need to be.

1.6 How to Use This Book I have deliberately written the individual chapters of this book as self-contained units, so that readers can read the book as a whole or focus on individual chapters. However, those who aim to read it as a whole may benefit from reading the chapters in the order presented here, which moves from individual sounds to successively larger units. None of the chapters is meant as a comprehensive introduction, an ‘all-youneed-to-know’ summary of current research. Rather, each chapter contains no more than a broad outline of the field, before homing in on some specific topic. This focus on smaller topics is meant to allow students to see different angles from those that they would find in most other introductions, and to allow them to see how linguistic research can be conducted. The sections on further reading are deliberately kept short. Experience shows that more comprehensive bibliographies tend to be neglected by students, since for most of them linguistics will be no more than one module among many. But shorter reading lists that contain time-proven material are usually successful.

1.7 Further Reading As general introductions to the history of Latin, I recommend Palmer 1954 and Clackson and Horrocks 2007; the former is somewhat outdated in its methodology, but has a wealth of material, while the latter is more modern, but often too brief. An enjoyable and thorough introduction to historical linguistics is provided by Trask 1996. For corpus methods in general, Weisser 2016 provides an excellent introduction. McEnery and Hardie 2012 is also highly recommended, but presupposes some background. Corpus linguistics always relies on statistics. Most linguists today use R for statistical analysis, and there are several introductions available, but for those who

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Chapter 1 By Way of Introduction

want to have a deeper understanding of why we do what we do, I suggest Woods et al. 1986, which can then be supplemented with introductions to R. Fortson IV 2010 provides an excellent introduction to the comparative method and the individual branches of Indo-European; Szemerényi (1996) is denser and more advanced. Hine 2005 and Adams et al. 2005 are must-reads for the Latinist interested in stylistic analysis. Hofmann and Ricottilli (1985) is methodologically outdated, but still provides a wealth of material. My article on the archaic simple future and imperfect is de Melo 2009.

Chapter 2 Phonetics and Phonology The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) described linguistic signs as having two sides, the ‘signifier’ (signifiant) and the ‘signified’ (signifié). The ‘signified’ covers meaning in all its facets, while the ‘signifier’ refers to outward shape. This outward shape is what we are concerned with in this chapter. How do we classify sounds? Which ones are meaningful and distinctive, and which ones are simply variants of other sounds? And how can we study these phenomena for Latin, a language which, after all, has come down to us in writing rather than in recordings of spoken language? The first part of this chapter tries to answer these questions, but will also examine what makes a good script, and whether the Latin writing system would qualify as a good one. The second and third parts of this chapter deal with changes in the system of sounds, from Indo-European, the reconstructed ancestor of Latin, down to the classical period, and then from the classical period down to the modern era and the Romance daughters of Latin. Naturally, a chapter like this cannot be exhaustive, but I hope that I can give readers a good idea of how we reconstruct pronunciation, how sound change comes about, and how it spreads through society. We shall begin with sounds and spelling.

2.1 Sounds and Spelling 2.1.1 Describing Sounds Human speech modifies the airwaves emitted from mouth and nose through various actions of the organs of speech. However, the primary functions of these ‘organs of speech’, such as the teeth and tongue, are food intake and unimpeded breathing; even the vocal folds evolved in order to prevent food going down the trachea and making us choke. The production of speech sounds is studied by articulatory phonetics, and this is what we are focusing on here. But the properties and transmission of the airwaves are equally important, and these are studied by acoustic phonetics. The main airstream mechanism in all languages is pulmonic, with air being pushed out of the lungs through the action of the diaphragm and the rib cage. Other airstream mechanisms do exist in human speech, but they never predominate: when the glottis is moved upward or downward, compressing or rarefying the air column above it, we can produce ejectives or ingressives, and these form part of the phonological inventories of many languages, but in English they are marginal; https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111172002-002

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an ejective can be heard if we ‘pop’ the -t in Right!. If the air is rarefied by downward movement of the tongue, we have click sounds, as in English tsk tsk; such sounds are common in many South African languages and also in Hadza, spoken in Tanzania, but are again marginal everywhere else. For Latin, just as for English, the pulmonic airstream mechanism is the only one relevant for our purposes. As the airstream passes through the larynx, it comes into contact with the vocal folds. If these are closed entirely and then open up, we speak of a glottal stop. In the International Phonetic Alphabet (Figure 2.1), the symbol for this sound is ʔ. If the vocal folds are lax and vibrate, we speak of voicing; readers may want to put their fingertips onto the larynx and say mmm or zzz – the vibration felt is voicing. If the vocal folds are kept apart and do not vibrate, as in sss, we speak of voicelessness. A French p, as in père ‘father’, is unaspirated; for p, the lips close and open again, and voicing begins at the same time as the stop closure is released. By contrast, English p in pair is aspirated: the first part of the vowel after the stop release is still voiceless, and this voiceless vowel part is what we call aspiration. But in English spare, the p is unaspirated, just as in French. Readers are invited to hold a piece of paper close to their mouth and to say pair and spare. The aspiration in the former is realized as a burst of air that will make the paper billow, while the paper will remain still in the latter. The difference between hotter and otter is again one of aspiration: the vowel in the former has a voiceless start. Simplifying a complex situation, we can divide sounds into consonants and vowels. For consonants there is some kind of oral obstruction. This obstruction can be created with various organs of speech (Figure 2.2): if it is created with both lips, the sound is bilabial (p, b); with the upper incisors and the lower lip, labiodental (f, v); with the tongue and the teeth, dental (th in thigh and thy); and so we can move on to alveolar, palatal, velar, and uvular. These are common ‘places of articulation’. But there are also various ‘manners of articulation’: a complete closure leads to stop or plosive consonants (p, b); a less complete obstruction gives us fricatives (f, v); and a complete oral closure, accompanied by a lowering of the velum so that air can escape through the nose, results in nasals (m, n). Other manners of articulation exist. For l, the tip of the tongue touches the alveolar ridge, and air escapes at the side of the tongue (for me, the lefthand side); we speak of a lateral. For r, a multitude of pronunciations exist even within English: in some Scottish varieties, it can be a tap of the tongue tip against the alveolar ridge, and in formal singing, word-initial r- is sometimes realized as a full trill; a French r is a uvular fricative, but the most common British English r is a palato-alveolar approximant. Other approximants or glides in English are the initial sounds in water and yard, which are also called semivowels. Vowels are more difficult to pin down precisely, because there is no firm obstruction. We classify them as front or back, depending on tongue position with

2.1 Sounds and Spelling

Figure 2.1: The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

23

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Chapter 2 Phonetics and Phonology

Figure 2.2: The organs of speech.

respect to the mouth; the vowel in beet is a front one, the vowel in boot is further back. We also classify them according to height, depending on tongue position with respect to the roof of the mouth; boot has a higher vowel than bought. In addition, we can differentiate between rounded and unrounded vowels, based on the position of the lips. Often, front vowels are unrounded and back vowels are rounded; but other constellations exist: the vowel in French lune ‘moon’ is a front rounded vowel. Learners of French often struggle with this sound, but it is easy to produce: readers should try saying loon, keep their lips in that position, and then try to say lean – the result will be a front rounded vowel. Vowels may also be nasalized, when we lower the velum so that air can escape through mouth and nose at the same time.

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Many languages distinguish segments by length. In English, vowels may be long or short, as in beet and bit.¹ In Finnish, consonants can also be long or short; long consonants are referred to as geminates. In English, this only happends in compounds like lamp-post. We can vary the pitch of our speech, which depends on how fast the vocal folds vibrate; the acoustic correlate of this is f0, the fundamental frequency. Pitch in English can be used to differentiate between statements (He came.) and echo-questions (He came?); we speak of intonation. In other languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, it can also differentiate between words, and we speak of tone. In English, one could perhaps argue that there are two types of any, differentiated by tone: Jim doesn’t teach in any university is ambiguous in its written form, but if we pronounce any with a fall, it means ‘not in any university at all’, while if there is a fall-rise, it means ‘not in any old university, only in the good ones’.²

2.1.2 Phonetics Versus Phonology So far we have examined how to classify sounds. But not all sounds are created equal: the Received Pronunciation of English, a standard used by most BBC presenters and originally based on varieties spoken in the southeast of England, has two l-sounds, ‘clear’ l and ‘dark’ ɫ. The clear sound occurs syllable-initially, as in light, and the dark sound occurs syllable-finally, as in tile.³ Since these two sounds never contrast in English, we consider them variants, or allophones. A phoneme, on the other hand, is a contrastive sound, and normally found via a ‘minimal pair’ test: house and mouse contrast in the initial phonemes, h and m; bitter, better, batter, butter contrast in their vowels. A phonemic analysis is always language-specific. In English, clear and dark l are allophones, but in Russian they are separate phonemes. In English, alveolar and velar nasals contrast (sin and sing), but in Italian they are allophones, with the velar nasal occurring only before velar consonants. Phonetic transcriptions are normally put between square brackets, [ ], and phonemic ones between slashes, / /. Since phonemic transcriptions are only concerned with distinctive sounds, they can dispense with much phonetic detail, detail which may be unnecessary when it comes to basic intelligibility, but which is indispensable for

1 But note that there is also a qualitative difference, with the long vowel being higher and more fronted. 2 Note that the fall or fall-rise extends onto university, which is one reason why I prefer not to analyse any as having a lexically specified tone. 3 It would be more precise to say that the clear sound occurs in syllable onsets and that the dark one occurs in codas, since clear also has the clear sound, while hilt has the dark one. For onset, nucleus, and coda, see below.

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many other purposes, for example when we are learning a second language and trying to achieve a high level of proficiency. Proficient speakers are able to segment words into phonemes easily, but the brain does not simply divide words into phonemes and discard the additional phonetic information as surplus to requirements. On the contrary, phonetics and phonology are active components of language competence at every level. The first four phonemes are identical in grey, great, greater, but the sequence /eı/ is longest in grey and shortest in greater. This is why we can hear a clear difference in rhythm between these two sentences, which are phonemically identical:⁴ (1) Take Gray to London. (2) Take Greater London. Phonemes matter, but so do sub-phonemic distinctions. But how can we actually reconstruct them? This is the question we can turn to now.

2.1.3 Reconstructing Pronunciation When trying to reconstruct pronunciation, we rely on four main types of evidence: explicit statements by grammarians and others; language-internal evidence, coming from spelling conventions and misspellings, metre and rhyme, and puns; transliterations into other scripts; and the regularity of sound change. In most cases, the individual pieces of evidence are not as clear-cut and unambiguous as we might wish for; it is the combination of such puzzle pieces that gives us more reliable results. Explicit Statements Explicit statements by grammarians are often problematic because their terminology is poorly defined and because they did not understand certain phenomena. For example, when they describe t and d, they claim that the tongue position is slightly different for the two (Ter. Maur. 199–203). In Italian and French, both are laminal denti-alveolar stops, and we have no reason to assume that the situation was different in Latin. But why would a grammarian argue for a difference in tongue position? The answer is that unlike their Indian counterparts, Roman and Greek

4 I owe this example to John Coleman. It is originally from Abercrombie 1965.

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grammarians did not understand what causes voicing. Hence they tried to find some other difference between t and d; we should take this as a warning not to rely too much on introspection for any linguistic phenomenon. Elsewhere, ancient terminology may be problematic. Pliny the Elder (quoted in Prisc. gramm. 2.29) describes Latin l as pinguis ‘fat’ in coda position, as exīlis ‘thin’ when geminate, and as medius ‘intermediate’ in onset position. It is clear that the ‘fat’ l corresponds to our ‘dark’ one because of sound changes that would otherwise be hard to explain: the name Albia is misspelt Aubia, and altus must also have developed a diphthong in some varieties, as evident from French spelling (haut). But what are the other two types? Sen 2015, 33–40 argues convincingly that -ll- was slightly palatalized and that l- in onset position was neutral. However, we arrive at such a conclusion only by combining ancient evidence with Romance outcomes, where for example -ll- yields /j/ in Spanish (still written ll). Language-Internal Evidence We will return to spelling conventions below. Suffice it to say here that they are not always as helpful as one might think, precisely because they become conventions very early on. Even in the early period there is no guarantee that spelling is close to pronunciation: for example, we know that in pronunciation the diphthong ei became ẹ̄ and then ī, or that -os became -us, and yet older inscriptions often reflect more modern pronunciations, and more modern inscriptions often follow older orthographic patterns. Let us look at the Egadi rōstra (discussion in de Melo 2023), rams from warships built in the mid-third century BC. Here, the family name Papīrius is spelled Papeirio and Paperio (= Papẹ̄rio). Old ei monophthongized to ẹ̄ before raising to ī, and a spelling like Paperio proves that the monophthongization was at least in progress; but Papeirio does not necessarily indicate that the diphthong still existed as such, since it could be no more than a conservative spelling. Contemporary inscriptions already have endings in -us, and the Plautine fourth-declension genitive senātī ‘of the senate’, borrowed from the second declension, only makes sense if second-declension -os and -om had already become -us and -um, homophonous with the endings of the fourth declension. Loss of -s before a word beginning with a consonant must have started as a purely phonological phenomenon, but in Plautus it is no longer obligatory and is more common in iambic lines than in song, a clear indication that it had become colloquial. All this makes it likely that nominative singular endings spelled -o are, already in the mid-third century, an inscriptional convention in personal names reflecting an earlier state of the language. That said, misspellings, especially systematic ones, are a good indication of current pronunciation. Herculēs is the classical form; the Appendix Probi (item 19)

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tells us not to write the name as Herculēns. Presumably, no one pronounced -nin this word, but since -n- had been lost before the fricatives -f- and -s-, hypercorrect spellings started to appear. Incidentally, we have explicit statements for this phenomenon: Velius Longus (gramm. 7.78-9) tells us that Cicero pronounced Megalēnsia without -n-. The evidence from Romance also points in this direction, compare Latin īnsula ‘island’ and Italian isola. Latin metre is the regulated sequence of light and heavy syllables; as such, it can in many instances help us to determine which vowels are short and which are long. Let us look at how we do this. We divide syllables into onset and rhyme, and the rhyme is further divided into nucleus and coda. In a syllable like flent ‘they cry’, fl- is the onset, -e- is the nucleus, and -nt is the coda. Only the nucleus is obligatory. Metre tells us that the onset is irrelevant for syllabic weight; a syllable is light if it ends in a short vowel, and heavy if it ends in a long vowel and / or a consonant because such a rhyme takes longer to pronounce. Metre also tells us that a single consonant between two vowels will always be an onset. Two consonants will normally be divided between syllables, unless they are a stop followed by a liquid (l or r); in that case, the cluster most commonly forms a complex onset in classical Latin, but division between the syllables is an alternative. In early Latin, metre proves that stop plus liquid is always a complex onset.⁵ In open syllables, metre is the best way to show whether a vowel is long or short. If a word ends in a vowel and the next one begins with one, the final vowel does not count metrically, because it is fully elided or at least modified. Interestingly, final -m and initial h- do not prevent elision, indicating that they were weakly pronounced.⁶ But even though metre is clearly based on regularities in everyday speech, it also has its artificial elements. Early metre is marked by iambic shortening: sequences of light and heavy can alternatively be realized as sequences of two light syllables, for example inherited egō ‘I’ next to the more common egŏ. Accented syllables cannot be made light, and several shortened forms survive into classical Latin; both phenomena indicate that iambic shortening was a phenomenon of common speech. However, in early anapaests, iambic shortening happens so excessively that there can be little doubt that it has been turned into a poetic licence to

5 There is one systematic exception in early Latin: if a morpheme boundary intervenes (ob-loquī ‘to interrupt’), the stop always functions as a coda consonant and closes the syllable. The same applies to classical Latin. 6 Final -m, often left out in early inscriptions, must at some point have been a full consonant, but turned into a sign for nasalization, before disappearing almost entirely; only monosyllabic words preserve traces in the Romance languages, compare French rien ‘(no-)thing’ < rem ‘thing’ or Spanish tan < Latin tam ‘so, such’.

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fit difficult words into this cumbersome and unwieldy metre. Here is a relatively uncomplicated example of a catalectic anapaestic octonarius: (3) Abĭn ā mē scelŭs? – Sine, mea Pietās, te exōrem. - Exōrēs tū mē? (Plaut. Bacch. 1176) ‘Won’t you go away from me, you criminal? – Let me persuade you, my little saint. – You persuade me?’ This metre consists of seven and a half anapaests, that is, fifteen elements, each of which must consist of one heavy or two light syllables. There is an extremely regular incision after the eighth element (here after Pietās), and often there is one after the fourth element (here after scelŭs) and the twelth (absent here) as well. All this makes the metre unwieldy. In our line, we find iambic shortening in abĭn and scelŭs (the latter could also be treated as losing final -s). The importance of puns and wordplays is often overstated. When Plautus says that a pregnant woman needs et mălum et mālum darī ‘to be given a beating and an apple’,⁷ we only learn that these two words form a minimal pair differentiated by vowel length. Much is made of a story in Cicero (div. 2.84), where a fruit-vendor in Brindisi shouts Cauneās ‘Caunean figs’ and Crassus interprets this as an omen, caue ne eās ‘beware of going’. The first -e may be short because this word frequently underwent iambic shortening in early Latin and became a fixed introduction for prohibitions; the second -e may have been elided; but all in all we need not assume that Cauneās and caue ne eās sounded exactly the same, and the problem with puns and wordplays is that it is unclear how similar two entities need to be for the pun to be effective. Transliterations Transliterations of Latin words into other scripts can be instructive, but again we must be careful. Latin ae is routinely rendered as Greek αι. But how informative is this? At some point both languages had a diphthong, but then it monophthongized, and not necessarily at the same time. However, transliteration practices became conventional, and when ae is transcribed as αι, we cannot tell whether we are dealing with two diphthongs, one diphthong and one monophthong, or even two monophthongs. Latin c is commonly rendered as Punic q. This is interesting, because our assumption is that Latin c was a velar stop, whereas Punic q was uvular.

7 Plaut. Amph. 723. The law of Bentley and Luchs proves that the beating comes before the apple: if an iambo-trochaic line ends in an iambic word, the word that precedes must not be an iamb or end in an iamb. See also 4.4.1.

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Punic did have a velar k, so why was this not used instead? We have some evidence that Punic k was aspirated. Latin c, an unaspirated velar stop, could thus be transcribed as an equally unaspirated, but uvular q, or as a velar, but aspirated k. The choice was between two bad options, and all we learn is that to speakers of Punic, absence of aspiration mattered more than the correct place of articulation. Sound Change As we will see in the following sections, sound change is largely regular. This allows us to reconstruct many vowel quantities in closed syllables. And while transliterations cannot tell us that ae was still a diphthong in the first century BC, Varro’s explicit statement for the dialect of Rome is convincing (ling. 5.97), and we have further evidence from sound change: Caesar got borrowed into Germanic, and since Proto-Germanic ∗ai turned into Old English ā, Old English cāsere ‘ruler’ and German Kaiser ‘emperor’ show that the borrowing happened at a time when Latin still had the diphthong. But again we need to be cautious. Latin lĭber ‘book’ should have given us Italian ∗∗levro, and yet we get libro. Sound changes are regular, but libro is a learned re-borrowing from Latin liber; clearly, literacy and reading were not as widespread in the Middle Ages as they are now. Much can be done when we assess the evidence carefully and combine different puzzle pieces. But what are the limits of our reconstruction?

2.1.4 What We Can and Cannot Do If we were to assess all our evidence for the first century BC in detail, we would get a clear picture of consonantal phonemes. There were eight stops, p, b, t, d, k (written c), g, kw (written qu), gw (written gu). They were bilabial, dental, velar, and labiovelar (velar with accompanying lip-rounding). The voiceless stops were unaspirated, the voiced ones were fully voiced. There were two nasal phonemes, m and n, with ŋ as an allophone before velar or labiovelar stops (-n- in ingerere ‘to carry in’ and sanguis ‘blood’ was pronounced ŋ). Three fricatives existed, f, s, h, with the last one on its way out.⁸ And there were two liquids, a tapped or trilled r and a lateral l, which had a velarized allophone. The picture is equally clear for vowels. There were five long vowels, high ī and ū, mid ē and ō, and low ā. These had five short counterparts, which were slightly more

8 The Romance languages preserve no trace of Latin h, and the French h aspiré, no longer pronounced as a glottal fricative, but as a glottal stop, is of Germanic origin. Not even in early Latin does h prevent elision; it was still pronounced, but it was an unstable phoneme.

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open.⁹ Front vowels were unrounded, back vowels were rounded. Vowels could combine into several diphthongs like ae and au, and under certain circumstances vowels could be nasalized, although this was not phonemic. Before a labial segment, the contrast between unstressed u and i would be lost, hence spelling alternations like optumus / optimus ‘best’. In English, ʒ is a marginal phoneme. In initial and final position, it only occurs in French loans (g- in genre and -ge in rouge). Minimal pairs are hard to come by; azure and asher spring to mind, but little else, and again, azure is a French loan (though ultimately from Persian). In the first century BC, the educated elite would likewise make concessions in pronunciation to Greek loans. The aspirated stops, written ph, th, ch, are not native, but can perhaps be classified as marginal phonemes, along with z and y̆ / ȳ. The accent position is almost entirely predictable. In words with a heavy penultimate, this syllable is accented; otherwise, the antepenultimate will carry the accent. A few exceptions exist, such as illīc ‘there’, accented on the final syllable because it arose by syncopation from ∗illei-ke. If a clitic like -que (‘and’) attaches to a word, the syllable before it will be accented, whether heavy or light. All in all, we have a very good understanding of Latin segments and the accent position, but we fall short in many other respects. We do not know particularly well how elision was realized phonetically; we know little about the nature of the Latin accent; and we cannot say much about intonation, which has such vital functions across languages. Greek had distinctive pitches; granted, minimal pairs like φώς ‘man’ (high pitch) and φω̃ ς ‘light’ (falling pitch) were rare, and when such pitch contrasts disappeared altogether, not much was lost. In Latin, no such minimal pairs existed, and yet Roman grammarians described the word accent with terminology translated directly from Greek. Was the Latin accent predominantly one of pitch? Or of loudness? I believe that phrasing the question like this is not very helpful. It is often said that in English, accented syllables are louder than unaccented ones, and while this is not false, the main cue for accent in English is a change in pitch contour. But how would the layman describe the English accent? The majority of people not trained in linguistics would not be able to do so accurately, and given that Roman grammarians were not that different from the educated layman of today, we cannot blame them for simply taking over the Greek terminology. If the Romance evidence is anything to go by, the Latin accent combined pitch changes and loudness, not unlike the English. As a sidenote, the situation is not substantially different in Modern

9 Except for ă, since the long vowel was already maximally open.

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Greek, which does not have lexically distinctive pitch; and yet the ancient pitch terminology was in use until a few decades ago. Intonation is another area where our understanding of Latin phonology is inadequate. How many distinctive intonation patterns were there? How were they realized? In English, intonation can mark the difference between a statement and an echo-question, as well as many other, more fine-grained distinctions. If I see a medical doctor, I may be asked How are you?, and this polite, ‘phatic’ question is not a genuine request for information. Typically, this type of question has a fall-rise intonation. Once I have said Fine. and asked the same phatic question in return, the doctor may ask again, How are you?, and this would then be a true request for information. This type of wh-question is often marked by falling intonation. The more we study intonation across languages, the more we can see that complex intonation systems exist in every language, including those that already have lexical tone, like Mandarin Chinese. Our ignorance of Latin sentence intonation means that if we were to speak to Romans of the first century BC, they would probably think that we sounded somewhat unnatural. That said, it is not impossible to make some rudimentary deductions about patterns of prominence in larger phrases in Latin; let us briefly look at what we can find out about focus marking.

2.1.5 Excursus: nē … quidem ‘Not Even’ If the last paragraph sounded somewhat defeatist, this excursus is meant to show that, whilst we should be aware of our limitations, we can still use our available evidence to draw some conclusions about the prosody of units larger than the word. Let me begin with an English example (from Ladd 2008, 255). Willie Sutton, a notorious bank robber in the 30s and 40s, is said to have been interviewed shortly after his arrest: (3) Reporter: Why do you rob banks? Sutton: Because that’s where the money is. Sutton’s reply is funny because he deliberately misunderstood the reporter’s question. The reporter wanted to know why Sutton had chosen a life of crime, when instead of robbing banks he could have built houses or taught children. Sutton, on the other hand, pretended that he had been asked why he robbed banks instead of private homes or schools. What we can see in the reporter’s question is a mismatch between semantics and phonology. Semantically, he wants to focus on rob banks, but such a ‘broad focus’ is regularly realized by phonological prominence on only

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the last member of the group, banks. Had he wanted to focus on banks only (‘narrow focus’), the phonological prominence would likewise be on this one word.¹⁰ How does Latin deal with focus phonologically? Syntax offers us some cues about phonological phrasing: (4) Haec mulier quae hinc exīt modo, estne erīlis concubīna Philocōmasium an nōn est ea? (Plaut. Mil. 416–17) ‘The woman who’s just come out from here, is she master’s concubine, Philocomasium, or isn’t she?’ Normally, the question particle -ne is a second-position clitic, which may or may not break up a noun phrase like bonā fidē ‘in good faith’. In our example, on the other hand, it is postponed substantially, and this is a strong indication that the whole phrase haec … modo is somewhat independent and forms its own intonation unit. Apart from clitics, Latin also has other means to help us to establish intonation phrases; for instance, if a sentence-initial nominative noun phrase is left dangling and picked up by anaphoric is or ea ‘this one’, we can again assume that such a nominative phrase forms its own intonation unit. In this excursus, I want to look at nē … quidem ‘not even’. Many languages have dedicated focus particles which precede or follow a focal element; in Latin, we find similar elements, such as etiam ‘even’, which mostly precedes the focal phrase, or quoque ‘also’, which regularly follows. Nē … quidem is special because it encloses focal material, which then presumably receives some sort of phonological prominence. But what if this focal material consists of several words? In (3) above, the whole phrase rob banks was focal, but the actual phonological prominence was only marked on its final word, banks. How does Latin deal with phrases that are longer than one word? Let us examine nē … quidem in Caesar, who has forty tokens of it, and supplement our findings with selected examples from Cicero.

10 Compare also Jane didn’t leave because she was afraid. In its written form, this sentence is ambiguous. In its spoken form, the ambiguity disappears. If we put the accent on leave, the unaccented subordinate clause becomes background information; Jane did not leave. If we put the accent on afraid, the subordinate clause is considered foreground information, and the negation has scope over the subordinate clause rather than over leave; Jane did leave, but not out of fear. Disambiguation through accentuation may also have been possible in Crēdō quia absurdum ‘I believe because it is absurd’ (loosely based on Tertullian). If the quia-clause were foregrounded, we would get the wrong interpretation: I would believe anything that is absurd, and I would not believe sensible statements. But if crēdō is foregrounded, we get the intended interpretation: religious mysteries surpass human understanding, so we have to fall back on belief rather than on logic.

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The most common, and unproblematic, situation is that the focal phrase consists of only one word, which is then enclosed in its entirety (fifteen tokens): (5) Nē id quidem Caesar ab sē impetrārī posse dīxit. (Caes. Gall. 4.9.3) ‘Caesar said that not even this could be obtained from him.’ (6) Quārum rērum illō tempore nihil factum, nē cōgitātum quidem. (Caes. civ. 1.7.6) ‘Of these things, nothing was done at that time, let alone thought about.’ (7) Vbi nē tum quidem eōs prōdīre intellēxit, circiter merīdiem exercitum in castra redūxit. (Caes. Gall. 1.50.2) ‘When he realized that they were not coming forth even then, he led his army back to the camp around midday.’ In these examples, the enclosed elements are a pronoun, a participle, and a temporal adverb. In one instance, the focal element should be an entire relative clause, but because that is a constituent of some length, what is enclosed is the pronoun iīs, which then receives focus and refers to the following relative clause quī quiētī uidērentur:¹¹ (8) Sī ipse ad exercitum contenderet, nē iīs quidem eō tempore quī quiētī uidērentur, suam salūtem rēctē committī uidēbat. (Caes. Gall. 7.6.4) ‘He saw that it would be an error, if he himself were to rush to the army, to entrust his personal safety even to those who at the time seemed peaceful.’ Latin prepositions are clitic and form a unit with what they modify. Twice, Caesar encloses the combination of a preposition and another word, as here: (9) Nē ad cōnandum quidem sibi quicquam reliquī fore. (Caes. civ. 2.5.5) ‘Nothing would be left to them even in order to make an attempt.’

11 If a clause is short enough, it may be enclosed in its entirety, as in Cic. Quinct. 73, where nē ubi cōnsisteret quidem ‘not even where he could stand still’ consists of only a verb and a proclitic subordinator. Here is a more complex case, from Cic. div. Caec. 35: nē quae ille quidem fēcit ‘not even what he has done’; ‘not even’ modifies the entire relative clause, but there is an even stronger focus on ille, which is contrastive; hence the inclusion of the proclitic relative pronoun, to mark that the whole clause is in focus, and of ille, to indicate the contrast.

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So far, everything has been unproblematic.¹² Let us now look at noun phrases consisting of more than one word: (10) Nē haec quidem rēs Cūriōnem ad spem morābātur. (Caes. civ. 2.39.6) ‘Not even this matter delayed Curio in his aspiration.’ (11) Ipse Cicerō, cum tenuissimā ualētūdine esset, nē nocturnum quidem sibi tempus ad quiētem relinquēbat. (Caes. Gall. 5.40.7) ‘Although Cicero himself had very delicate health, he did not even set the night-time aside for his rest.’ (12) Nē prīmum quidem impetum suum posse sustinērī exīstimābant. (Caes. Gall. 3.2.4) ‘They believed that not even their first onslaught could be withstood.’ These three examples are variations on the same theme. In (10), haec and rēs belong together, but it is only the demonstrative which is contrastive (‘thís matter and not another one’); it makes sense to enclose only the demonstrative. Caesar has six further examples of this type, with a two-word phrase in which only one word is emphatic and enclosed. In (11), the relevant phrase is nocturnum … tempus, and again the emphasis is only on the enclosed word. (11) differs from (10) insofar as clitic sibi further separates tempus from nē nocturnum quidem. There are two more examples of this type in Caesar. (12) is one of three examples with a phrase of three or more words, here prīmum … impetum suum, but where again only the enclosed word is focal. While the last three examples were still straightforward, problems arise when a phrase of two or more words should be focal in its entirety; in the Caesarian corpus, they are regularly broken up: (13) Noctū nē conclāmātīs quidem uāsīs flūmen trānsit. (Caes. civ. 3.37.4) ‘By night he crossed the river without even the proclamation for breaking up camp.’ (14) … cuius cōnsēnsuī nē orbis quidem terrārum possit obsistere. (Caes. Gall. 7.29.6) ‘… not even the whole world could resist their unanimity.’

12 In Cicero, other groups of two words are also enclosed: nē tam diū quidem ‘not even so long’ (S. Rosc. 78), with proclitic tam; or nē opus sit quidem ‘it would not even be necessary’ (Lael. 51), where opus est is a fixed collocation.

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(15) … saepenumerō sēsē cum hīs congressōs nē uultum quidem atque aciem oculōrum dīcēbant ferre potuisse. (Caes. Gall. 1.39.1) ‘… at meetings with them, they had oftentimes been unable to bear even their look and the keenness of their eyes.’ (16) Mātrēs familiae dē mūrō uestem argentumque iactābant et pectore nūdō prōminentēs passīs manibus obtestābantur Rōmānōs, ut sibi parcerent neu, sīcut Auaricī fēcissent, nē ā mulieribus quidem atque īnfantibus abstinērent. (Caes. Gall. 7.47.5) ‘The mothers of the household cast clothing and silver from the wall and, hanging over with bared chests and outstretched hands, implored the Romans to spare them and not, as they had done at Avaricum, to not even hold back against women and children.’ In (13), conclāmātīs … uāsīs has two equally important elements, and in (14), orbis … terrārum is a fixed expression that functions as a single whole. Caesar has four examples of this type in total. In (15), the focal phrase is even longer, comprising uultum … atque aciem oculōrum; there are two similar examples in the corpus. (16), finally, is similar to (15) insofar as it has a long focal phrase, ā mulieribus … atque īnfantibus, but differs insofar as a proclitic preposition is also enclosed by nē … quidem.¹³ Such longer focus phrases are important for our purposes because they show us how a mismatch between semantic aims and phonological wishes is resolved. Semantically, the whole phrase is focal, just as in (3) above, rob banks as a whole was focal. But phonologically, there are problems in both languages: quidem is meant to come early and breaks up the phrase, while in English only the most rightward element can bear full phonetic prominence. How are we to interpret the Latin data phonologically? In English, the phrase accent falls onto the rightmost content word in the phrase; could we say that in Latin, it falls on the leftmost one, and that the rest of the phrase is perhaps de-accented, or bears a secondary, lesser kind of stress? There are problems with such an approach. The position of the Latin word accent is calculated from the word edge on the right, and it would be a natural assumption that phrase accents are calculated in comparable ways. Moreover, Cicero shows us that personal names can be treated in different ways:

13 An interesting variation on this theme occurs in Cic. fat. 5, nē herculē Īcadiī quidem praedōnis ‘not, by Hercules, even of the robber Icadius’. Both personal name and apposition are presumably focal, and the phrase is split, but a further emphasizing element, herculē, is inserted between nē and quidem.

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(17) … nē Titus quidem Postumius … (Cic. Brut. 269) ‘… not even Titus Postumius …’ (18) … nē Lūcius Valerius quidem … (Cic. Brut. 54) ‘… not even Lucius Valerius …’ Roman personal names are discussed in 6.3.3. In the late Republic, first names like Titus or Lūcius were not very informative outside the immediate family, where they could distinguish between people of the same family name; however, in Roman society as a whole there was by now a very limited pool of first names. In these two examples, then, we could either say that the family name is more informative and hence more focal, or that the combination of first name and family name is focal as a whole. At any rate, no contrast is intended between, say, Titus Postumius and Gaius Postumius. (17) follows the pattern we already observed in earlier examples; the name is mechanically split up. But in (18), the whole name is enclosed, so here semantics wins the day. This could be a further indication that in Latin, just as in English, the rightmost word in a focal phrase bears the main prominence; sometimes, quidem is mechanically placed after the first phonological word¹⁴ of the focus phrase, as in (17), even though at least one more phonologically prominent word is to come, and sometimes, quidem follows the word with the main stress, that is, the last word in the focal group. Our final example from Caesar provides further evidence that there was probably no de-accentuation of the second part of a multi-word phrase: (19) Plūs tertiā parte interfectā reliquōs perterritōs in fugam coniciunt ac nē in locīs quidem superiōribus cōnsistere patiuntur. (Caes. Gall. 3.6.2) ‘When more than a third had been killed, they put the terrified remainder to flight and do not let them come to a halt even on higher grounds.’ The focal phrase is in locīs … superiōribus; but the contrastive element within that phrase is the adjective. It seems inconceivable that the adjective would not have any significant prominence. We can compare a phrase from Cicero, nē spīritū quidem minimō ‘with not even the smallest breath’ (de orat. 3.184), where again the contrastive element is the adjective. It is time to sum up. Nē … quidem is a focus marker; nē consistently attaches to the left edge of the focus phrase, but quidem is more problematic: if the focus

14 A phonological word consists of a lexical word and potentially clitic elements attached to it, for example prepositions.

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phrase consists of more than one phonological word, it can come directly after the first phonological word or after the phrase as a whole, if that phrase is still relatively short. If it comes after the first phonological word, the later ones nevertheless do not lose their prominence. We can assume that just as in English, it is the rightmost word in the focus phrase which bears the main stress. Let us move on to orthography.

2.1.6 From Sound to Letter: Is the Perfect Script Phonemic? Most laypeople, as well as most linguists, assume that the perfect script is phonemic, that is, each letter of the script corresponds to one discrete phoneme. A fully phonemic writing system helps children to learn to read and write faster; it is no accident that Finnish and Italian children, whose languages utilize (near-)phonemic writing systems, acquire literacy substantially faster than English children, whose language is written in a historical orthographic system. Second-language learners also benefit from phonemic scripts because the neat mapping from symbols to sounds tells them how to pronounce new words. And of course linguists, who often need to consult data from languages they are not intimately familiar with, find phonemic spelling helpful. However, once we are proficient readers, whether in a first language or one acquired later in life, we rarely try to figure out the pronunciation of a word letter by letter. Most words, especially highly frequent ones, are taken in as a whole and are not decomposed into smaller constituents.¹⁵ Any spelling mistakes are autocorrected by the brain, which is why proofreading is laborious and why most people cannot read for content and for spelling at the same time. In highly literate societies, written language often acquires a degree of autonomy; far from being merely a representation of spoken language, its structures are more elaborate and it regularly contains words whose meaning we know even if we are unsure about their pronunciation.¹⁶ In short, then, a phonemic writing system is useful for some groups of people, but the more proficient we are, the less orthographic conventions matter. Purely phonemic writing systems can also have some – admittedly minor – downsides. To begin with, different dialects have different phoneme inventories

15 The processing of numbers, however, always requires decomposition and is thus intrinsically different. 16 Note that this uncertainty normally goes in the other direction, since there is a many-to-one mapping between orthography and pronunciation in English. Thus, when confronted with madeup written forms like bome or boam, we would know to pronounce them as /bəʊm/, but a spoken form with this diphthong would not enable us to predict which spelling is correct.

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and distributions, and a standardized phonemic writing system has to prioritize one dialect over all others. Standard Italian, which is based on the variety spoken in Tuscany, albeit without purely local features, distinguishes between close /e/ and open /ɛ/, with a minimal pair pesca (/e/) ‘fishing’ (cf. Latin piscis ‘fish’) and pesca (/ɛ/) ‘peach’ (cf. Latin māla persica¹⁷ ‘Persian apple, peach’). In spelling, no distinction is made, which is sensible: there are very few minimal pairs, so that the ‘functional load’ of the opposition is low,¹⁸ and not all dialects make the distinction, or make it in the same way as Tuscan. Underspecified orthography helps all Italian children to learn to read and write faster, regardless of their native dialect. Historical orthographies also make it easier for the average person to access and understand older texts. Most speakers of English can read Chaucer with relatively little training, but if they could hear Chaucerian pronunciation, they would struggle. More phonemic orthographic systems need regular updating; Belgium and the Netherlands make available ‘the Green Booklet’ (het Groene Boekje) every few years, containing all orthographic changes, but it has to be said that unlearning old spellings and learning new ones can be quite cumbersome.¹⁹ Of course, homophone differentiation is impossible in a fully phonemic script. While English butt and but, or oar and or, are unlikely to be confused in any natural setting, one might feel differently about Latin cum ‘with’ and quom ‘when’, which in current orthography are often both rendered as cum. Perhaps a more serious problem is the fact that phoneme consistency can come at the cost of morpheme consistency. Dutch devoices final stops and fricatives, but in spelling the devoicing is only indicated for the latter; hence druiven ‘grapes’ next to singular druif, but handen ‘hands’ next to singular hand, pronounced /hant/. Do we want to keep the spelling of morphemes consistent? Or do we want to be phonemic? Often, we cannot have both. For many words, there are alternative pronunciations. Should these be accompanied by alternative spellings? In English, this is done to some extent for words

17 Pessica is already attested in the Appendix Probi, item 149, as a form to be avoided. 18 Conversely, a high functional load would mean that there are many minimal pairs, so that the phonemic distinction matters a great deal. 19 One problem area for speakers of Dutch is the question which Latin-derived words are written with c and which ones with k. For example, a classicus or classica ‘classicist’ would study klassieke talen ‘classical languages’. Classicus / classica is considered less nativized than the adjective klassiek; words still considered Latin should be spelled with c, while nativized ones get k. Another, purely native, problem area is the question when to write ij (blijven ‘to remain’) and when ei (domheid ‘stupidity’), since these are homophonous in many dialects; the spellings were kept distinct because in some varieties, notably in Flanders, they indicate two different diphthongs.

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which have ‘weak’ clitic by-forms, hence I am or I’m. Latin also had weak, vowel-less by-forms for es ‘you are’ and est ‘he is’. Just as with their English counterparts, there were certain phonological and syntactic restrictions: arx est ‘it is a castle’ could not contract because the resulting consonant cluster violates phonotactic constraints, and contractions were also impossible in utterances consisting of only two words. In traditional grammars, one speaks of ‘prodelision’ when weak forms are used, but the phenomenon has little in common with normal elision. It was often made explicit in early orthography, but later manuscripts got rid of it in many instances. In English, French loanwords are normally written as in French. In pronunciation, some concessions may be made to French phonology, but often such words are fully nativized. Orthographic systems which are phonemic need to nativize foreign spellings and prescribe a pronunciation, which may not be a desirable state of affairs. The Dutch word for ‘gift’ is a loan from French, cadeau, often nativized in spelling to kado. This new spelling is still substandard, and the diminutive, ‘little gift’, is officially still written cadeautje, but such mixed spellings feel more awkward than nativized kadootje. In Latin, most loanwords come from Greek. In Plautus’ time, these were nativized in pronunciation and morphology, and the Greek aspirates φ, ϑ, χ were rendered as p, t, c. But only a generation later, partly owing to the influence of various pro-Hellenic upper-class Romans, Greek became a prestige language, and people began to write ph, th, ch, though not always in the appropriate places. A final consideration, less significant for Latin, is that when we develop an orthographic system for a hitherto purely oral language, we should ideally take into account the scripts and writing conventions the community is already familiar with; for instance, in many parts of Africa, schooling is conducted in English or French, and local communities will be familiar with those spelling conventions, which a new orthography for a local, oral language should not ignore entirely. Many modern languages are written in more than one script; Serbian, for example, is written in the Latin alphabet and Cyrillic. In ancient Italy, Oscan was written in a native, Etruscan-derived alphabet, in the Latin alphabet, and in an Ionic Greek alphabet. Oscan had a diphthong /ɛi/. How should this be rendered in the Greek alphabet? In Greek, ει was a monophthong in the relevant period. The Oscans sometimes wrote ηι, but also ει; the latter is transferred from the conventions of the national alphabet. All in all, then, broadly phonemic scripts are still preferable to the opposite, but I hope that this exposition has convinced my readers that a fully phonemic script is not necessarily the gold standard and that English orthography, so often seen as an almighty mess, is not necessarily to be frowned upon. Let us now turn to Latin writing conventions.

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2.1.7 Latin Orthography The ancestry of the Latin alphabet lies in the Near East. The Canaanite languages, a branch of North-West Semitic, are comprised of the fragmentary Ammonite, Moabite, and Edomite languages as well as of their well-attested sister languages Phoenician and Hebrew. While the Hebrew script in which we read Biblical texts today is actually the Aramaic script, adopted at a time when Hebrew was increasingly becoming a liturgical language rather than the language of everyday conversations, the old Hebrew script was closely related to the Phoenician one. The Canaanite scripts mark the transition from logographic to sound-based writing. The original Phoenician script has symbols for all its consonantal phonemes, but not for its vowels, which we can partly reconstruct by comparison with other Semitic languages and through Phoenician inscriptions in other scripts, including the Latin one. The absence of vowel signs is not surprising: the letter names betray their logographic origins, for example ’ālp ‘ox’ and bēt ‘house’, and the letters mark the initial sounds in these words, ʔ and b; but in Phoenician, just as in some other Semitic languages, words have to begin with a consonant, and this explains why there are no special vowel symbols. Throughout its long history, Phoenician retained a conservative orthography, but sound changes happened, and when certain consonants were lost in certain positions, these signs began to develop a double duty, as consonants (preserved elsewhere) and as vowels. Much the same happened in Hebrew: the name Sarah, originally meaning ‘princess’ (derived from sar ‘prince’), was at first written srh and pronounced with -h, but when /h/ disappeared in final position and lengthened the preceding vowel, the symbol h came to mark the long vowel ā as well. Semitists call such consonant signs indicating long vowels mātrēs lēctiōnis. Various Greek city states adopted the Phoenician script, together with the letter names, hence alpha from ’ālp and bēta from bēt. Since Greek had no phonemic glottal stop, alpha was repurposed as ă and ā. Phoenician ḥēt yielded Greek H. In Attic and West Greek, this letter stood for /h/, but Ionic lost this phoneme and called the letter ēta; when Athens adopted the Ionian alphabet, the symbol had to change its sound value from /h/ to /ɛː/. A West Greek form of the alphabet, in which H stood for /h/ rather than /ɛː/, and X stood for /ks/ rather than /kh /, was adopted by the Etruscans, who passed it on to the Romans. Phoenician had three back stops, voiced velar /g/, voiceless (and aspirated) velar /k/, and voiceless uvular /q/. The Greeks turned these into Γ, K, and Ϙ, gamma, kappa, and qoppa, although the first was called gemma in West Greek. Qoppa was a dead letter: there was no use for it, but since the alphabet was normally learned as a list, it was passed on within it and kept as a numeral, just as the other letters could indicate

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numbers as well. The Etruscans took on the same letters as C, K, and Q, but given that they had no voiced stops and no o, these letters must have been pronounced ke, ka, ku. But what to do with three letters of the same value? Because of the letter names, C was used before e and i, K before a, and Q before u. This convention was rather pointless, so the Etruscans gave it up soon, opting for C in some city states and for K in others, but before they did so, they passed on the alphabet and the C/K/Q convention to the Romans. The Romans used this convention in several early inscriptions, but it was cumbersome: in the early period, locus ‘place’ would have to be written as LOQOS (nominative singular), LOCEI (nominative plural), and LOKA (alternative nominative plural). It is no surprise, then, that the Romans abolished the convention, using QV for the labiovelar kw and retaining K only in old-fashioned abbreviations, such as K for the name Kaesō or KAL for the kalendae ‘first day of the month’. The Phoenician city Carthage was written Karthāgō or Carthāgō, but in Phoenician the initial sound was /q/ (qart ḥadašt means ‘new city’)! Already in the early period, B, D, and O were used in Latin. Presumably, these letters were inherited from the Etruscan alphabet, where they were ‘dead letters’, and were revived under Greek influence. But because of the C/K/Q convention, C could not be revived as /g/, and the letter C continued to do double duty for /k/ and /g/, as in the old abbreviation C for Gaius. In the third century BC, the Romans created a letter for /g/, G, essentially C with a diacritic mark. It was put in seventh position in the alphabet, ousting Z, for which the Romans had no use at the time. However, fashions change, and in the course of the second century BC, Greek became a prestige language. People began to feel the need for the letters Y and Z to indicate non-Latin sounds, and so they re-borrowed them from the Greek alphabet and placed them at the end of the Latin one. Around this time, people also began to render Greek φ, ϑ, χ as PH, TH, CH. The Latin alphabet is a reasonably good fit for the language, but it is not fully phonemic. Vowel and consonant length are phonemic, as in ănus ‘old woman’, ānus ‘ring, anus’, and ănnus ‘year’. In Plautus’ time, geminate consonants began to be written as such, but indications of vowel length were never systematized. The obvious solution would have been to write long vowels double, just as long consonants are written double. That, however, only happened for a short period of time in the second century BC. Traditionally, the convention was ascribed to Accius, but presumably it was the result of Oscan influence. In Oscan, vowel length was phonemic only in initial syllables (which were always stressed), and here it was rendered by double spellings in the national alphabet. In Latin, the accent does not regularly fall on the initial syllable, and vowel length is phonemic in every position; yet double spellings occur only in initial syllables, as in paastores ‘shepherds’ (CIL 12 .638), a word which has three long vowels and an accented penultimate.

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Other methods of indicating vowel length existed. The most common one was the apex, a diacritic placed on top of a vowel. More idiosyncratic is the I longa, an elongated I that sticks out at the top and the bottom, but has no equivalent for other letters. And finally, there are historical spellings: when ei had merged with inherited ī, the spelling ei could now be used to indicate a long vowel. This was sometimes done very historically, and sometimes in the ‘wrong’ places simply to indicate vowel length. It is quite common to find the I / EI distinction in final syllables, but not elsewhere, because it is easy enough to learn a handful of endings and apply historical spellings to them, but it is quite a feat to learn historical spellings for hundreds of words. In the mid-first century AD, Emperor Claudius noticed three problems with the Latin script. First, as in Greek, we have a single letter for /ks/ (X / Ξ), but we lack a single letter for /ps/ corresponding to Greek Ψ. Second, the letter V stands for a vowel (trisyllabic uŏlŭī ‘I wanted’²⁰) and disyllabic uŏluī ̯ ‘I turned’²¹). And third, in words like optumus / optimus ‘best’, the vowel in the middle syllable is neither u nor i, but something in between. In order to remedy the situation, Claudius invented three letters, yet these are only found in court inscriptions of the period, clearly in an attempt to flatter the Emperor. Tacitus (ann. 11.13–14) cannot refrain from mockery, and understandably so: from a phonemic perspective, X is as useless as a letter for /ps/ would be, since these can be written as digraphs; and the sound in optumus / optimus never contrasts with u or i, but is just an allophone. Only the issue of the semivowel u could be taken seriously, but the underspecification hardly matters because the functional load is minute and I cannot think of many minimal pairs other than the one already mentioned.²²

2.1.8 Roman Writers on Orthography Prescriptive comments on orthography are already found in the second century BC. Lucilius (died 103 BC) stated that for second-declension nouns in -us, the genitive singular should be written -i and the nominative plural -ei (Quint. inst. 1.7.15); both were pronounced -ī. These are historically correct spellings, matching Plautine pronunciation, but in Lucilius’ time, old -ei had merged with inherited -ī in pronunciation,

20 Now often written voluī, but the distinction between U / V and I / J is medieval. 21 Now often written volvī. 22 Among the vanishingly rare number of other minimal pairs we find aluī ̯ ‘belly’ (genitive) and alŭī ‘I nourished’, or caluī ̯ ‘bald’ (genitive) and calŭī ‘I was hot’.

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and some people used the phonemic spelling -i (= -ī) for the nominative plural or the hypercorrect spelling -ei for the genitive singular. In the first century AD, Quintilian took a broader, less prescriptive view. In inst. 1.7, where he focuses on orthography, he states that the apex should not be overused; vowel length is phonemic, but for most words he does not mind underspecification, arguing that the apex comes into its own only when it distinguishes minimal pairs like malus ‘bad’ and mālus ‘apple tree’. He reports the view that one should write exspectō ‘I await’, even though in this compound from ex and spectō one would only hear a single -s-; this is a case where morpheme consistency matters. But Quintilian himself no longer distinguishes in spelling between cum ‘with’ and quum ‘when’ (no longer quom!). He considers it pedantic to write quotīdiē ‘daily’, in line with its etymology, rather than cotīdiē; and he also thinks it pedantic to write quicquid ‘whatever’, a phonemic spelling, instead of quidquid, which could be misinterpreted as two instances of quid ‘what?’. For obtinuit ‘he obtained’, he argues that ‘logic’ (ratiō, morpheme consistency) demands -b-, while the ears hear -p-. In the same section, he also comments on outdated spelling conventions. Lucilius’ distinction between -ī and -ei is considered superfluous. Historically accurate spellings like caussa ‘cause’ and dīuīssiō ‘division’ are ascribed to the Ciceronian period.²³ And since I have already mentioned quum and quom, he points out that his teachers would still write nominative singular seruos ‘slave’ and ceruos ‘stag’, whereas he himself uses seruus and ceruus. What we can see in Quintilian is a general preference for phonemic spelling, but with a high tolerance for underspecification among vowels, where the apex is not used to indicate any long vowel, but only long vowels that result in minimal pairs. He is generally averse to historical spellings, even where they could differentiate homophones. The one area where he is willing to deviate from the phonological ideal in a major way is when it comes to morpheme consistency, where preference is given to morphemic spellings. Neither Lucilius nor Quintilian was primarily concerned with orthography. Treatises dedicated to the subject first appear in the early second century, with Velius Longus and Terentius Scaurus. The relatively late appearance of orthographical treatises is perhaps not surprising, since it coincides with a period in which major sound changes were happening, while orthography remained relatively stable. Terentius Scaurus is by and large in favour of phonemic spellings and advocates equus ‘horse’ rather than equos, or causa ‘cause’ rather than caussa; however,

23 Incidentally, the phonetic shortening of -ss- to -s- after diphthong or long vowel predates Cicero.

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he opts for paullus ‘little’ rather than paulus, which in his time must have been the normal pronunciation. Morpheme consistency is not a major consideration for him: he recommends plēps ‘common people’ rather than plēbs (genitive plēbis) and pelligere ‘to read through’ rather than perligere (from per and legere); that said, he prefers obscūrus ‘obscure’ over opscūrus, claiming, absurdly, that one hears -bhere. Differentiation of (near-)homophones is a consideration: for the relative pronoun, we should distinguish between nominative²⁴ quī and dative cuī in spelling. Although Terentius Scaurus is as aware of the problems of purely phonemic scripts as a modern linguist should be, he does not couch his language in such terminology. Instead, he speaks of errors and their correction. Errors arise for four reasons: adiectiō, when we wrongly add a letter, as in (historically accurate) caussa instead of causa; dētractiō, when we wrongly leave out a letter, as in aedus ‘goat’ instead of haedus (h- had always been an unstable sound in Latin); immūtātiō, when we confuse two (near-)homophones such as ad ‘to’ and at ‘but’; and annexiō, when we divide a word the wrong way: it should be ne-scīre ‘to be ignorant’, in accordance with morpheme boundaries, and not nes-cīre, in accordance with phonological syllabification. Apart from phonology, which is taken for granted, there are three, sometimes contradictory, ways of correcting poor spellings: historia, referring to older spellings (such as haedus and dialectal faedus, where the regular correspondence between h- and f- indicates that we need to write the silent h-); orīginātiō, referring to the etymology of a word; and prōportiō or analogy (dominī ‘of the master’ corresponds to dominus in the same way that equī corresponds to a form equus, not equos). Terentius Scaurus does not seem too bothered that sometimes these principles contradict each other: for equus, one could argue equally well that historia demands a spelling equos. Of course Terentius Scaurus was a prescriptive writer. Yet what is unclear is whether his prescriptions were based on current educated usage or on a priori speculations about what spelling is all about; I tend towards the first alternative, but if the second is correct, it would be interesting to know whether he followed his own rules. Unfortunately, this is no longer possible because the manuscript tradition clearly normalized and regularized even where this would have violated Scaurus’ ideas. We can see that same normalization process in Varro’s De lingua Latina: in 9.80 he explicitly tells us that the nominative plural is written -ei, yet the copyist has modernized his examples and given them the ending -ī. On this note, let us turn to sound change and its causes.

24 Terentius Scaurus adds the vocative, which is of course absurd.

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2.2 Sound Change: From Indo-European to Latin 2.2.1 Actuation Why does the pronunciation of words change at all? We never pronounce one and the same word in exactly the same way, but most of these very minor variations are not noticeable to the untutored ear. Sound change comes in two parts: first, a variant pronunciation has to arise which is noticeable to other speakers in the speech community, and then this variant needs to be adopted by the wider speech community. We call the rise of such variant pronunciations ‘actuation’, and their adoption, ‘spread’. We shall look at the spread of sound changes in 2.3.5; for now, suffice it to say that the end result of sound change is usually exceptionless,²⁵ but while the sound change is ongoing, the picture looks far messier. Actuation is normally driven by articulatory, acoustic, or psycholinguistic factors. Articulatory factors include over-articulation and under-articulation. Overarticulation happens in particularly careful speech, where we tend to exaggerate for the purpose of clarity; this means, for example, that we stretch out long vowels even further, and when long monophthongs are drawn out, it becomes difficult to maintain the vowel quality, which can lead to diphthongizations. Over-articulation changed the English vowel system dramatically during the Middle English period. Middle English had seven long vowels, /iː/, /uː/, /eː/, /oː/, /ɛː/, /ɔː/, and /aː/. The high vowels diphthongized, leading to various knock-on effects. The outcomes of these seven Middle English vowels can be seen in words whose orthography reflects earlier pronunciation, mice, mouse, meet, moon, meat, moan, mane. Under-articulation is common in rapid speech, where consonant clusters assimilate and unstressed vowels are reduced to ə. Among the acoustic factors, similarity in sound is an important one. In earlier times, English had a velar fricative /x/ (written gh, pronounced as in loch) as well as the labiodental fricative /f /. While these are very different in articulatory terms, they sound quite similar and are easy to confuse on a spectrogram. German has kept the two distinct, but in English, /x/ was confused with /f / in some contexts, leading to sound change; compare English cough, where the spelling still indicates a velar fricative, even though we pronounce /f / these days, and German keuchen ‘to pant’. The confusion can also go in the other direction, compare English after, with old -f-, and Dutch achter ‘behind’; in Dutch, the change of /f / to /x/ always happens if /t/ follows. 25 We call this the Neogrammarian principle, based on the discovery of the Neogrammarians or Junggrammatiker, including the Brothers Grimm and Karl Verner. For the Neogrammarians, see especially Morpurgo Davies 1998.

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An example for a psycholinguistically driven sound change is Grassmann’s law in Greek. In the perfect, there is an initial reduplication syllable consisting of a copy of the verb-initial consonant and the vowel /e/; hence, next to λύω ‘I loosen’ we find a perfect λέλυϰα. However, if the verb begins with an aspirated stop, the reduplication syllable contains its unaspirated counterpart, as in ϑνήςϰει ‘he is dying’ and τέϑνηϰε ‘he has died’. What is the rationale behind Grassmann’s law? Greek makes a phonological distinction between voiced stops, voiceless unaspirated ones, and voiceless aspirated ones. But occasionally people slip up and assimilate two onsets. This happens not just in Greek, but in any language with contrasts in voice onset time: German Detektiv, a loan from English detective, is stressed on the final syllable, and the onsets of the unstressed syllables often assimilate in careless speech, resulting in a pronunciation /dedek-/. If such assimilations occur frequently, speakers may hypercorrect, and that is what happened in Greek: a sequence of two aspirated stops, though morphologically correct, was misinterpreted as an anticipatory assimilation in aspiration; hence the deaspiration that we call Grassmann’s law. Sound changes can be unconditioned or conditioned. An unconditioned sound change affects every instance of a phoneme, while a conditioned sound change happens within a certain environment. The Dutch change of /f / to /x/ is a good example of a conditioned sound change because it only happens before /t/; and Grassmann’s law is an equally good example.²⁶ When we establish a family tree for a language family like Indo-European or Semitic, we can group together those languages which share innovations. However, the most useful innovations for subgrouping are morphological ones, not phonological ones. The reason is that morphological innovations are much less predictable, while sound changes follow the simple, universal principles outlined above, and therefore we can see identical sound changes in unrelated languages that are not in contact with each other. In what follows, we shall look at some sound changes that happened in the transition from Indo-European to Latin; but we shall by and large move backwards in time rather than forwards.

2.2.2 Rhotacism Rhotacism is a sound change that turned -s- into -r- between vowels. It happened in the historic period; in fact, we can roughly date it to the mid-fourth century BC because Cicero (fam. 9.21) tells us that Lucius Papirius Crassus (consul in 336) was the

26 For a Latin example of a conditioned sound change see 2.2.3.

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first to be called Papīrius rather than Papīsius.²⁷ It is normally assumed that ∗-s-²⁸ between vowels had already become voiced ∗-z- in Proto-Italic (Stuart-Smith 2004, 108). This situation is preserved in Oscan, where this allophone of /s/ is written s in the native alphabet, but z when Oscan is written in the Latin script, as in egmazum ‘of things’, with an ending that corresponds to Latin -ārum.²⁹ Latin then turns ∗z into r. Like Latin, but for chronological reasons clearly independently from it, Umbrian undergoes rhotacism between vowels.³⁰ Classical Latin, however, has many instances of intervocalic -s-. Most of these are easy to explain. Rhotacism did not affect geminates, and after rhotacism ceased to be operative, -ss- was simplified to -s- after long vowels and diphthongs. We saw earlier that Cicero still used the conservative spellings dīuīssiō ‘division’ and caussa ‘cause’, but many others had stopped writing geminates in such contexts earlier. A handful of words are harder to explain: asinus ‘donkey’ and rosa ‘rose’ might be loans from neighbouring dialects or languages that entered Latin after rhotacism. Rhotacism made Latin paradigms messier and obscured connections between cognate words. Thus, from a root ∗ges- ‘to carry’, we get a participle gestus; the perfect is formed by adding an originally aoristic -s-,³¹ leading to a form gessī, with a geminate that is unaffected by the sound change; and the present ends up as gerō. Similarly, next to the adjective fēstus ‘connected with a feast’, we find the noun fēriae ‘holidays’. In nouns like honōs ‘honour’ and flōs ‘flower’, the oblique cases show rhotacism, honōris and flōris. Since such alternations were considered troublesome, new nominatives like honōr were created, but not for monosyllables like flōs. Sound change may be regular, but it leads to irregular paradigms; analogy is less regular, but restores order to some extent.³² I have started the discussion of sound changes with rhotacism because it resulted in a reshuffle of phonemes. In Proto-Italic, ∗-s- had an allophone ∗-z- and contrasted with the consistently voiceless -ss-. Rhotacism turned ∗-z- into -r-; r existed as

27 Actually, at the time he would have changed his name from Papeisios / Papeisius to Papeirios / Papeirius (the vowel change in the final syllable is called ‘weakening’; see 2.2.4). 28 Asterisks are used to indicate that a form is reconstructed rather than attested in writing. 29 The native Oscan and Umbrian alphabets are transliterated in bold, while italics are used when these languages are written in the Latin alphabet. In the Oscan national alphabet, z stands for /ts/, as in Etruscan. The Oscans began using the Latin alphabet late, at which time Latin had re-introduced z for Greek words. 30 Later, Umbrian also undergoes rhotacism in word-final position. 31 The merger of aorist and perfect will be discussed in 3.3.2. 32 We call this fact ‘Sturtevant’s paradox’. Incidentally, after Plautus, honōr was shortened to honŏr, another regular sound change resulting in a messy paradigm, with nominative and vocative singular -ŏr, but -ōr- everywhere else.

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a phoneme before rhotacism, in all positions of the word, but rhotacism increased the frequency of this phoneme and decreased the frequency of the phoneme s. The later simplification of -ss- after long vowel or diphthong increased the phoneme frequency of s and restored this non-geminate in intervocalic position.

2.2.3 Dissimilation Rhotacism can be explained by articulatory factors. When -s- gets voiced between two vowels, it is an assimilation, an issue of under-articulation. When -z- turns into a tapped -r-, it is again caused by articulatory factors rather than acoustic or psycholinguistic ones. In this section, we will look at dissimilation of l and r, which, like many dissimilations, has psycholinguistic reasons; when speakers hear a sequence of two identical liquids, they may believe that it is the result of assimilation, and so they may dissimilate. This dissimilation shows no morphological restrictions, but it is perhaps most obvious when we examine suffix alternations. We can see the dissimilation with the adjectival suffix -ālis, which is used in this form if the base contains no liquid at all, or contains -r- (Diālis ‘pertaining to Jupiter’, Mārtiālis ‘pertaining to Mars’). But if the base contains -l-, the suffix is -āris (sōlāris ‘pertaining to the sun’). Since sequences of identical liquids are not unheard of in Latin, we must assume that the sound change no longer applied regularly in the historical period and that it was morphologized; speakers learned when to use which form of the suffix.³³ A more complicated alternation, going back to Indo-European, concerns the suffix for instrument nouns, ∗-tro- / ∗-tlo- / ∗-dh ro- / ∗-dh lo-, with liquid and stop dissimilation. The first shape of the suffix can be seen in arātrum ‘plough’ (from arāre ‘to plough’), a relatively recent formation without liquid dissimilation.³⁴ In the last shape, the ‘voiced aspirate’ sound will be discussed below; the suffix, with ‘anaptyxis’, that is, vowel insertion, can be seen in stabulum ‘stable’ (as a place where cattle can stāre ‘stand’). In the second shape, t and l, both dental, dissimilate in place, so that we get pōclum ‘cup’ (cognate with pōtāre ‘to drink’); in the classical period, this suffix mostly shows anaptyxis (pōculum). While dissimilations are largely caused by psycholinguistic factors, anaptyxis happens because of over-articulation.

33 Occasional dissimilations do occur throughout the history of Latin and are not restricted to our suffix; these may also lead to -n- as an outcome. Compare peregrinus ‘foreigner’ and French pèlerin / Italian pellegrino ‘pilgrim’, or meretrīx ‘prostitute’ and occasional by-forms such as meletrīx (presupposed by Old French meautris) or menetrīs (Appendix Probi item 147). 34 Greek ἄροτρον is an older formation, but the Latin vocalism, with -ā-, proves that the Latin form was created later.

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2.2.4 Vowel Weakening and Syncope In classical Latin, the position of the word accent is predictable, with very few exceptions which are the result of the loss of vowels in final syllables; in those cases, the morphology is transparent enough for speakers to understand why the accentuation pattern is deviant.³⁵ In classical Latin, then, the accent regularly falls on the penultimate syllable if it is heavy, and on the antepenultimate if the penultimate is light. Given the remarkable similarities between Sanskrit and Greek accentuation, we can reconstruct the accent position for (late) Indo-European quite reliably. Unlike in Latin, where the phonological shape of a word determines which syllable is accented, Indo-European had a system where the accent position depended on lexical and morphological factors, comparable to English, where for example the suffix -ic will draw the accent onto the syllable preceding it (écstasy versus ecstátic). In between the Indo-European and the classical period, Latin must have had an initial accent. We can see this from various syncopations and vowel neutralizations that affect all syllables except the first. The classical accent position was already firmly in place in Plautus’ time, as can be seen from some metrical phenomena.³⁶ On the other hand, in our earliest texts, vowel weakening and syncope have not yet happened; the inception of these phenomena can be dated to the sixth or fifth century. Latin is not the only language in ancient Italy to develop an initial accent. While its closest relative, Faliscan, shows no signs of syncope or weakening, Oscan and Umbrian syncopate far more short vowels in non-initial syllables than Latin does. Perhaps the initial accent goes back to Proto-Italic, but then manifests itself differently later on in the daughter languages. Alternatively, we could be dealing with a contact phenomenon: Czech assumed initial accent under Hungarian and German influence, owing to multilingualism that lasted for centuries. In early Italy, Etruscan was a prestige language, and it shows syncope of non-initial syllables and vowel weakening as well. The phenomenon could have begun with Etruscan or one of the Italic languages and then spread from there. On the fibula Praenestina (CIL 12 .3), we find a dative numasiōi; the nominative would have been numasios. This name corresponds to the classical Latin form Numerius and to Oscan niumsis. Oscan palatalized the initial consonant, but this

35 Cf. imperative ēdū́c ‘lead out’ from earlier ēdū́ce, or Arpīnā́s ‘inhabitant of Arpinum’ from Arpīnā́tis. 36 Iambic shortening, for instance, can only affect unaccented syllables, and the syllables which are consistently spared are the ones which bear the accent in classical Latin.

∗

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does not matter here. The vowel in the second syllable was weakened in Latin and syncopated in Oscan. And the suffix ∗- ̯ios was vocalized to -ios in early Latin and then weakened to -ius, while in Oscan there was another syncope, resulting in -is. Weakening also affected early loans: Greek τάλαντον ‘talent’ (monetary unit) and βαλανεῖoν ‘bath’ end up as Latin talentum and balineum / balneum. Syncope and vowel weakening are described in detail in Meiser 1998, 66–74. Here I can only provide a brief outline. Syncope affects only short vowels in open syllables, but in Latin it is a process that spans centuries, which makes it difficult to be more precise. The perfect of ferre ‘to carry’ is tetulī in Plautus, but in compounds we can observe syncope, hence rettulī ‘I carried back’ from ∗re-tetulei and contulī ‘I compared’ from ∗kom-tetulei;³⁷ classical tulī is not the result of syncopation, but of back-formation based on the compounds. When short vowels in internal syllables are weakened, the regular outcome is -i- if the syllable is open, and -e- if it is closed. We can compare facere ‘to do’ (open initial syllable), participle factus (closed initial syllable), next to perficere ‘to complete’, participle perfectus. But the phonetic properties of certain consonants can influence the final outcome of vowel weakening. If the syllable is an open one and the next syllable begins with -r-, the rhotic has a lowering effect and we get -e- rather than -i-, which explains the second syllable of facere. Dark l was distributed slightly differently in prehistoric times; it also occurred in onset position if a back vowel followed. The vowel preceding dark l regularly ends up as -u-, compare, from ∗famel-, both familia ‘household’ (clear l) and famulus ‘household servant’ (prehistoric dark l), or Greek Σιϰελός ‘Sicilian’ borrowed as Latin Siculus, next to Sicilia from Σιϰελία. In final syllables, the outcomes of weakening are somewhat different, for instance second-declension -us and -um from earlier -os and -om. Long vowels are unaffected by vowel weakening, but diphthongs do undergo changes. When weakening started, Latin had five diphthongs, ou (from earlier ∗ou and ∗eu), au, ai (later ae), ei, and the rare oi. Weakening resulted in long monophthongs, the quality of which was identical with the second member of the diphthong. We can see this in claudere ‘to close’, exclūdere ‘to shut out’, or caedere / earlier caidere ‘to cut, to fell’, excīdere ‘to cut out’. Thus, cadere ‘to fall’ has a perfect cecĭdī, but caedere has cecīdī. Vowel weakening is clearly a change set in motion by under-articulation, but its effects must have been psycholinguistic at first; while the initial accent was still in place, vowel quality became a secondary cue to accent position, as certain vowels

37 In rettulī, syncope results in a geminate, but in contulī we get degemination because ∗∗-ntt- is not a legitimate cluster in Latin.

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were now more likely to be stressed and others were more likely to be unstressed. This is again similar to what we find in English: the main cues to accent position may be pitch change and increased volume, but vowel quality is a secondary cue, since for example ə can never be stressed. All this changed when the accent position shifted to its classical place. Vowel weakening was a phonological process, but it had occasional morphological knock-on effects. The passive of facere ‘to do’ is suppletive, since we use a different verb, fierī. But when weakening happened, the connection of compounds like perficere ‘to accomplish’ with the base facere was felt less acutely, hence the regular passive perficī. More recent compounds, created after vowel weakening, retain their connection with the base, hence cōnsuēfacere ‘to accustom’ with a passive cōnsuēfierī.

2.2.5 Developments of Diphthongs As we have just seen, diphthongs were subject to vowel weakening processes just like short vowels, but unlike short vowels, they also changed in initial syllables. This makes it difficult at times to ascertain what is the result of weakening and what is an independent development. Thus, ou and ei follow the usual weakening patterns in non-initial syllables and end up as ū and ī, but we find the same end results in initial syllables, compare Lūcius next to Oscan lúvkis (with -ou-) or dīuus ‘divine’ next to early DEIVOS (= deiuōs, accusative plural, CIL 12 .4). The diphthong oi is more complicated. In final syllables it develops into -ei- and then -ī-. In initial syllables, its most common outcome is ū, compare ūnus ‘one’ next to early oino (accusative singular, CIL 12 .9). But after initial p- or f-, the diphthong is preserved (poena ‘punishment’ as a loan from πoινή), unless -i- follows (pūnīre ‘to punish’). The diphthongs ai (or ae) and au are retained in the standard dialect of Rome into the first century BC, but not much longer. Outside Rome, however, ai monophthongizes to /ɛ:/ early; Varro (ling. 5.97) compares Roman haedus ‘goat’ with rural hēdus. When we have such pairs, occasional instances of hypercorrection are inevitable; from Greek σϰηνή ‘stage’ we get Latin scēna as well as hypercorrect scaena. In the first century BC, au coexisted with monophthongized ō in Rome, but the latter was still substandard. No wonder, then, that Publius Claudius Pulcher, aristocratturned-populist, changed his name to Clōdius. In the same vein, Emperor Vespasian used to say plōstra ‘waggons’ rather than plaustra, and when corrected by the grammarian Mestrius Florus, he jokingly called him Flaurus, with a hypercorrection alluding to φλαυ̃ρoς ‘shabby’ (Suet. Vesp. 22). At first sight, one might think that plōdere ‘to clap’ is a monophthongized form of plaudere, but the latter is a hypercorrection

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of the former, as proven by the compound explōdere ‘to clap someone off the stage’; if plaudere were ancient, we would expect ∗∗explūdere.

2.2.6 Voiced Aspirates We are now moving into the prehistory of Latin. Besides voiced and voiceless stops, Indo-European had a series of ‘voiced aspirates’, whose reflexes are voiced in some branches (Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Celtic) and aspirated in others (voiceless aspirates in Greek). As was mentioned earlier, aspiration is delayed voice onset time, which means that ‘voiced aspirates’ are a contradiction in terms.³⁸ However, stops which were described as both voiced and aspirated existed in Sanskrit, and many modern Indic languages, such as Hindi, still have stops that acoustically give the impression of being both voiced and aspirated. In articulatory terms, they are ‘breathy voiced’: the vocal folds vibrate, but are kept in such a position that more air escapes, which gives this auditory impression. One example is Indo-European ∗bh er‘to carry’, which has a voiced reflex in English bear, a voiceless aspirated one in Greek φέρω ‘I carry’, and a ‘voiced aspirate’ in Sanskrit bharati ‘he carries’. The Latin cognate is ferō ‘I carry’, with a voiceless fricative. For Indo-European stops, we reconstruct five places of articulation: bilabial ∗bh , dental ∗dh , palatal ∗g’h , velar ∗g h , and labiovelar ∗g wh . In what follows, we ignore the palatal stops because they merged with the velar ones in Proto-Italic. Let us now look at the reflexes of the voiced aspirates in initial and medial position; they are always voiceless in initial position, but voiced in internal position: – bilabial: initial position: from ∗bh reH2 tēr, Latin frāter ‘brother’, Greek φράτηρ ‘kinsman’, English brother, Sanskrit bhrātar- ‘brother’ medial position: from ∗nebh -, Latin nebula ‘cloud, fog’, Greek νεφέλη ‘cloud’, German Nebel ‘fog’,³⁹ Sanskrit nabhas- ‘fog’ – dental: initial position: from ∗dh uH-mo-, Latin fūmus ‘smoke’, Greek ϑυμóς ‘spirit’, Old Church Slavonic dymъ ‘smoke’, Sanskrit dhūma- ‘smoke’ medial position: from ∗medh -, Latin medius ‘middle’, Greek μέσoς ‘middle’,⁴⁰ English mid, Sanskrit madhya- ‘middle’

38 The only language I am aware of which has true voiced aspirates is Kelabit, an Austronesian language; here, these stops begin fully voiced, then devoice halfway through, and the voicelessness affects the first part of the vowel. 39 English nebulous is a Latin-Romance loan. 40 Assibilation obscures the stop.

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velar: initial position: from ∗g’h elH3 -, Latin holera ‘greens, vegetables’, Greek χλωρóς ‘greenish yellow’, German gelb / English yellow,⁴¹ Sanskrit hari- ‘blond, yellow’ medial position: from ∗ueg’ ̯ h -, Latin uehere ‘to drive,’ Pamphylian Greek Fεχέτω ‘he shall bring’, German Weg / English way,⁴² Sanskrit vahati ‘he drives’ labiovelar: initial position: from ∗gwh er-mo-, Latin formus ‘warm’, Greek ϑερμóς ‘warm’,⁴³ English warm, Sanskrit gharma- ‘warm, hot’ medial position: from ∗dh egwh -, Latin fouēre ‘to warm’, Greek τέφρα ‘ashes’, Tocharian B tsak- ‘burn’, Sanskrit dahati ‘it burns’

These are the basic outcomes. There are also some conditioned changes; for instance, in internal position, next to ∗u, ∗r, or ∗l, ∗dh turns into -b- rather than -din Latin, compare ruber with its cognates red and ἐρυϑρóς. Word-internal -f- does not point to a divergent outcome in Latin; rather, such words are loanwords from Faliscan or Sabellic, where ∗bh and ∗dh have -f- as word-internal reflexes. Next to ruber, we find rūfus ‘red-haired’ from Sabellic and rutilus ‘reddish (of copper or the sunrise)’ from an unknown Indo-European language. As is common, such loans for concepts for which there already is a word result in more specialized meanings, hence ‘red-haired’ rather than simply ‘red’.⁴⁴ Ascoli 1868 believed that the voiced aspirates devoiced and became voiceless aspirates in all positions, as in Greek; then they became voiceless fricatives, as in later Greek, and in Latin these fricatives were voiced internally and became stops (except for h). One problem with this idea is that fricatives tend to behave as a class, but ∗s must have become voiced intervocalically already in Proto-Italic. An alternative proposal, originally suggested by Hartmann and then taken up by Rix 1957, argues that voiced aspirates became voiced fricatives in all positions, but then devoiced in initial position. The advantage of this idea is that it fits better with what we know of -f-: there is evidence that this phoneme was voiceless in initial position, but voiced word-internally in Faliscan, Oscan, and Umbrian. The downside is that voiced fricatives rarely devoice in word-initial position. Stuart-Smith 2004 proposes

41 English palatalizes in this position. 42 Again, English palatalizes in this position. Waggon is also cognate, but is a Scandinavian loan. 43 Labiovelars are mostly preserved in Linear B, but in Attic the outcomes are bilabial, dental, or velar, depending on the neighbouring vowels. 44 The same language that gave Latin rutilus also gave it the Alpēs ‘Alps’ (compare albus ‘white’, hence ‘snow-covered mountains’) and Aetna ‘Mount Etna’ (compare aedēs ‘house’, originally ‘hearth’, hence Aetna ‘burning mountain, volcano’).

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a phonetically plausible solution: the voiced aspirates devoiced in initial position, but not elsewhere; then voiced and voiceless aspirates became fricatives, voiceless in initial position and voiced word-internally – this situation is preserved in all of Italic other than Latin; and finally, the voiced fricatives turn into voiced stops in Latin. The change of original ∗dh to b in certain environments can then be explained thus: first, between vowels, it turns into a voiced dental fricative; and this dental fricative becomes a labiodental one before turning into a bilabial stop. The change of dental to labiodental fricative is based on acoustic similarity and has parallels in Cockney English, where brother is pronounced with v (hence spellings like bruv). Stuart-Smith’s phonetic reassessment is clearly superior to Ascoli’s and Rix’s hypotheses and shows that for sound change, both acoustics and articulation matter and that we need to take phonetic plausibility into account.

2.2.7 Laryngeals Our last problem before we can turn to Latin-Romance developments in the next section concerns the Indo-European laryngeals. The issue of laryngeals is intimately connected with Ablaut or apophony. Ablaut refers to vowel alternations that go hand in hand with morphological ones. We can see Ablaut in English irregular verbs, such as sing, sang, sung, or ride, rode, ridden. Here, there are vowel changes that accompany changes in tense and voice. In Old English, such alternations were widespread and semi-productive; we speak of ‘strong’ verbs, while ‘weak’ verbs are those which form the simple past and the past participle with -ed. Greek has comparable patterns of vowel alternation: next to λείπω ‘I leave’, there is a perfect λέλoιπα ‘I have left’ and an aorist ἔλιπoν ‘I left’. The vocalism of classical Greek is much more conservative than that of Old English, and what we can see in the Greek example is systematic variation between e, o, and zero (in combination with a semivowel in the two ‘full grades’, which becomes syllabic in the ‘zero-grade’). In addition to these three grades, there are two rarer ones, with ē and ō (‘lengthened’ grades).⁴⁵ Because of vowel weakening, this original system is obscured in Latin, but there are still some alternations in initial syllables, as in tegere ‘to cover’ and toga ‘covering, toga’.

45 Compare for Greek: πατήρ ‘father’ (nominative, lengthened ē-grade; πατέρα (accusative, e-grade; πατρóς (genitive, zero-grade); εὐπάτωρ ‘born of a noble father’ (nominative, lengthened ō-grade; εὐπάτoρoς (genitive, o-grade.

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The English strong verbs fit these patterns very neatly, if we take a few sound changes into account. Sing shows raising of ∗e before nasal; sang reflects an old o-grade, with ∗o becoming a; and the participle has the zero-grade, with the originally syllabic nasal developing to -un-. Ride and the other forms in this paradigm underwent the Great Vowel Shift in Middle English; in Old English, the forms are rīdan, rād,⁴⁶ ġeriden, and these correspond to earlier ∗ei, ∗oi, ∗i, with ∗ei regularly turning into ī and ∗oi turning into ∗ai and then ā.⁴⁷ However, the way Indo-European used to be reconstructed, certain deviant patterns of vowel alternation remained. Ferdinand de Saussure realized that next to ∗ ∗ e, o, zero, we also find ∗ei, ∗oi, ∗i, or ∗en, ∗on, ∗n, and in these latter two series, the semivowel and the nasal constituted an element that could become fully syllabic in the zero-grade, meaning that this element, rather than a vowel, formed the nucleus of the syllable.⁴⁸ But what if the deviant patterns of vowel alternations could be the result of sound changes that affected a previously regular series? What if they could in fact be analysed as sequences of ∗e, ∗o, ∗zero followed by sounds that got lost or modified through sound changes? The great scholar posited two such sounds, naming them coefficients sonantiques. The majority of Indo-Europeanists today accept the existence of three such sounds, which are normally referred to as ‘laryngeals’. This term laryngeal is used today without necessarily assuming a laryngeal place of articulation. It goes back to the Danish scholar Hermann Møller. When the Hittite language, spoken in ancient Anatolia and written in an Akkadian syllabic script, became intelligible to scholars, they realized that it was an Indo-European language. Hittite has reflexes of the second (and sometimes third) laryngeal, transliterated as h. The exact quality of this sound is unclear; it need not be exactly the same ˇ as in the Akkadian script, and what is more, the exact quality of the Akkadian sound is also unknown. Various pieces of evidence indicate a voiceless back fricative, velar [x] or perhaps glottal [h]. Møller believed that Indo-European and Proto-Semitic were sister languages, and since most Semitic languages have a variety of laryngeal and pharyngeal sounds, he called the original coefficients ‘laryngeals’, believing that they were a further indication of a genetic relationship. These days, we no longer accept a genetic relationship between Indo-European and Semitic, but the

46 This is the vocalism of the singular preterite; the plural, not relevant for our purposes, had the zero-grade, ridon. 47 We saw this last change earlier (2.1.3), when we were comparing Latin Caesar and its Old English outcome cāsere. 48 We can see a comparable alternation in English, where the second syllable in the word button may contain a vowel ə, but for most speakers this vowel is absent and n forms the centre of the syllable.

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term stuck. We conventionally indicate laryngeals with H followed by a number, but this notation with H is not meant as a phonetic one. We shall only look at four laryngeal constellations: laryngeal followed by ∗e; ∗e followed by laryngeal; syllabic laryngeal; and laryngeal following a syllabic liquid or nasal. Laryngeal before ∗e disappears, but the second and third laryngeal colour the vowel:⁴⁹ – ∗H1 : ∗H1 ek’wos ‘horse’, Latin equus ‘horse’, Greek ἵππoς⁵⁰ ‘horse’, Sanskrit áśvaḥ ‘horse’; initial laryngeal is posited because of the regular Indo-European root structure (roots must begin with a consonant) ∗ – H2 : ∗H2 ent-i (locative) ‘in front’, Latin ante ‘before’, Greek ἀντί ‘opposite’, Sanskrit ánti ‘nearby’, Hittite hant-s ‘front’ ˇ – ∗H3 : ∗H3 ekw - ‘to see’, Latin oculus ‘eye’, Greek ὄμμα ‘eye’, Sanskrit akṣī ́ ‘eyes’ (dual); again, initial laryngeal is posited because of root structure When the laryngeal follows ∗e, it disappears, but because it is in coda position, it also lengthens the vowel;⁵¹ the second and third laryngeal again have a colouring effect:⁵² – ∗eH1 : ∗dh eH1 - ‘to place, put’, Latin fēcī ‘I made’, Greek τίϑημι ‘I put’, Sanskrit dadhāmi ‘I place’ – ∗eH2 : ∗steH2 - ‘to stand’, Latin stāre ‘to stand’, Greek (Doric) ἵστᾱμι ‘I set up’, Sanskrit tiṣṭhāti ‘he places’ – ∗eH3 : ∗deH3 - ‘to give’, Latin dōnum ‘gift’, Greek δίδωμι ‘I give’, Sanskrit dadāmi ‘I give’ We have just seen three verbal roots; in the participle in ∗-tó-, these roots are in the zero grade: – ∗H1 : ∗dh H1 -tós ‘placed’, Latin factus ‘made’, Greek ϑετóς ‘placed’, Sanskrit dhitáḥ ˚ ‘placed’⁵³ ∗ ∗ – H2 : stH2 -tós ‘stood up’, Latin status ‘set, agreed upon’, Greek στατóς ‘set, ˚ placed’, Sanskrit sthitá- ‘placed’

49 Note that Sanskrit merges ∗e, ∗o, and ∗a to a. 50 The i is difficult to explain, but at any rate the aspiration is late; cf. old names like Λεύϰιππoς ‘white horse’, where it is not yet found. 51 Across languages, the onset never seems to contribute to syllable weight, while in many languages, the coda does; so the loss of a coda consonant may be compensated by lengthening the vowel, while there is nothing comparable for an onset consonant. 52 Note that Sanskrit merges ∗ē, ∗ō, and ∗ā to ā. 53 Thus the handbooks; in reality our earliest attested form is hita-, a Middle Indic form, even though it made its way into the Vedic manuscripts.

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∗

H3 : ∗dH3 -tós ‘given’, Latin datus, Greek δoτóς, Sanskrit ditáḥ⁵⁴ ˚

In Latin, the outcome here is ă, regardless of laryngeal; similarly, in Sanskrit it is i, regardless of laryngeal; only Greek has three distinct short-vowel reflexes. The reflexes of laryngeal after syllabic nasal or liquid can again best be studied in participles: – nasal + ∗H1 : ∗g’nH1 -tós ‘born’, Latin gnātus ‘son’, Greek ϰασίγνητoς ‘brother, ˚ cousin’, Sanskrit jātáḥ ‘born’ ∗ ∗ – liquid + H2 : tlH2 -tós ‘carried’, Latin lātus ‘lifted’, Greek (Doric) τλᾱτóς ‘lifted’, ˚ German Ge-duld ‘patience’ – liquid + ∗H3 : ∗strH3 -tós ‘spread’, Latin strātus ‘spread’, Greek στρωτóς ‘spread’, ˚ Sanskrit stīrṇá- ‘spread’ In Latin, the outcome is non-syllabic liquid or nasal followed by ā; in Greek, nonsyllabic liquid or nasal followed by a long vowel whose quality depends on the laryngeal; and in Sanskrit īr or ūr for liquid + laryngeal, and ā for nasal + laryngeal. We have now seen the effects of laryngeals in Latin. But what were they in phonetic terms? If they occur in zero-grade forms, next to a nasal or a liquid, it is the nasal or the liquid which will be the syllable nucleus, not the laryngeal; but if there is no nasal or liquid, the laryngeal can be syllabic. This indicates sounds which are less sonorous than vowels, nasals, or liquids, but more sonorous than stops. Perhaps, then, they were fricatives, and the Hittite evidence points in that direction, too. Given that sound systems tend towards a certain symmetry, and given that we have palatal, velar, and labiovelar stops, it is tempting to think of our three laryngeals as palatal, velar, and labiovelar fricatives. The palatal fricative would not influence vowel colour; the velar one would be a-colouring; and the labiovelar one, with lip rounding, would nicely predict o-colouring. However, we should remain cautious. The second laryngeal can lead to a preceding ∗t becoming aspirated in Sanskrit,⁵⁵ while the third one can lead to a preceding ∗p becoming voiced.⁵⁶ Perhaps the phoneme system was not quite so symmetrical after all. For this reason, it seems more sensible to stick to purely algebraic notation. There are limits to reconstruction, and we should acknowledge them.

54 Another handbook form; we actually have Middle Indic datta- in the Vedic manuscripts, but the zero grade can be seen in adita ‘he gave for himself’ (aorist middle). 55 Second person singular perfect ending -tha next to Greek -ϑα (oἶσϑα ‘I know’) cannot go back to a voiced aspirate, which would be preserved as such in Sanskrit. 56 Sanskrit reduplicated píbati ‘he drinks’, from a root also seen in Greek πίνω ‘I drink’ and Latin bibere ‘to drink’ (presumably earlier ∗pib-, with distance assimilation).

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2.3 Sound Change: From Latin to the Romance Languages Now that we have examined a few significant sound changes from Indo-European to Latin, we should also look in the other direction, to the Romance languages. The Romance languages are normally grouped along broad geographical lines into Italo-Romance (Italian dialects, with a standard based on Tuscan);⁵⁷ Gallo-Romance (French and Provençal); Hispano-Romance (Castilian Spanish, Catalan as less widely recognized standard, and Portuguese); Rhaeto-Romance (Romansh, Ladin, and Friulian); and Balkan Romance (Dalmatian, now extinct, and Romanian).

2.3.1 Vulgar Latin, Proto-Romance, Diglossia The classical Latin of the first century BC, especially as written by Cicero and Caesar, became a stylistic model that later generations aspired to. The spoken language continued to develop, but the written form was largely codified: those with societal aspirations were trained in classical morphology, syntax, lexis, and stylistics. As we saw earlier, spelling continued to be modernized to some extent, but it, too, was more conservative than pronunciation. When people try to imitate the language of earlier generations, they tend to focus on morphology and the lexicon, because these are easiest to manipulate, while earlier pronunciation is rarely attempted. The imitator of classical Latin would thus be least successful in the phonological domain – if one can speak of lack of success when no real effort is made in the first place. That said, just as Cicero and Caesar became models for prose, Virgil and Ovid were the authors to imitate in verse, and that required learning classical metre and vowel length, an undertaking that was far more artificial than learning earlier morphology, since late authors writing classicizing verse probably did not pronounce it in a classical fashion. The more the spoken varieties of Latin diverged from its written form, the more effort had to be put into learning this by now artificial variety. We speak of diglossia, a situation where most people are able to speak a ‘low’, everyday variety, while the educated elite is also capable of handling a ‘high’ variety in writing and sometimes in speech. The high and low varieties are separate in principle, but in practice they influence each other. We call this low variety of Latin ‘Vulgar Latin’, the Latin of the uolgus ‘common people’. Vulgar Latin was not a purely oral variety; the less educated masses had

57 Sardinian is somewhat separate from Italo-Romance.

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not mastered the high variety and would slip into Vulgar Latin in writing, although not even the least educated written documents are unadulterated Vulgar Latin. We can use Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and other languages to reconstruct IndoEuropean. If we take the Romance languages and employ the same methods, we arrive at what we call Proto-Romance. Proto-Romance was a purely spoken language, and we should at least in principle keep it separate from Vulgar Latin. Elements which got lost in all Romance varieties, but can be seen to have existed in Latin, cannot be reconstructed; we will return to the limits of reconstruction at the end of this section. Comparing Proto-Romance with classical and Vulgar Latin can thus provide us with a good reality check as to what can and cannot be done in reconstruction. But the main reason why we need to keep the concepts of Vulgar Latin and Proto-Romance distinct is that Vulgar Latin documents, however humble, always strive for what was perceived as grammatical correctness; they can afford us glimpses of Proto-Romance, but no more.

2.3.2 Vulgar Latin Vowel Changes No Romance language has retained the phonemic vowel length distinctions found in classical Latin; where quantitative contrasts exist, these are invariably innovations.⁵⁸ This collapse of the quantitative system must have happened relatively early, but its precise outcomes differ from region to region. In the western part of the Empire, the result was a seven-vowel system. As we noted earlier, with the exception of ă, short vowels were slightly more open than their long counterparts. This is a widespread phenomenon across languages with quantitative distinctions; in fact, openness is often a secondary cue that the vowel is short (Gussenhoven 2007). In the west, then, ī and ū became i and u, but ĭ and ŭ merged with ē and ō, resulting in e and o; ĕ and ŏ remained distinct, as ɛ and ɔ, and ă and ā merged into a. The evidence for these developments is overwhelming. Italian largely retains this system in accented syllables, although there are some further developments

58 Unlike the French spoken in France, Belgian French still has some phonemic length distinctions, for example between /i/ and /iː/ (il ‘he’ and île ‘island’) or between /ɛ/ and /ɛː/ (mettre ‘put’ and maître ‘master’); the loss of such oppositions in the French of France is relatively recent, yet the Belgian French long vowels do not go back to Latin, but are the result of contractions. Similarly, in Friulian, a variety of Rhaeto-Romance, where such length contrasts are even more common, they are mostly the result of contractions.

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like diphthongizations. Spanish, too, presupposes such a system, as does French, although here there are extensive further shifts already visible in Old French. In addition to the Romance evidence, we have a large body of misspellings in the western half of the Empire. The letters I and E are commonly confused, as are V and O, and such confusions are particularly frequent when they stand for what would have been ĭ, ē, ŭ, and ō in classical Latin. In Sardinia and North Africa, we end up with a five-vowel system. Quantities disappeared, but unlike in the west, long vowels simply merged with their short counterparts. In North Africa, Latin was eventually displaced, but the Latin of Sardinia resulted in a Romance variety, and Sardinian has faithfully preserved this five-vowel system. However, we have substantial evidence that the North African vowel system resembled that of Sardinia. Augustine (doctr. Christ. 4.10.24) states that ‘African ears’ do not distinguish between long and short vowels, as in ōs ‘mouth’ and ŏs ‘bone’, and that it therefore makes sense to use an innovated form ossum ‘bone’⁵⁹ rather than the traditional ŏs, which would be confused with ōs by the common people. The spelling confusions between I and E and between V and O, so common in Italy, Gaul, and Spain, are virtually absent from North Africa. Normally, correct spelling only tells us that people knew how to spell, not that sound change had not happened; but in this case misspellings of all sorts abound, so the absence of confusion in vowel letters does indicate that the loss of quantities evidenced by Augustine and by defective hexameter poetry was not accompanied by a merger of ĭ and ē or ŭ and ō. In the east, a six-vowel system emerged. As everywhere else, ă and ā merged. The front vowels developed as in the west, resulting in i, e, and ɛ, but the back vowels developed as in Sardinia and North Africa, resulting in u and o. Vowel systems are often symmetrical because the minimum number of phonological contrasts results in the maximum number of phonemes. However, where asymmetries do exist, as in the east, they tend to follow certain patterns. If the number of front vowels differs from that of back vowels, there are almost always more front vowels. But why should this be? There are good articulatory reasons for such an asymmetry. When we open our mouths, there is more space in the front than in the back, where the jaws are connected with the skull by the temporomandibular joint. Naturally, more space allows for more distinct vowel articulations.

59 A back-formation based on the plural ossa. In much later Latin, we even find a neuter singular ueterum ‘old’, back-formed from the plural uetera (Adams 2016, 618).

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2.3.3 Vulgar Latin Consonant Changes Perhaps the most dramatic changes to the consonant system are the various ‘palatalizations’ in the later period. ‘Palatalization’ is perhaps not the most precise term, since we are dealing with palatalizations followed by assibilations; when for example velar k acquires a more palatal place of articulation next to i, this is a palatalization that we can also observe in English key (palatalized k) as opposed to cool (fully velar k), but when such a palatalized k turns into ʧ, it is an assibilation, one which also happened in English, as when Latin cāseus was borrowed into Old English and resulted in cheese (Old English cȳse). In later Latin, unstressed ĭ turned into a semivowel if another vowel followed, and this yod led to the palatalization of preceding dental and velar stops. Velar stops underwent similar processes if full front vowels followed, but this development is not pan-Romance, since Sardinian preserves k and g in this position (centum ‘a hundred’ > chentu, generum⁶⁰ ‘son-in-law’ > ghèneru). There is little doubt that at least the palatalizations with yod already began within Latin. The fifth-century grammarian Consentius considered it a mispronunciation if the ending -tiō was pronounced without -s- between -t- and -i- (17.2-6, discussion in Mari 2021, 255–8), and Väänänen 1967, 54–6 lists vulgar spellings such as zaconus (= diaconus ‘deacon’), ampitzatru (= amphitheātrum ‘amphitheatre’), and dissessit (= discessit ‘he left’). However, the palatalizations of k and g before full front vowel are later and rarer than those before yod. Because of spellings like termināciōnēs ‘boundaries’, one sometimes reads that the outcomes of ∗kj and ∗tj were identical in Vulgar Latin. But since the outcomes of these two clusters are typically kept apart in Romance, this seems unlikely. We need to be cautious. The traditional Latin spelling system could simply not accommodate different sibilants and affricates, and writers were left with a choice between outdated historical spellings and imperfect phonetic ones. The outcomes of palatalization are very diverse in Romance; we cannot do them justice here. However, there are two general points I wish to make. The first is that when a cluster palatalizes and assibilates, this is not necessarily the end of the development. Modern French has ʒ as outcome of g before front vowel, genre from ∗generem, the masculine outcome of original genus; but the Old French sound was ʤ, which was simplified later on, and the original affricate can still be seen in English gender, borrowed from Old French.

60 In Vulgar Latin, the accusative became the default case for most nouns, ousting the nominative; Italian nouns no longer have case, but their form typically reflects the old accusative, cf. 3.4.1.

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The second point is an elaboration of what I said earlier, that the palatalization of k and g before front vowel is later than the palatalization before yod. In fact, palatalizations came in several waves and, depending on the branch of Romance, went on for many centuries. In Spanish, for example, the oldest wave affected t, k, and g before yod, followed by k and g before front vowel. The outcome of g is /j/ or, if the following vowel is unstressed, zero (germānum ‘brother’ > hermano with silent h). The voiceless stops first turned into /ʦ/ and much later into /θ/ in Spain.⁶¹ Palatalization of n and l before yod probably happened early on,⁶² but orthography is not helpful here; seniōrem ‘older man’ > señor ‘Mr’, and folia ‘leaves’ > hoja ‘leaf’ (∗lj > ∗ʤ > ∗ʒ > /x/). The palatalizations lt > /ʧ / (multum ‘much’ > mucho) and kt > /ʧ / (noctem ‘night’ > noche) happened somewhat later, but still before the medieval period. And initial kl-, pl-, and fl- assimilated to ll-, but the final palatalization to /j/ only occurred in the Middle Ages, compare clāmāre ‘to shout’ > llamar, plōrāre ‘to cry’ > llorar, and flamma ‘flame’ > llama (all with conservative orthography). Most Romance varieties lose the Latin geminates.⁶³ In southern Italian and Romanian, simple voiceless stops remained voiceless between vowels, but in northern Italy, Gaul, and Spain they underwent voicing and sometimes fricativization. We can see this in French: intervocalic p and b become v (rīpa ‘river bank’ > rive, faba ‘bean’ > fève); intervocalic t and d become voiced dental fricatives and then disappear (uīta ‘life’ > vie, uidēre ‘to see’ > voir); and intervocalic k and g become voiced velar fricatives and then also disappear (sēcūrum ‘safe’ > sûr, augustum ‘August’ > Old French aoust). Where French has word-internal voiceless stops, they go back to geminates (mittere ‘to send’ > mettre, with conservative orthography).

2.3.4 From Latin to Italian Now that we have seen Vulgar Latin developments in vowels and consonants, we can have a brief and selective look at how these develop further in Italian. I have chosen Italian because it is a Romance language many of my readers know and because phonologically it is the most conservative Romance variety apart from Sardinian.

61 The fact that the outcome is /s/ in South America shows that this change only happened in the sixteenth century. 62 We assume this because early palatalizations raise neighbouring vowels, e.g. from ɛ to e, which is not true of medieval palatalizations. 63 This does not necessarily happen early. The vocalism of French chat ‘cat’, with /a/ rather than /ɛ/, shows that the syllable was still closed when /a/ changed to /ɛ/ in open syllables; the geminate in cattus must have persisted into early Gallo-Romance.

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Italian retains the western vowel system fairly faithfully; the seven vowels i, u, e, o, ɛ, ɔ, and a are mostly preserved when stressed, but in unstressed syllables, e and ɛ merge into e, and o and ɔ merge into o, so that we have a reduced vowel inventory. In stressed syllables, ɛ and ɔ diphthongize to jɛ and wɔ, as in pedem ‘foot’ > piede and focum ‘fire’ > fuoco. This diphthongization follows certain restrictions: it can only happen if the syllable is open and penultimate, which explains why populum ‘people’ gives us popolo. For palatalizations, there are often two competing outcomes, an issue we will revisit below:⁶⁴ – t > ʦ (plateam ‘road, piazza’ > piazza), but also t > ʤ (ratiōnem ‘reason, right’ > ragione) – d > ʣ (medium ‘middle’ > mezzo), but also d > ʤ (hodiē ‘today’ > oggi) – k > ʧ (faciem⁶⁵ ‘face’ > faccia) – g > ʤ (rēmigium ‘rowing’ > remeggio) – s > ʧ (bāsium ‘kiss’ > bacio), but also s > ʤ (occāsiōnem ‘opportunity’ > cagione) Italian retained the Latin geminate consonants and actually increased their number through various assimilations; Italian does not permit clusters of two distinct stops, hence optimum ‘best’ > ottimo. Single voiceless stops between vowels remained voiceless in southern Italian, but became voiced in the north; the standard language shows a mixture of outcomes. Intervocalic voiced stops remain, except Latin b, which becomes v, as in amābat ‘he loved’ > amava.

2.3.5 The Spread of Sound Change We began the section on sound change from Indo-European to classical Latin with the issue of actuation. The pronunciation of an individual word in an individual speaker can change for articulatory, acoustic, or psycholinguistic reasons. But why does something that starts as no more than a mispronunciation spread to other words and across a group of speakers, until it becomes the new normal? Why is the end result of sound change typically regular? And why is the outcome of palatalization in standard Italian, a normal sound change, not regular? As we have just seen,

64 Many of these outcomes count as geminates between vowels, but I have not marked this in the phonetic symbols; in Italian orthography, geminates in pronunciation are indicated with double spellings. 65 Or rather its first-declension by-form ∗faciam.

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one Latin sound can have two different outcomes here, and it is not predictable which word will have which outcome. While the actuation of sound change can be explained by neuromuscular, transmissory, and psychological factors, sound change spreads for sociolinguistic reasons. When a word has changed pronunciation for one speaker, this will often go unnoticed; but if a change is noticed, other speakers may choose to imitate it. They tend to do so because the speaker who has changed the pronunciation of the word has ‘prestige’, in the loosest sense of the word – this prestige need not be overt prestige, manifesting itself in wealth or power, but can be covert prestige, as when posh kids imitate inner-city speech because it is perceived as ‘cool’. Imitation is a productive process. Speakers notice a divergence in pronunciation, compare how they pronounce a given word and how the other person does it, and try to find out in which phonological contexts the divergence occurs. If a suitable environment can be established, they will generalize the new pronunciation in this context; we end up with a conditioned sound change. If no environment can be detected, the sound change will be unconditioned. The imitation process takes time. A change spreads from word to word, from speaker to speaker. Historical linguists working on ancient languages spoken by relatively small numbers of people will notice the end results, when sound change is more or less complete and regular and when it finally enters the orthographic system. But dialectologists working on modern languages can observe the messiness of sound change in progress, of the wave-like advance of a given change. They notice ‘isoglosses’, geographic boundaries where one part of a town or region has already established a sound change in a specific word, while another part has not yet done so; and these isoglosses can be quite different for different words, even though it is the same sound change in progress. That is essentially why standard Italian palatalizes one and the same Latin sound in two different ways. Palatalization happened in different ways in different parts of Italy, and these different outcomes spread in waves. Tuscany, being in central Italy, was hit by a southern wave of palatalization outcomes as well as by a northern one, and it adopted southern pronunciations for some words and northern pronunciations for others. The end result of sound change is largely regular, at least at its epicentre. But while sound change is in progress, and at its borders even after it has finished, the picture is inevitably messier.

2.3.6 The Limits of Reconstruction Now that we have seen how actuation and spread work, and why sound change is, at least in its end results, overwhelmingly regular, one question remains: how

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reliable are our reconstructions? Here we have to make a fundamental distinction between comparative and internal reconstruction. Comparative reconstruction looks at cognate words in at least two languages and establishes consistent sound correspondences. Once we have a set of correspondences, we try to establish an ancestral sound based on likely phonetic developments. For example, English father is cognate with Latin pater, Greek πατήρ, and Sanskrit pitár-, giving us a neat correspondence between English f-, Latin p-, Greek p-, and Sanskrit p-. We reconstruct ∗p in this case, not because the majority of the daughter languages have this sound, but because the change of p to f is a common one, while the opposite is unusual. Internal reconstruction is done with a single language. We notice a synchronic irregularity and try to reconstruct an earlier system without this irregularity. For instance, next to the perfect gessī ‘I carried’ and the participle gestus, we have the present gerō. This present is the odd one out, with -r- rather than -s-, so we can reconstruct an older ∗gesō which underwent rhotacism. Internal reconstruction is inherently less reliable than comparative reconstruction because it lacks the broader evidence base and because no language is free from some irregularities. Laryngeal theory is often seen as a great triumph for internal reconstruction. When Ferdinand de Saussure posited his coefficients sonantiques, he did so purely on internal grounds, trying to simplify the highly complex and irregular system of Ablaut. His reconstruction, the narrative goes, was then justified by the decipherment of Hittite. But of course the real picture is more complex. Originally, only two laryngeals were reconstructed, whereas most scholars today assume the existence of three, for very good reasons. And the evidence from Hittite and Anatolian more broadly cannot prove the existence of more than a single laryngeal. A comparison between reconstructed Proto-Romance and attested classical Latin can provide a reality check for the reliability of linguistic reconstruction in general. Let us begin with the vowel system. Since the (early) eastern Romance vowels are like the (early) western ones on the front axis, and like the North African and Sardinian ones on the back axis, we will ignore them here. We then get the following correspondences between classical Latin, Italian (as a representative of western Romance), and Sardinian:⁶⁶ Latin ī and ū > Italian i and u, Sardinian i and u; Latin ĭ and ŭ > Italian e and o, Sardinian i and u; Latin ē and ō > Italian e and o, Sardinian ɛ and ɔ; Latin ĕ and ŏ > Italian ɛ and ɔ, Sardinian ɛ and ɔ; and Latin ā and ă > Italian a, Sardinian a. If we did not have the Latin data, there would be no reason to reconstruct vowel quantities. For the front and back vowels, Italian

66 I am focusing on Sardinian here because we know what its five vowels are phonetically: i, u, ɛ, ɔ, a. For North Africa, it is unclear whether the mid-vowels were e and o or ɛ and ɔ phonetically.

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has three qualities each, and Sardinian has two each. But because we have four distinct correspondence sets for front and back vowels respectively, we would have to reconstruct nine vowel qualities in total, perhaps along these lines: high ∗ i (It. i, Sard. i) and ∗u (It. u, Sard. u), mid-high ∗ı (It. e, Sard. i) and ∗ʊ (It. o, Sard. u), mid-open ∗e (It. e, Sard. ɛ) and ∗o (It. o, Sard. ɔ), open ∗ɛ (It. ɛ, Sard. ɛ) and ∗ɔ (It. ɔ, Sard. ɔ), and low ∗a (It. a, Sard. a). It is conceivable that Vulgar Latin briefly had such a nine-vowel system, if distinctive vowel length disappeared before the various qualitative mergers, but the lesson is that if a category such as vowel length has disappeared entirely in the daughter languages, it is often impossible to recover through the comparative method. In the ancestors of Italian, Spanish, and French, the diphthongs ae and oe merged with ∗ɛ and ∗e. Again, these diphthongs would not be recoverable if we did not have Latin. On the other hand, au also monophthongized in these languages (Latin causa ‘cause’, Italian cosa ‘thing’), but Portuguese, Occitan, Romanian, and Rhaeto-Romance retain a diphthong (ou in Portuguese, au elsewhere). A large enough data pool will thus always make our comparative reconstructions more reliable. If we did not have the varieties which retain the diphthong, we would perhaps still realize that our reconstruction is insufficient, as French palatalizes k before front vowels and a, but not before back vowels, which means that the French outcome of causa, chose ‘thing’, would be suspicious. Internal reconstruction could get us one step further. I have deliberately focused on problem areas. Comparative reconstruction, aided by internal reconstruction, is by and large highly reliable, but we should remain wary of over-confidence.

2.4 Further Reading My favourite introduction to phonetics and phonology is Gimson and Cruttenden 2008, which focuses on English, but has such a wealth of information that it is a must-read. The Handbook of the International Phonetic Association (1999) is recommended for reference. Prosody and intonation are covered by Shattuck-Hufnagel and Turk 1996. An up-to-date account of acoustic phonetics and voice studies can be found in Kreiman and Sidtis 2013. The classic textbook on the reconstruction of Latin pronunciation is Allen 1989. This can be supplemented with Sen 2015 and Probert 2019 on more specialized topics. Questa 2007 is predominantly on metre, but also sets out how pronunciation in 200 BC differed from classical Latin. Writing systems across the world are discussed in Cruttenden 2021. For an overview of Latin orthography, de Melo 2022b is serviceable. The history of the

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Latin alphabet is dealt with by Wachter 1989. For the orthography of classical Latin, we will soon have Adams forthcoming. Biddau 2008 is an exemplary edition of Terentius Scaurus’ treatise on orthography, with a clear commentary. The best outline of sound changes from Indo-European to Latin is still Meiser 1998. The laryngeal theory is most helpfully explained in Lindeman 1987, and for the voiced aspirates and their outcomes in Italic the standard treatment is Stuart-Smith 2004. Szemerényi 1996 provides a wealth of comparative data for the reconstruction of Indo-European phonology, but his discussion of laryngeals is to be treated with caution. For Vulgar Latin sound changes, Väänänen 1981 remains unrivalled. For sound changes from Latin to French I recommend Harris 1988; for those from Latin to Spanish, Penny 2002.

Chapter 3 Morphology If phonology breaks up words into distinctive sounds, morphology, in many influential accounts of the subject, breaks them up into meaningful units. For example, the word cats consists of four distinctive sounds or phonemes and two meaningful units or morphemes, the lexical element cat and the plural marker -s. In this chapter, we shall examine various aspects of morphology and how they apply to Latin: after a first section outlining basic concepts, we shall move on to synchronic issues of compounding, derivation, and inflection. The next two sections will discuss aspects of morphological change from Indo-European to Latin, and from Latin to Romance. And finally, we will deal with grammatical gender as a morphosyntactic case study. In the course of this chapter, we will also look at analogy and levelling, at productivity and how word frequency influences the ways in which our brains do or do not perform morphological decomposition, and at the question of what factors cause or prevent large-scale morphological change.

3.1 Basic Concepts 3.1.1 Words and Morphemes In many textbooks, morphology is presented as breaking up words into smaller, meaningful units. The smallest meaning-bearing unit is the morpheme. If we take a word like injustices, its base is the adjective just, which has lexical meaning; from it, we can derive an abstract noun by adding a suffix -ice, leading to justice; this in turn can be negated with a prefix in-, hence injustice; and if we think of the noun as concrete rather than abstract, we can pluralize it by adding another suffix, -s, giving us injustices. This example has already shown us different affix types: there are prefixes and suffixes, added in front and at the back; some languages also have infixes, added inside, but in Latin there is only one infix, the nasal infix, which was a present-stem formant in Indo-European, hence tangō ‘I touch’, but perfect tetigī without the nasal. Just as phonemes can have allophones, morphemes can have allomorphs. The regular English plural suffix comes in three shapes. After most voiceless sounds, it is realized as /-s/, as in cats; after most voiced sounds, it is realized as /-z/, as in dogs, where spelling obscures the voiced pronunciation; and after sibilants, whether voiceless (/s, ʃ /) or voiced (/z, ʒ/), it is realized as /-ız/, as in our original example, injustices. In Latin, the genitive singular of the first declension used to end in -ās, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111172002-003

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as in pater familiās ‘father of the household’,¹ but this ending was replaced by -āī, with the genitive of the second declension tacked on to the noun stem, and this eventually became monosyllabic -ai / -ae. Here we can again speak of allomorphs, but in this instance they are not phonologically conditioned as in our English example. In principle, we could say that classical -ae, -ī, -is, -ūs, and -eī, the genitive singular endings of the five declensions, are allomorphs because they all have the same meaning, ‘genitive singular’, but in practice we rarely do so because the allomorphy between first-declension -āī and -ae is intuitively different from the allomorphy between first-declension -ae and third-declension -is. In the first case, we are dealing with variants that are diachronically or phonologically connected, just as English -s / -z / -ız, whereas in the second case there is no such connection. A more precise way of speaking, rarely adopted in the morphological literature, is to say that Latin has one morpheme for the genitive singular, which has different morphs for different declensions, such as -ae and -ī, and that a morph -ae can have an allomorph -āī in earlier Latin; in other words, the morpheme is a unit of meaning, the morph is a unit of form, and an allomorph is a variant of a morph that is conditioned by factors such as phonology or register, but not membership of a declension class. So far we have broken up a few words into morphemes, but we have avoided a more basic question: what is a word? Most people would agree that blackbird, referring to a species of bird, counts as one word, whereas black bird, referring to any bird that is black, including the actual blackbird, counts as two. But how do we determine what should be treated as a word? Following Bloomfield 1926, 156, we can say that the word is a ‘minimum free form’. For determining such minimum free forms, we rely on phonological criteria, structural integrity, syntax, and semantics. Thus, phonologically blackbird has only one accent, on the first syllable, while black bird can receive two stresses, and if it does not, the default stress is on bird. Structural integrity entails that nothing can intervene between the two morphemes of blackbird, while the combination of adjective and noun is not restricted in this way (black and white bird). Syntactically, a coordinated structure like blackbirds and cars leaves the colour of the cars open, whereas black birds and cars can be interpreted in such a way that the adjective modifies both birds and cars. And semantically, a black bird can be any type of bird so long as it has the colour black, while the blackbird is a unique species. If we apply such tests, we notice that they sometimes yield conflicting results. While we have prototypical words like bird, and prototypical affixes like plural -s,

1 Livius Andronicus still uses such genitives in -ās in his epic, but not elsewhere; they must already have been oldfashioned in the mid-third century BC.

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there are many entities in between. These are often called clitics, but they do not form a homogeneous class in any respect. In Latin, they include elements like -que ‘and’, autem ‘but’, and mihi ‘to me’. The particle -que leads to a stress shift that can ́ violate the penultima rule, as in armǎque ‘and weapons’. Autem does not lead to any stress shift, but is regularly found in the second position in a clause, the ‘Wackernagel position’.² And the pronoun mihi can be stressed if contrastive, but if it is non-contrastive, it often goes into the Wackernagel position as well. Languages are often divided into isolating, agglutinative, inflectional, and polysynthetic ones, but such distinctions are always idealizations. Isolation means that most words are monomorphemic; Sinitic languages and some languages of southeast Asia are fairly isolating. In agglutination, we can find lengthy words with several morphemes, but each morpheme has only one meaning; Turkish is the classic example, with a word like ev-ler-ın consisting of a lexical base, ‘house’, followed by a plural marker, followed by a genitive marker. In inflection, grammatical morphemes often encode several functions at once; Latin is a prototypical case, where the ending in ag-ō ‘I drive’ marks first person singular present indicative active. In polysynthesis, words contain a particularly large number of morphemes, and often several content morphemes, so that in extreme cases, word and sentence may coincide; this phenomenon is common in several North American language families as well as in Papua New Guinea.

3.1.2 Compounding, Derivation, Inflection Compounding and derivation are means of creating new words, while inflection describes how a single word can occur in different variants in order to express different grammatical functions, such as changes in case or number. But why do we need to create new words? According to Plag 2003, 59–60, there are three main reasons for doing so. We can create new words for new concepts (‘labelling / referential function’), but also for syntactic recategorization or in order to express certain attitudes. Syntactic recategorization helps us to avoid cumbersome phrasing: (1) John has always been slow, but what I find most grating about him is not his slowness.

2 Named after the Swiss linguist Jacob Wackernagel (1853–1938), who noticed the existence of such clitics in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit and argued that this phenomenon was inherited from IndoEuropean (Wackernagel 1892).

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Here, the creation of slowness spares us from a clumsy subordinate clause (is not the fact that he is slow). The creation of new words in order to express attitudes can be seen in endearments like sweetie from sweet, or in insults like fattie from fat. Compounding describes the combination of two or more elements with lexical meaning; most commonly, this results in nouns (blackbird, greenhouse), but such processes can also create other word classes like adjectives (fat-free) or verbs (sweet-talk).³ If frequent enough, compounds can acquire conventionalized meanings: a chicken salad is a salad containing chicken rather than a salad fed to chickens. Otherwise, the relationship between the elements of a compound is vague or underspecified, and it is up to the listener to figure out what exactly the intended meaning is. Plag 2003, 148–49 distinguishes between ‘sortal’ and ‘relational’ elements, a distinction which can help us to reduce this vagueness. Nouns can be sortal: chair, stool, and sofa are different objects to sit on. Father and mother, on the other hand, are relational nouns: a parent is always a parent to someone else. With relational nouns in a compound, the modifying element will automatically be interpreted as the argument of the relational noun; hence a beer drinker is a person who drinks beer and a cigarette smoker is a person who smokes cigarettes. We speak of ‘argument linking’. Where argument linking fails, a different interpretation arises from context. Brain surgery shows argument linking because it refers to an operation performed on the brain; but the linking process fails in laser surgery, which must be interpreted as an operation performed with the help of a laser, or in chain smoker, which must be a person who smokes constantly. Two special types of compounds can only be mentioned here. They are often referred to with Sanskrit terminology, as dvandva- and bahuvrihi-compounds. In the category of dvandva ‘pair’, we find appositional compounds, such as singersongwriter for a person who is both, and coordinative ones, such as nature-nurture debate, which is a debate about two opposites.⁴ The bahuvrihi ‘much rice’ type is

3 In this connection, it is worth mentioning ‘blending’, the compounding of two words typically of the same word class, done in such a way that the ending of the first and the beginning of the second are cut off. The textbook example is smog, from smoke and fog. I have recently come across an instance combining two different word classes: a British tabloid called Prince Harry’s wife Woko Ono, a blend of woke and Yoko Ono; the adjective refers to people whose social activism is little more than a performative display, and the personal name refers to the artist who is supposed to have broken up the Beatles. Latin examples are difficult to come by. Perhaps the nickname of Tiberius Claudius Nero belongs here, Biberius Caldius Merō (Suet. Tib. 42), as it combines his name with the words bibere ‘to drink’, caldum ‘mulled wine’, and merum ‘undiluted wine’. 4 The Sanskrit terms are used slightly differently in the actual Indian tradition. For instance, the term dvandva could indeed be used for nature-nurture debate there; but not for singer-songwriter.

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also called exocentric and always refers to a human characterized by having, owning, or doing something, for instance redneck for a white person working outdoors in the sun, or pickpocket for a thief. Derivation does not add lexical material, but changes word classes, for example from noun to verb (laus ‘praise’, laudāre ‘to praise’), or, where word classes remain constant, adds a further grammatical meaning, such as inchoative (uirēre ‘to be green’, uirēscere ‘to become green’). Derivation can involve complex semantic and phonological restrictions. Plag 2003, 93 and 206–7 shows the phonological difficulties in his discussion of the denominative suffixes -ize and -ify, which are in near-complementary distribution. The suffix -ize attaches to unstressed syllables (cauterize), while -ify attaches to stressed ones (intensify). However, rectify, while fitting the stress pattern, does not have a base that exists as a free form. And since -ify leads to the deletion of any final unstressed vowel, we get limited overlap for the two suffixes, compare dandy next to dandify and dandyize. And finally, solídify, an old form, fits the synchronic stress pattern, but the base is sólid, and synchronically this suffix does not lead to stress shifts. Inflection modifies features such as case and number for nouns, or person, number, tense, mood, and voice for verbs. Inflection and derivation are easy to distinguish in principle, but in practice the boundaries are somewhat fluid. Inflection tends to be fully productive and regular in both form and meaning and not to lead to gaps in paradigms, while this cannot be said of derivation. However, is gender inflectional or derivational? For adjectives, which have to be able to agree with nouns, gender is best treated as inflectional, but for nouns, where we get human pairs like erus ‘master’ and era ‘mistress’, gender shifts between masculine and feminine are more limited, so that it may be better to think of it as derivational. Past passive participles are another borderline case. Not every verb can form them, and once they are formed, they inflect like adjectives, while keeping the verbal category of relative tense, which makes it impossible to ascribe the formation to either derivation or inflection. Similarly, the boundary between compounding and derivation can occasionally be blurred. If I describe myself as dog-tired, I am using what is formally a compound with two lexical units, but the element dog functions more as an intensifier than a truly meaningful element.

3.1.3 Morphological Models, Frequency Effects, and Mental Processing I started this chapter with a hedge, stating that morphology, ‘in many influential accounts’, was ‘presented’ as breaking words into smaller meaningful units. Every discussion of morphology recognizes the importance of sub-word entities, but their

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status within the theory varies between the different morphological schools. The concept of the morpheme and the segmentation of words into such morphemes were popularized by Bloomfield 1926, whose treatment of the subject came to be known as ‘item-and-arrangement’ morphology. Such a system works reasonably well for agglutinating languages, but not so much for inflecting ones. Hockett 1987, 81–82 aptly remarked, ‘We seemed to be convinced that, whatever might superficially appear to be the case, every language is “really” agglutinative.’ But if we look at a form like rēxistī ‘you have governed’, we can see problems with such an approach. The form is an s-perfect, but this -s- is not the only perfect marker here; the root vowel in the perfect is lengthened, and the ending does not merely indicate second person singular indicative active, but is also unambiguously perfect. We are dealing with a case of multiple exponence, where the feature ‘perfect’ is multiply cued; simply chopping up the word and identifying a perfect marker will not do. But multiple exponence as a strategy is just as sensible as plain agglutination. As Blevins 2016, 42 remarks, ‘multiple exponents of a grammatical property enhance communication over a noisy channel and contribute to robustness in general.’ Hockett’s answer to the shortcomings of the Bloomfieldian model was ‘itemand-process’ morphology. Again, we divide words into morphemes, but their assembly relies on processes other than mere concatenation. Such models work better, but ultimately still have to handle the same type of problems. A model which has been particularly successful for Latin and Greek as well as other inflectional languages was proposed in Robins’ ‘defence’ of ‘word-andparadigm’ morphology (1959). Word-and-paradigm morphology acknowledges that speakers can recognize sub-word entities, but argues that they may not always be able to segment and decompose words into such entities reliably. Word-and-paradigm morphology takes the word as its basis and then identifies implicational relations, formalized as paradigms; we could speak of ‘item-and-pattern’ morphology (Blevins 2016, 11). An implicational relation means that if we know one form, we can reliably predict one or more other forms; for example, a form like rēxistī allows us to predict not only all other person and number combinations of the perfect active indicative, but also those of the perfect active subjunctive as well as all active pluperfect forms, in both the indicative and subjunctive. If we know that monet ‘he admonishes’ is a third person singular present indicative active, we can predict all īnfectum forms: present, imperfect, and future, active and passive, indicative and subjunctive. However, if instead of monet we encounter regit ‘he rules’ or facit ‘he makes’, we cannot do so, because in isolation these forms could belong to the third or the fourth conjugation. If we then learn that the first persons are regō and faciō, we can predict all īnfectum forms for the former, because we can now see that it belongs to conjugation 3a, but the latter is still not helpful. However, once we also know the second

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person facis or the infinitive facere, we can see that this verb belongs to conjugation 3b rather than the fourth conjugation, and the entire īnfectum stem becomes predictable. I have now stated that we can see that a certain verb belongs to conjugation class 3a or 3b, but of course the average native speaker of Latin was not trained in grammar, an elite subject in antiquity. In the process of acquiring their native language, speakers of Latin would encounter and memorize individual verb or noun forms, just as every child learning an inflecting language does today. These would amount to only partial paradigms for most verbs and nouns, and the implicative relations acquired alongside these partial paradigms would help speakers predict the missing forms analogically when needed. Alongside the partial paradigms, there is a great deal of redundancy in first-language acquisition: a child may have stored many partial paradigms, say, the nominative and dative singular of ouis ‘sheep’ or the genitive and ablative of turris ‘tower’, but the child will also have stored hundreds of nouns with all case forms, most of which are redundant because nominative and genitive singular would allow to predict the remaining forms for most nouns. Descriptive grammars are more economical: they contain paradigms for all distinct noun and verb classes, and then for each and every noun and verb they contain ‘principal parts’, forms which are diagnostic for identifying the noun or verb class that the word belongs to. As principal parts we choose those forms which are maximally predictive. This procedure is not only concise and elegant, but also pedagogically ideal. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that such idealizations do not mimic native speakers’ mental processes. For the most part, this discrepancy is unproblematic in a synchronic description, but frequency patterns play a vital role in language change, as we will see below. Functional pressures also explain Carstairs’ ‘paradigm economy principle’ (1983). Let us assume that a language has noun paradigms with eight cells: a singular / plural distinction and four cases. Let us also assume that there are four endings for nominative singular, two for genitive singular, three for dative singular, and so on. How many declension classes will this language have? The maximum number that is theoretically possible can be arrived at by multiplying the figures for each cell, 4 × 3 × 2 etc. However, as Carstairs showed, the actual number is always significantly lower, equal to or only slightly higher than the figure in the maximally diverse cell. Why should this be the case? Blevins 2016, 197 points out that ‘form variation serves a fundamentally discriminative function, so that the function of a morphological exponent is best understood in terms of the forms that it distinguishes in a system, not what discrete meanings or properties it expresses in that system.’ Carstairs’ principle allows for a maximum amount of discrimative function with a minimum of paradigm complexity.

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In this connection the concept of ‘markedness’ needs to be mentioned. Why would one cell have four realizations, while another has only two or three? Linguists often say that the singular is less marked than the plural, the nominative less than the ablative, the present less than the past, and so on. The more marked item is not necessarily conceptually more complex, but it is statistically rarer. The less frequent an item is, the more marked it is, and the fewer morphological distinctions it makes. Often the more marked forms show syncretism: in the first and second declension, the nominative plurals end in -ae and -ī, but in the dative and ablative we only get one ending, -īs. More frequent forms are more important for communication and require greater discrimination. This also explains why highly frequent lexical items are often irregular, compare good, better, best next to regular great, greater, greatest, or bonus, melior, optimus next to regular grandis, grandior, grandissimus. Diachronically, such highfrequency items are stable because they are already acquired in early childhood and therefore resist morphological changes that regularize the system. But synchronically, a certain degree of irregularity is not a bad thing either: they are well discriminated, which is important for frequent words, and they ‘emphasize contrasts that are less saliently marked in regular patterns’ (Blevins 2016, 199). However, how many irregular forms are tolerated is always the result of a compromise between conflicting principles: maximal salience and discrimination versus simplicity and regularity.⁵ Before we can move on to synchronic problems of Latin morphology, I want to make one last point about discrimination and multiple exponence. As I pointed out in the chapter on phonetics and phonology, sub-phonemic contrasts matter for perception. Bead and beat contain the same long-vowel phoneme, but differ in the voicing of the final stop. However, phonetically, the long vowel is shorter before a voiceless segment, and this secondary cue matters for keeping the two words apart. Many Dutch plurals end in -en, for example geit ‘goat’, plural geiten. The diphthong in the plural is sub-phonemically shorter than in the singular, a phenomenon common

5 Given that memory capacity is highest in early infancy, irregular forms do not impede the speed of first-language acquisition in any meaningful way; in fact, the stronger degree of overt discrimination that irregular forms can provide, may even help with first-language acquisition, since it will direct infants to categorial contrasts they have to master (such as that between positive and comparative in Latin and English). The situation is different for second-language acquisition: not only has memory capacity decreased, but learners also have a system of categorial contrasts in place already, a system which they may modify, but which they need not establish from scratch. A great deal of morphological irregularity can thus delay the speed of second-language acquisition. It is no wonder that most international languages have a tendency to simplify their morphology over time, because they have a large number of adult learners.

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across languages, where syllables in polysyllabic words are marginally shorter than their monosyllabic counterparts. These differences matter: Dutch speakers can predict with a high degree of accuracy whether a singular or a plural was meant even if noise cuts off whatever comes after gei-, and this adds to our discrimination abilities. Such phenomena seem to be universal and must have existed in Latin as well, but given the nature of our evidence, they can no longer be recovered.

3.2 Synchronic Problems of Morphology We can now turn to the synchronic side; for Latin, derivational processes are more problematic than compounding or inflection, and so we will devote more space to issues of derivation.

3.2.1 Compounding Compounding is not a highly productive process in Latin, unlike in Greek, Sanskrit, or the Germanic languages. Most of the nouns formed through compounding are very old, such as agricola ‘farmer’ or parricīda ‘murderer of a kinsman’. Note that the second element of these two forms is relational, since cultivating requires a piece of land, and murder requires a human victim. Both forms are masculine nouns of the first declension, a synchronically anomalous situation. Originally, the linking vowel was ∗-o-, preserved in Greek, but vowel weakening turned it into -i-, and more recent compounds follow the pattern with -i-. Parricīda, whose second element is caedere ‘to slay’, has a synchronically obscure element which is cognate with πηóς ‘kinsman’ (∗pāsos, with loss of intervocalic ∗-s- in Greek and rhotacism in Latin⁶). The great age of the formation is also obvious from the fact that parricīda underwent weakening of ∗ai to ī; because the first element was unclear to the Romans, patricīda ‘murderer of one’s father’ was formed by popular etymology, and from there, mātricīda ‘murderer of one’s mother’. Argentifodīna ‘silver mine’ is a more recent compound; Varro’s description (ling. 8.61-2) indicates that he analysed the form as a compound, but it is likely that this compound started as a genitive phrase, argentī fodīna ‘mine for silver’, and that it was phonologically adapted once it was reanalysed as a single word. Fixed phrases

6 The Latin form then underwent the littera-rule, whereby a long vowel followed by a single consonant gets shortened, with compensatory gemination of the consonant; this also happened with lītera > lĭttera ‘letter’, hence the name of the rule.

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occasionally turned into compounds later as well, though these new formations were frowned upon by prescriptive grammarians; the writer of the Appendix Probi tells us to use aquae ductus ‘aqueduct’ rather than aquiductus (item 22), and terrae mōtus ‘earthquake’ rather than terrimōtium (item 159). Such phrases have often become as conventionalized as compounds. Compounding can create not only nouns, but also adjectives. However, many of these adjectives are based on Greek ones, such as altitonāns ‘thundering from on high’ (Enn. ann. 541) from Homeric ὑψιβρεμέτης. This calquing process started in tragedy and epic, and given the dactylic shape of many such compounds, they became an artificial feature of poetic language or parodies thereof.⁷

3.2.2 Derivation While compounding is rare in Latin, derivation is a very common phenomenon. There are complications which extend beyond pure morphology to matters of semantics. We can illustrate this with English negative prefixes (discussed in Plag 2003, 30–36): un- is most common for adjectives that form a scale (happy, unhappy), but are not used in either-or contrasts (artificial does not allow for ∗∗unartificial), unless these are special kinds of derived adjectives (available, unavailable). The same un-, when combined with verbs, indicates reversal rather than simple negation (dress, undress). With nouns, the prefix is rare, but marks a lack of a quality (belief, unbelief ). Given that there are several negative prefixes (un-, in-, a-, non-, dis-, anti-), one needs to work out exactly what their meanings are and what morphological restrictions exist. Sometimes, the interplay between the meanings of the prefix and of the adjective can be quite complex; for example, Britons are non-American, but they need not be un-American. Since American is a geographical adjective, it should not be possible to combine it with un-; but in the constellation un-American, we are not dealing with geography, but with attitudes that are scalar. The most productive adverb formations in Latin are in -ē for adjectives of the first / second declension and in -(i)ter for those of the third. However, especially in early Latin, -(i)ter encroaches on the territory of -ē. Are there semantic factors involved? Probably not in this case; the distribution is largely morphologically determined, and where -(i)ter comes up unexpectedly (maestiter ‘sadly’, Plaut. Rud. 265a), it may simply do so because this suffix has more morphological substance and allows for clearer marking. Other adverbial formations include fossilized

7 Compare Plautus’ multibiba atque merobiba ‘a great drinker of undiluted wine’ (Curc. 77), with deliberately ridiculous compounds, the second of which even has a Greek-style linking vowel.

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ablatives (rārō ‘rarely’) or accusatives (multum ‘greatly’). Occasionally, however, two competing adverb formations of the same adjective do differ in meaning; in Plautus, īnsānum ‘insanely’, an adverbial accusative, differs from the adverb īnsānē in that the former is an intensifier (īnsānum bene ‘insanely good’, Plaut. Mil. 24), while the latter has its literal meaning. Yet such differences in meaning have nothing to do with the fact that two different suffixes are involved; they arise simply because īnsānum was reinterpreted in certain contexts and then lost its original meaning, just as English insanely is normally an intensifier and quite divorced in meaning from insane. In other cases, further research might reveal subtle meaning differences. For example, -tās and -tūdō appear to be synonymous suffixes for abstract nouns formed predominantly from adjectives, and occasionally one and the same adjective can have a noun in -tās and another in -tūdō next to it. However, such overlap is rare.⁸ Is this because they are fully synonymous and thus the existence of one type prevents the creation of the other? Or is the overlap, though rare, possible precisely because there are subtle meaning differences? There is an interesting discussion in Gellius (13.3): Gellius argues that suāuitās ‘sweetness’ and suāuitūdō are exactly identical in meaning and usage, as are sānctitās ‘holiness’ and sānctitūdō, or acerbitās ‘bitterness’ and acerbitūdō, or ācritās ‘sharpness’ and ācritūdō. This seems a priori unlikely, and indeed we can establish differences in usage for those doublets which are attested sufficiently frequently. But the main point Gellius is trying to make is that those grammarians who want to see a difference between necessitās and necessitūdō are wrong. These grammarians claim that necessitās refers to the unavoidability of a state or a situation, while necessitūdō refers to the unavoidability, and hence closeness, of friends and family. Who is right, Gellius or the grammarians? Gellius manages to give examples that go against the grammarians’ doctrine; he finds one example of necessitās for human relationships in Caesar, but admits that the usage is rare, and he presents an example of necessitūdō for an external situation from Sempronius Asellio. But even if originally these were genuine semantic doublets, they could only persist if there was some secondary differentiation, and indeed throughout his work Gellius himself uses the two words exactly as the grammarians describe them, the very grammarians he loathes so intensely.

8 One might add that where it does exist, the two words are not equally frequent. Thus, amāritūdō ‘bitterness’ is common, but amāritās is found only in Vitruvius (2.9.14); see especially Adams 2016, 170–71 on the distribution of these suffixes in Vitruvius. In general, -tūdō is more productive in early Latin, but by the late Republic -tās has become more frequent.

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Linguists speak of ‘blocking’ when the existence of a form prevents the creation of a more regular alternative. For example, from attain we can form a noun attainment, but from maintain we cannot form ∗∗maintainment because we already have maintenance. Next to sing, we get singer, but since we have cook (verb) and cook (noun), we should not be able to form cooker; the word does of course exist, but in a specialized meaning, referring to a machine, and it is this specialized meaning that seems to prevent blocking. Plag 2003, 67 points out that often we think of one item blocking the creation of another, but that there are subtle meaning differences in the suffixes and that, given the right circumstances, the supposedly blocked items are perfectly acceptable. Thus, ethnicity is meant to block the creation of ethnicness, and indeed many speakers of English find this word odd when it occurs without context. Yet Plag’s examples show that under certain circumstances, ethnicness is not only possible, but required: (2) Her ethnicity was not a factor in the hiring decision. We are an equal opportunity employer. (3) Her ethnicness was certainly a big factor in the director’s decision. He wanted someone who personified his conception of the prototypical Greek to play the part. Ethnicity refers to the woman’s racial, cultural, or linguistic background, while ethnicness refers to the visibility of such features. For blocking to occur, the item blocking the creation of a new word must be frequent enough, and the new word must be a genuine synonym of the pre-existing word. Word frequency also affects meaning. Amābilitās ‘loveliness’ is not a particularly common word, and its meaning is fully predictable from decomposition; but cīuitās, a highly frequent word, does not normally refer to an abstract quality, but to ‘citizenship’ with its rights and duties, or to the ‘citizenry’ of a specific place or to that place itself (hence Italian città ‘city’, a meaning which cīuitās already has in Bell. Hisp. 36.4 or in Augustine’s Dē cīuitāte Deī ‘On the city of God’ rather than ‘On God’s citizenship’). The meanings of highly frequent words can often not be predicted fully from their constituent parts. The same goes for English readable: for an essay to be readable, it is not good enough that it can be read because of clear handwriting, in which case we would say it is legible;⁹ an essay is readable if it is well written, clear in logic and enjoyable in content. In such cases, we say that the

9 Note that in English, many Latinate roots are bound roots which cannot exist on their own; legdoes not occur in isolation, just as -fer in infer or refer only exists in bound form.

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meaning of a complex word can be motivated from its constituent parts rather than fully predicted.¹⁰ But why should frequent words misbehave like this? A slogan common among linguists of a certain bent is that ‘the lexicon is like a prison: it contains only the misfits.’ In other words, we are supposed to store words with morphological or semantic irregularities as unanalysed wholes, but decompose regular ones. This sort of economy works well for dictionaries, but economy of presentation has little to do with psycholinguistic reality. The average speaker of English pronounces about three words per second, and while it may seem uneconomical to store a word like unthinkable whole, it is only uneconomical in terms of storage space, but it is very economical for fast processing. Which words we store whole and which ones we decompose is simply a matter of frequency. The more frequent a word is, the more likely it is to be stored whole, in order to speed up processing, but the rarer a word is, the more likely it is to be decomposed, in order to save mental storage space. However, when words are stored as complete wholes, they are likely to develop their own meanings and pronunciations because they fail to be decomposed. Hence the conventionalized meanings of words like cīuitās, or the acceptance of an unusual stress pattern for solídify (next to sólid).¹¹ Frequency and the related concept of productivity can solve other mysteries of morphology as well. English is said to have two types of suffixes, called ‘layer 1’ and ‘layer 2’. Layer 1 consists mostly of Latinate suffixes; they can affect stress patterns and alter stem-final consonants, compare éthnic (/-k/) and ethníc-ity (/-s-/). Layer 2 contains mostly Germanic suffixes; they do not affect stress patterns and do not influence stem-final consonants, compare again éthnic and now, from the example above, éthnic-ness. If several suffixes are attached to a stem, those of layer 1 tend to be closer to the stem than those of layer 2. Generative linguists believe that stress

10 In the formation of adverbs, we can see this with momentary and momentarily. In British English, the adverb has the same meaning as the adjective, ‘lasting for a moment’, which is what one would expect; but in American English, there is a further adverbial meaning which is more loosely related to the meaning of the adjective: ‘in a moment’ (as in the headmaster will see you momentarily). Compare also, in compounding, German Gasthaus and Gästehaus, both compounds of guest and house. Gasthaus, the morphologically regular formation, has come to mean ‘restaurant’, and overnight guests are only permitted in some of these establishments; hence the new creation Gästehaus, for overnight guests. Similarly, the meanings of oversee and overlook are no longer fully predictable from the simple verbs see and look. 11 Compare also German Name ‘name’ and nennen ‘to name’. The connection between these two high-frequency words has been lost synchronically, but diachronically they are related. In Old High German, this is still obvious: the noun is namo, and the verb is nemnen (with a vowel alternation through Umlaut that is entirely predictable). Similarly, the connection between French ami ‘friend’ and ennemi ‘foe’ is no longer felt, but it was still obvious in Latin amīcus and inimīcus.

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assignment happens after suffixes of layer 1 are attached, but before those of layer 2 come into play. Irregular inflection is also supposed to happen at level 1, while regular inflection happens later; thus, ring ‘call someone on the phone’ has a past tense rang, but ring ‘put a ring on someone’s finger’, as a derived verb, gets a regular past ringed. However, there are problems with such generative approaches. The suffix -ness belongs to layer 2, but from busy we get business (disyllabic) and busyness (trisyllabic). The disyllabic form, by virtue of being disyllabic, shows a phonological alteration that is untypical of suffixes of layer 2, and its meaning is no longer predictable from the adjective. The trisyllabic form, by contrast, while having the same suffix, is entirely regular. A purely generative approach with different layers does not do justice to a complex reality. Instead, we can discard this concept entirely and focus on frequency, productivity, and parseability. Parseability (Plag 2003, 175–77) depends on phonotactics and affix frequency. The easier an affix is to separate, because it does not involve accent shifts or segmental changes, the more parseable it is; and the lower the frequency of the derived word is in relation to the base word, the more parseable the affix must be. For instance, red is much more common than redness, so we can decompose redness easily, but busy is not that much more common than business, which meant that it began to be stored as a whole and to develop its own phonology and meaning. In general, an affix that can easily be parsed out should not stand inside an affix that is difficult to parse out, and this explains English suffix ordering and regularities of inflection much better than a theory of different layers. Parseability in Latin can have diachronic repercussions. Dēcipere is a compound of dē ‘from’ and capere ‘to catch’, but over time its original meaning disappeared entirely and it came to mean ‘to deceive’. In late Latin, however, it was parsed anew and, as it were, etymologized, and hence it came to mean ‘to snatch away, to steal’ (Adams 2016, 405, who notes that such processes are common in later Latin¹²). We can also compare auscultāre ‘to listen’, which in some parts of the Empire became ōscultāre by monophthongization, and in others ascoltāre by dissimilation. The former was reinterpreted as opscultāre, as a compound with ob ‘towards’; the latter was reinterpreted as a compound of ab ‘from’ and in turn formed the basis for ∗exscultāre, a compound of ex ‘out of’ and the source of French écouter ‘to listen’.¹³

12 When such a process goes wrong, we speak of a ‘popular etymology’. English impregnable ‘impossible to capture’ is a good example; in the fifteenth century, this was still imprenable, a loan from French, but subsequently it was influenced by the words pregnant and impregnate, which belong to a completely different semantic field. 13 If a process is morphologically productive, a word attested in early and late Latin need not have survived in the intervening period, but may have been coined anew. Pezzini 2016, 19–23 notes that

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Parseability goes hand in hand with productivity and is, in fact, its side effect. But while the concept of productivity is intuitively clear – a derivational process is productive if we can apply it easily and without restrictions –, it is useful to be able to measure productivity more objectively. Plag 2003, 59 and 206 provides a number of productivity measures, which can give divergent outcomes. The first of these is ‘extent of use’ or type frequency, which is simply the raw count of all forms with a specific affix. This is a crude measure and can only give us a rough indication of productivity. A second, more labour-intensive measure can be achieved if we count all attested neologisms in a given period. Thirdly, we can count the number of hapax legomena in a given corpus, which is a good indication of the amount of newly created derivatives. And finally, we can measure ‘productivity in the narrow sense’, that is, the probability of encountering new formations among all derivatives of a certain morphological category. This last measure is calculated by dividing the number of hapax legomena with a specific affix by the number of all tokens with that affix. If we look at English once more, where such counts have been done much more commonly, we can see that -less and -ish are highly productive with respect to ‘productivity in the narrow sense’, but are outdone by -able and -ness on most other counts, even though these last two suffixes are less ‘productive in the narrow sense’. What this means in practical terms is that we do not use words with -less and -ish very often, but that it is very easy to create new ones. It should also be pointed out that -ish is particularly common in spoken language, so that corpora which do not include spoken data can give us misleading results.

3.2.3 Inflection Some types of derivation are highly productive, but nothing beats inflection in terms of productivity; this makes sense because while we need to be able to form new words, our need to use existing words in all possible syntactic contexts is even greater. Inflectional paradigms are also highly regular, and where sound change or

this must be the case for dōnābilis. The base, dōnāre, can mean ‘to present someone with something’ (person in the accusative) or ‘to give something to someone’ (thing in the accusative). Plautine dōnābilis ‘worthy to receive’ must be derived from the former meaning, while medieval dōnābilis ‘worthy to be given’ must be from the latter. Compare also the two meanings of undateable, derived from the two meanings of to date: the adjective can refer to someone who is a bad romantic prospect, or to someone whose dates of birth and death we are unable to ascertain. Finally, English to friend someone is attested in Shakespeare and Housman, but nowadays also on Facebook; the Facebook usage is bound to be an independent innovation.

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other factors lead to obscure alternations, these tend to be levelled out. For instance, -qu- before -o- or -u- delabializes, so that next to a genitive coquī ‘cook’ we should expect a nominative cocus. While such forms are attested, normally the paradigm gets levelled out, most commonly to coquus, genitive coquī, with less common by-forms cocus and cocī. But whichever form one opts for, the point is that the paradigm becomes regular. Such analogies can also happen across different tense stems, which is why English speak, past spake, participle spoken, attested thus in the King James Bible, ended up as speak, spoke, spoken. The Latin equivalent is early ioubeō¹⁴ ‘I order’, perfect iousī,¹⁵ participle iŭssum, where the original Ablaut alternation had become obscure to speakers and was levelled out, hence classical iŭbeō, iŭssī, iŭssum. On this diachronic note, let us move on to larger diachronic patterns.

3.3 Morphological Developments: From Indo-European to Latin In this section, we will look at four topics: case syncretism, the merger of the IndoEuropean perfect and aorist, the merger of future perfect and perfect subjunctive, and switches in conjugation classes. Apart from this last phenomenon, we are dealing with phenomena of syncretism, but, as we shall see, the factors behind these mergers are quite different. Let us begin with case.

3.3.1 Case Syncretism Indo-European, at least in its later phases, had eight cases, just like Sanskrit.¹⁶ Of course Sanskrit is not a direct reflection of Indo-European and it could have innovated here, as it did in many other respects, but this reconstruction is certain because Latin and Greek, despite their reduced case inventories, retain some of the old morphology. Thus, the Greek o-stem dative λύϰῳ ‘wolf’ formally corresponds to a Sanskrit dative, while the consonant-stem dative πoδί ‘foot’ formally corresponds to a Sanskrit locative. In Greek, then, dative and locative merged into the Greek dative,¹⁷ but the different declension classes preserve forms of both cases.

14 Ioubeātis in CIL 12 .581.27. 15 Iousisent in CIL 12 .581.18. 16 In Hittite, there is also an ergative and an allative, but dative and locative are not distinct. It is unclear whether an early stage of Indo-European had a different case alignment, as reflected in Hittite, or whether this is an innovation in Anatolian. 17 Hence ἐν ‘in’ + dative!

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The Indo-European case system will come up again in the next chapter on syntax. Suffice it to say here that the core functions of the cases were quite straightforward. Largely governed by verbal valency were the nominative and accusative for subject and direct object and the dative for indirect object or recipient; the genitive was the typical case at the noun phrase level, to indicate dependency on another noun, but the exact semantic relationship between these two nouns would have to be gleaned from context; the vocative was used for address; and the remaining three cases mostly had adverbial functions, the instrumental for instrument or accompaniment, the locative for place or time, and the ablative for separation or standard of comparison. In Greek, these adverbial cases merged with core cases because of partial semantic overlap. Dative and locative merged because the recipient could be envisaged as the local endpoint of a motion. Genitive and ablative merged because possession and part-whole relationships overlap semantically with source and origin. The instrumental remained distinct for longer, with a certain productivity in Mycenaean and a more limited survival in Homer, but ultimately it also merged with the dative. The Greek mergers are not the result of sound changes, but are semantically motivated. Much the same can be said for the Latin case syncretism resulting in the classical ablative. There is relatively little phonological attrition, so that we can see neat correspondences between Latin ablative morphs and those of the Sanskrit ablative, locative, and instrumental. The Latin ablative in -ō, or -ōd in the early period, corresponds to Sanskrit ablative forms; this second-declension form is also the basis for the ablative singular forms of all other declensions except for the consonant stems of the third, where -ĕ continues a locative ∗-i. An old instrumental ending can be found in the second-declension ablative plural ending -īs, earlier -eis (< ∗-ōis).¹⁸ As a side note, the Greek and Latin mergers also explain case usages in combination with prepositions. For ‘from’ (ἐϰ, ex), one would expect an ablative; in Greek, this is reflected in the genitive, in Latin, in the ablative. For ‘with’ (σύν and cum, not cognate), one would expect an instrumental; in Greek, this case merged with the dative, in Latin, with the ablative again. Just as in Greek, these mergers did not all take place at the same time. In classical Latin, there are still distinct locative endings for the first and second declensions (Rōmae ‘in Rome’, Dēlī ‘on Delos’), but these are restricted to place names.¹⁹ In Plautus, locative forms are also only found in the first and second declensions, but their

18 See 4.4.1 for syntactic consequences of this merger. 19 Towns, cities, small islands; in other words, the sort of entity that constitutes a city state corresponding roughly to a Greek πóλις.

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usage is still broader, hence a phrase like diē septumī ‘on the seventh day’ (Persa 260), where diēs as a fifth-declension noun stands in the ablative, but is modified by a second-declension adjective in the locative. The classical survival of separate locative forms for place names should not come as a surprise because for place names the locative is generally the most frequent case form.²⁰ Given that the Latin ablative clearly continues morphs of three distinct cases, the merger into the ablative must have been driven by semantic rather than phonological factors. Traditional grammars often distinguish between an ablative of instrument, an ablative of place, and an ablative of separation; but these supposed meanings are not tied to the survival of specific morphs, and since the merger is not the result of a loss of phonological substance, it is anachronistic to look for the preservation of Indo-European meanings here. Even less sensible are more finegrained descriptions that give us special subclasses such as the ‘military ablative’ as a subtype of the instrumental ablative (as in Menge et al. 2000, 481–82). Omnibus copiīs ‘with all troops’ is a ‘military ablative’ only by virtue of its lexical content, just as many of our ‘instrumental’ ablatives are interpreted in this way simply because the nouns denote instruments like swords or hammers. It is more reasonable to assume that synchronically, the ablative has a new meaning, or rather, a new function: it indicates that the noun in this case is not governed by verbal valency, is not dependent on another noun, and is not used for address; in other words, it is the prototypical case for adverbials, and their precise semantic functions are a product of the lexical meanings of the nouns involved and the sentence context as a whole. We can move on to another merger driven by semantics rather than phonological attrition, this time a merger within the verb system.

3.3.2 The Merger of Aorist and Perfect Classical Latin has five different types of perfect: the s-perfect (dīcō ‘I say’, dīxī); the reduplicated perfect (parcō ‘I spare’, pepercī); the long-vowel perfect (edō ‘I eat’, ēdī); the simple perfect without stem alternation (uertō ‘I turn’, uertī); and, finally, the productive u/u-perfect ̯ (moneō ‘I admonish’, monuī; audiō ‘I hear’, audīuī). For our purposes, the s-perfect and the reduplicated perfect are particularly interesting because they are both perfects in Latin, but correspond to two different tenses in Indo-European.

20 Compare also place names like Aix-en-Provence or Reims, which continue fossilized ablatives, Aquīs and Rēmīs, preserved even after the collapse of the classical case system; already Consentius mentions fossilized place names in the locative or other cases (5.349.4-5).

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The late Indo-European verb system, as reflected quite closely in Greek and Sanskrit, was very different from the Latin one.²¹ There were three aspect stems, the present stem for imperfective aspect, the aorist stem for perfective aspect, and the perfect stem for perfect aspect.²² From the present stem were formed the present and the imperfect, and its function was to indicate that an action was ongoing, in progress. The aorist, by contrast, marked an action as a complete whole. The perfect stood somewhat outside this system, marking a current state as the result of a past action; because of this special meaning, not every verb could have a perfect. Verb meaning played a huge role in Indo-European stem formation. Verbs could be divided into telic and atelic ones; telic verbs have a natural, linguistically specified endpoint, while atelic ones do not.²³ Atelic verbs formed root presents and derived aorists, while telic verbs formed root aorists and derived presents. Root presents and root aorists did not have to contain more than a verb root and a personal ending; an atelic root with a personal ending would be interpreted as a present, and a telic root with a personal ending would be analysed as an aorist. From an atelic root, an aorist could also be formed, by derivation; the most common aorist marker for such roots was ∗-s-. Likewise, from a telic root, a present could be derived through the addition of a suffix like ∗- ̯ie/o- or the nasal infix. The perfect, marked by reduplication, could only be formed from action verbs that could have a suitable result. All the Italic languages merge aorist and perfect, creating a new ‘perfect’. Since Latin often chooses an earlier perfect stem where Oscan and Umbrian have an earlier aorist, and vice versa, the assumption must be that the later stages of this merger happened independently in the two branches. But it is likely that a semantic merger happened earlier, in Proto-Italic. The perfect became a past tense just like the aorist, and as a result, new perfects were created for those verbs which originally did not have them for semantic reasons. The system was thus rich in doublets, some of which survive into the historical period: next to classical fēcī ‘I have made’, which continues an aorist stem (with a modified perfect ending!), the fibula Praenestina shows a reduplicated perfect stem in FHE⋮FHAKED ‘he has made’ (with an aorist ending!). For parcō ‘I spare’, there are two perfects, parsī, continuing an s-aorist, and pepercī, continuing a reduplicated perfect. Ultimately, however, most doublets were eliminated, though often in different ways in Latin and in Osco-Umbrian.

21 The model followed here is that of Hoffmann 1970. Many new analyses are proposed in Willi 2018. 22 Aspect and tense will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter. 23 To fall down is telic because there is a natural endpoint, hitting the ground. To swim is atelic, even though no one swims forever; but the endpoint is not specified explicitly.

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Since aorist and perfect originally had separate endings, there were doublets here as well. For Oscan and Umbrian, we do not have a full set of endings, but the ones we do have continue aorist endings: first singular -om and third singular -ed, as well as third plural -ens ( -r- by rhotacism); some trivial assimilations are to be expected, such as ārdeō ‘I burn’ (second conjugation), perfect ārsī, with ∗-rd-s- > -rs-. The reduplicated perfect requires a root with initial stop, f-, m-, or a cluster consisting of s- plus stop. The long-vowel perfect needs a root that ends in stop or nasal. Phonology is not the driving factor behind the creation of all the perfect doublets in Proto-Italic; that situation comes about through semantic change, which then has morphological consequences in the creation of new forms. But once these forms are genuinely semantic doublets, this useless proliferation of morphology needs to be reduced, and the elimination process is driven by phonology rather than morphology or meaning. For the syncretism of cases and tenses that we have seen so far, the startingpoint was semantic change, and phonology only came into play later, in the verb system, as a tool for selecting which stems would survive. But this is not always the case; we shall now examine another morphological merger initiated entirely by sound change.

3.3.3 Future Perfect and Perfect Subjunctive The syncretism of future perfect and perfect subjunctive is an interesting case because its origins lie in sound change, but sound change is not enough to explain the phenomenon in its entirety. Historically speaking, the future perfect, like other future tenses in Latin, continues Indo-European subjunctive formations in ∗-e/o-; through vowel weakening, these short vowels ended up as -ĭ- in open syllables. The perfect subjunctive, again like other subjunctive formations in Latin, continues Indo-European optative formations in ∗- ̯ieH1 - / -iH1 -; through elimination of Ablaut and by sound change, we get -ī-. The Plautine paradigms of facere ‘to make’ can be seen in Table 3.1.

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Table 3.1: Future perfect and perfect subjunctive in Plautus.

Future perfect Perfect subjunctive

1 sg.

2 sg.

3 sg.

1 pl.

2 pl.

3 pl.

fēcerō fēcerĭm

fēcerĭs fēcerīs

fēcerĭt fēcerīt

fēcerĭmus fēcerīmus

fēcerĭtis fēcerītis

fēcerĭnt fēcerĭnt

Wherever Plautine metre allows us to ascertain vowel length with certainty, these are the patterns we can observe.²⁹ Three forms are perhaps unexpected: in the first person singular perfect subjunctive, the original long vowel was shortened prehistorically before -m; in the third person plural perfect subjunctive, the original long vowel was shortened by Osthoff’s law, which states that long vowel before resonant and stop is shortened; and in the third person plural future perfect, we would expect an ending ∗-unt from ∗-ont (closed syllable), but it appears that the actual ending was taken from the perfect subjunctive. However, five out of the six combinations of person and number are clearly distinct in future perfect and perfect subjunctive. That situation changes not much later. In polysyllabic words, long vowels in final syllables ending in consonant other than -s underwent shortening. Already in Ennius we can see variation.³⁰ This means that the perfect subjunctive turns from fēcerīt into fēcerĭt and thus looks identical to the future perfect. Now there are three perfect subjunctives with long vowels and three with short ones; and the third person singular and plural is identical in future perfect and perfect subjunctive. Given that the third person is the most frequent person in any text type, there is pressure on the other perfect subjunctives to change. However, the perfect subjunctives do not simply adopt the short vowel. Instead, the first person singular forms are kept distinct because -ō and -im are common in indicatives and subjunctives, respectively; the third person singular and plural has the short vowel, as expected from the sound changes; and in the second singular and the first and second plural, long and short vowels coexist, but are in free variation and not governed by tense or mood. Thus we find in Catullus: (4) Dein cum mīlia multa fēcerīmus, conturbābimus illa… (Catull. 5.10-11) ‘Then when we have done this many thousand times, we shall shake them into confusion…’

29 Diffrēgerĭtis ‘you will have broken’ (Mil. 156) or uīderĭtis ‘you will have seen’ (Mil. 157) as future perfects; uēnerīmus ‘we may have come’ (Bacch. 1132) as perfect subjunctive. 30 Velīt ‘it might want’ in ann. 186, but mandēbăt ‘it was eating’ in ann. 125.

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The cum-clause is purely temporal and hence requires the indicative; the main clause is in the simple future. Thus, fēcerīmus is best analysed as a future perfect, even though its long vowel would in earlier times have marked the perfect subjunctive. Over time, the short vowel wins the day, but the diachronic process shows us the intricate interplay between sound change and analogical levelling.

3.3.4 Changes of Conjugation Class We have now seen semantic change and sound change as drivers of morphological change; but some morphological changes are not driven by any external factors. Thus, a number of verbs change conjugation class in early Latin; olĕre ‘to smell’ (conjugation 3a) becomes olēre (second conjugation), and sonĕre ‘to make a sound’ and tonĕre ‘to thunder’ (both conjugation 3a) end up as sonāre and tonāre (both first conjugation). The meaning of these verbs remains identical, and since most other verbs in the relevant conjugation classes remain where they are, we cannot invoke sound change either. What is happening is purely morphology-internal. Earlier in this chapter I argued that paradigms and principal parts as presented in traditional grammars are an idealization of a much messier reality. Native speakers store many more complete paradigms than any descriptive grammar contains; there is a great deal of redundancy. At the same time, native speakers store large numbers of partial paradigms and create the remaining forms by analogy. Our grammars with their sample paradigms and principal parts are an efficient, economical way of representing a native speaker’s competence, but this efficiency occasionally, inevitably, comes at the cost of psychological realism. Switches of conjugation class are the result of storing incomplete paradigms which do not contain all the cells that are required to make fully accurate predictions about all other cells. For instance, if speakers have only come across the perfect of olĕre, namely forms like oluī, they cannot be certain that the present stem belongs to conjugation 3a; in fact, most perfects of this type are associated with second-conjugation presents, hence the switch of conjugation class. For sonĕre, a first person sonō is again ambiguous between conjugation 3a and first conjugation, and since the first conjugation is more frequent and productive, the switch could happen. The perfect endings are always the same, regardless of whether a perfect is reduplicated, has a stem in -s-, or belongs to any other type. In that respect, it does not make sense to speak of conjugation classes as such; however, if we take a broader view, switches of perfect-stem types still fit with the topic we are looking at here. The most common perfect for legere ‘to pick up, read’ is lēgī; for colligere ‘to collect’, it is collēgī; but next to these long-vowel perfects, we also have intellegere

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‘to understand’ with an s-perfect intellēxī. Lengthened perfects were unproductive as early as Plautus. When new compounds like intellegere were formed – a compound whose young age is clear from the fact that next to analogically ‘weakened’ forms like intelligere, we also get intellegere without signs of internal weakening –, such new words formed their perfects in a regular, productive fashion, here with -s-. That said, since the connections between legere and its compounds remained clear, various alternative perfects were created. Adams 2016, 268–69 mentions the occasional by-forms lēxī and collēxī, but also intellēgī. Most other diachronic changes of perfect type align the perfect formations more clearly with the present ones. For parcere ‘to spare’, we have a reduplicated perfect pepercī, an unproductive type, and parsī, a productive type, but in this instance with a minor irregularity: by regular sound change, the cluster ∗-rk-s- was simplified, so that the connection between parcere and parsī is mildly obscured. Naevius, then, attests another, fully productive perfect, parcuī (com. 69), but this form did not catch on. The case of sūmere ‘I take up’, perfect sūmpsī, is similar. The original perfect of this verb was surēmī, attested for Livius Andronicus by Paul the Deacon (p. 299 M). Historically, the original perfect is easy to explain. Emere ‘to buy’ originally meant ‘to take’;³¹ its perfect is ēmī. Sūmō started as a compound, ∗sus-emō, perfect ∗sus-ēmei. The present underwent syncope, then ∗-s- was lost before nasal, with compensatory lengthening. In the perfect, syncopation did not happen, because it only affects short vowels, and so intervocalic ∗-s- rhotacized. We end up with sūmō, perfect surēmī, but because the connection between these forms was not clear to speakers, a new perfect was created, built on the present stem. Since that stem ends in -m-, it was bound to be an s-perfect; the insertion of -p- is automatic and unproblematic. Similar changes also happen in later Latin. Here is a hexameter by Commodian, in which I have not indicated quantities because Commodian has no command of classical scansion: (5) ‘Surge’, inquit, ‘iuuenis!’ Et resurrexit ille de ferclo. (Comm. apol. 644) “‘Rise, young man!”, he said. And the man rose from the bier.’ The penthemimeres lies after iuuenis, and ille de ferclo (with de counting as a light syllable) is the clausula. This means that et re- must count as two light syllables, while -surrexit fills the fourth foot. That, however, entails that surrexit is stressed on the first syllable. The classical form is surrēxit, and an accent shift would be unmotivated. So what is going on? The easiest explanation is that the connection between

31 Compare em ‘take that’, an interjection that started as a syncopated imperative.

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surgō and surrēxī was considered obscure and that a new perfect was created, based on the present. Since the present stem ends in a stop, an s-perfect was the normal choice. Behind surrexit, an educated spelling, hides a pronunciation ∗surxit. Commodian foreshadows Romance developments here: Italian sorge ‘he rises’ has sorse as its passato remoto, and these continue surgit and ∗surxit.³² It is time to sum up. Ultimately, every morphological change needs to be examined on its own terms. Morphological change can be caused by sound change, semantic change, and also morphology-internal paradigm overlap. In the development from Indo-European to Latin, sound change is a minor factor in morphological change. This changes in the development from Latin to Romance, the topic we can turn to now.

3.4 Morphological Developments: From Latin to Romance The morphological development from Latin to Romance is often described as a process of simplification, from synthetic to analytic, with a steady increase of periphrastic constructions. But that is only part of the story. For nouns, it does make sense to speak of a simplification process: there is a reduction of declension classes and of genders, as well as a complete loss of case. But pronouns retain vestiges of the old case system, and the verbal system can hardly be considered simplified: the inflectional passive gives way to periphrases, and the periphrastic future tenses are lost, but some of the newly created periphrases turn into inflections again, leading to new categories such as the conditional. In this section, I can only outline the most significant developments, but I also want to ask the bigger question why nouns and verbs go such different ways.

3.4.1 Reduction of Nominal Morphology Latin nouns come in five declensions, six cases, three genders, and two numbers. We need not discuss adjectives separately because they largely pattern with the nouns, except that they lack the fourth and fifth declension. Number is the only one of these categories which remains stable from Latin to Romance. Of the three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter, the neuter merges with the masculine,

32 For more examples of changes in conjugation class see Väänänen 1967, 144–5.

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occasionally with the feminine, but as a distinct category it largely disappears;³³ we will only touch upon gender here and discuss it properly in the next section. The five declensions are reduced to three, and case is lost entirely. The fifth declension merges with the first; the reasons for this merger are not phonological, but morphological: some nouns, such as māteriēs ‘material’, had firstdeclension by-forms already early on (māteria), and from there, new by-forms were created for the other fifth-declension nouns. These by-forms were less common in the nominative and accusative, the most frequent cases, but elsewhere the firstdeclension forms made inroads quickly. The fifth declension was the declension class with the fewest members, but it did contain some high-frequency words. These nouns persisted for long; but even diēs ‘day’ ultimately became día in Spanish. The original accusative of rēs ‘thing’ remained only as a fossilized negative polarity item in French, in the combination ne … rien ‘nothing’ (from ‘not a thing’, with the accusative rem); elsewhere, the noun was replaced by causa, originally meaning ‘cause, reason’, but turning into ‘thing’ (French chose, Italian cosa).³⁴ The fourth declension also disappeared, merging with the second. This development has its tentative beginnings in early Latin. After second-declension -os and -om had become -us and -um by vowel weakening, and thus homophonous with the endings of the fourth declension, the rarer fourth declension could be absorbed by the highly productive second one. If speakers came across a nominative or accusative of a fourth-declension noun, they could accidentally classify it as a second-declension form. In Plautus, however, the fourth declension remains largely distinct, except that the genitive singular regularly ends in -ī (senātī ‘of the senate’), taken from the second declension. The loss of the neuter was a gradual process. The neuter differs from the corresponding masculine only in the nominative and sometimes accusative. The loss was initiated by sound change and morphological developments: in some parts of the Empire, loss of final consonants meant that -us and -um became identical in the second declension, and the accusative became the default case for many nouns, so that even in those areas where final -s persisted for longer, the gender distinction

33 In Romanian, there remains a third gender, continuing the Latin neuter, but even here the morphology has changed: in the singular, this third gender inflects like the masculine, and in the plural, like the feminine. Compare also the outcomes of Latin ōuum ‘egg’ in Italian: singular l’uovo (masculine), but plural le uova (feminine article and agreement, but with a noun ending that continues a neuter plural). 34 Many lexical items were replaced throughout large parts of the Romance-speaking area: equus ‘horse’ was ousted by caballus ‘pack-horse’; magnus ‘big’ by grandis; pulcher ‘beautiful’ by bellus ‘pretty’ or fōrmōsus ‘shapely’; emere ‘to buy’ by comparāre ‘to acquire’; and īre ‘to go’ by uādere ‘to step’ or ambulāre ‘to walk’.

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was not sustainable.³⁵ Once this distinction had disappeared in the singular, neuter plural -a for nominative and accusative was lost analogically; it is hard to maintain a distinction in the plural if it is lost in the unmarked singular. Some neuter plurals in -a, for nouns referring to things that are typically found in groups, were reinterpreted as first-declension singulars in -a, such as folia ‘leaves’ > Spanish hoja ‘leaf’ or uēla ‘sails’ > French voile ‘sail’.³⁶ In the third declension, it was again sound change that facilitated the merger of neuter and masculine in the singular, compare nominative ācre ‘sharp’ and ācris,³⁷ accusative ācre and ācrem, all of which would end up having final -e. The neuter plural forms were again lost through analogical developments. We can now turn to the case system. Let us first look at what must have happened, through sound change, to the most common endings in the first three declensions in the singular (Table 3.2). Table 3.2: Sound change affecting the first three declensions.

1st declension Outcome 2nd declension Outcome 3rd declension Outcome

Nom.

Gen.

Dat.

Acc.

Voc.

Abl.

-a -a -us -o(s) -is -e(s)

-ae -e -ī -i -is -e(s)

-ae -e -ō -o -ī -i

-am -a -um -o -em -e

-a -a -e -e -is -e

-ā -a -ō -o -e -e

In the first declension, genitive and dative should have remained distinct from the rest; in the second declension, genitive and vocative; and in the third, the dative. Sound change did not finish off the case system entirely, but it did wreak havoc. The rest was done by analogy.

35 Adams 2016, 272 and 600 looks at two distinct types of development: quō tempus ‘at which time’ shows a relatively early fossilization of some third-declension neuters in -us, with associated words still inflecting and indicating case and gender; and ille fundāmentum ‘the foundation’, much later and with a grammaticalized article, shows that at least in writing, second-declension neuter forms were still remembered, even if the words in agreement inflected for the masculine. 36 The case of biblia ‘(sacred) books’, neuter plural, becoming a feminine singular, ‘sacred book, Bible’, is different insofar as we are dealing with a loanword; loanwords often behave somewhat differently while they are still felt to be foreign words. 37 In later Latin, masculine ācer gives way to ācris, which had always been the feminine form, so as to eliminate stem alternations. Admittedly, masculine ācris is already found in Enn. ann. 369, but the late form is probably not a direct continuation, but an innovation formed by paradigm levelling.

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Old French is attested early enough to preserve a marginal case system, presented in Table 3.3.³⁸ Table 3.3: The Old French case system.

1st declension 2nd declension 3rd declension (masculine)

nominative accusative nominative accusative nominative accusative

Singular

Plural

chevre chevre murs mur monz mont

chevres chevres mur murs mont monz

Old French preserved final -s, but deleted final vowels (or vowel + -m), unless that vowel was e (< a). In the first declension, chevre (from capra ‘she-goat’) shows no distinction between nominative and accusative in the singular because of the loss of final -m. In the plural, there is no distinction either, but this is because the nominative acquired -s from the accusative, based on the third declension, where nominative and accusative plural were originally identical.³⁹ In the second declension, exemplified by murs (from mūrus ‘wall’), nominative singular and accusative plural look identical, as do nominative plural and accusative singular. This situation came about because of the sound changes outlined above, and because vowel + -s ended up as -s.⁴⁰ The pattern is the same in the third declension, where my sample word is monz (from mōns ‘mountain’, or rather its analogically created parisyllabic nominative ∗montis). Actually, we would expect a nominative plural ∗∗monz, but the third declension was influenced by the second. The pattern we can see in the second and third declensions was complicated and eventually the accusative was generalized as the all-purpose form. In Italian and Spanish, too, all singular and plural forms of all declensions can be traced back to the accusative; compare the Italian singular forms pollo ‘chicken’ < pullum, coscia ‘ham-hock’ < coxam, and carne ‘meat’ < carnem.⁴¹

38 The letter z stands for /ts/. 39 This development, leading to nominative plural forms like caprās, began already in Latin; but its attestation remained sporadic until very late. 40 Unless that vowel is e < a, which does not occur in the second declension. 41 In Spanish, final -s was retained in the plural, but in Italian it changed to -i, hence the Italian plural patterns -i < -ōs, -e < -ās, -i < -ēs.

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The exception to this dominance of the accusative consists of certain vocatives that remained frequent and were hence retained. Thus, French seigneur ‘lord’ goes back to the accusative seniōrem, but Old French sire, source of our Sir, comes from the vocative senior.⁴² In conclusion, when it comes to Latin case, sound change initiated the morphological changes, which were then completed by analogy.⁴³ We can now turn to the verb.

3.4.2 Verbal Morphology: Restructuring, Not Simplification While the Latin noun system underwent a thorough simplification process, the verb system was restructured rather than simplified. Some categories, like the simple future of Latin, disappeared, but not without replacement. Elsewhere, new categories were created alongside old ones, such as a have-perfect next to the old perfect. But as a tendency, the system did not lose categories in the way the noun did, and at most one can think of the creation of new periphrastic forms as a kind of simplification. The passive is a case in point (data from de Melo 2012). The Romance passive is fully periphrastic, but in classical Latin only the perfectum forms are periphrastic, while the īnfectum ones are synthetic. Table 3.4 gives an overview of the most common tenses in the passive, built from amāre ‘to love’. Table 3.4: The passive in classical Latin.

Present Imperfect Perfect Pluperfect

Classical Latin

Pre-Romance

Translation

amor amābar amātus sum amātus eram

amātus sum amātus eram amātus fuī amātus fueram

‘I am being loved’ ‘I was being loved’ ‘I have been loved’ ‘I had been loved’

Already in classical Latin, half the forms are periphrastic. The replacement does not simply happen because later Latin is averse to synthetic forms; rather, the

42 For personal names, the nominative could also function as a base form, cf. French Georges and Charles from Geōrgius and Carolus. 43 There are of course additional factors. Adams 2016, 632, looking at a medieval text from northern Italy, notes that here the dative of nouns has already given way to ad and that the ablative used for instruments is always combined with cum, but that the replacement of the genitive with dē is still in progress; for animates and for pronouns, inflected genitives still exist.

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replacement process is a lengthy one driven by semantic factors. Already in early Latin, there are on occasion double pluperfect forms like amātus fueram, with a pluperfect copula and a participle that marks anteriority. But these are typically used pragmatically to indicate anteriority to another pluperfect. In the early Principate, such double pluperfect forms are grammaticalized and occur side by side with the original pluperfects, but without any functional difference. But once amātus eram has been replaced by amātus fueram, its spot is open, and the old perfect and imperfect can get fuī and eram as copulas. The present is the last to be shifted in this chain of developments; the first forms of this type appear in the itinerary of Egeria (audītus sit in 2. 36.3 equals audiātur). The entire replacement process took centuries and was the result of grammaticalization and a chain shift that had little to do with a desire to use more periphrastic constructions.⁴⁴ The creation of a have-perfect is equally divorced from any wish to replace synthetic forms with periphrases.⁴⁵ In fact, the new have-perfect does not replace the old perfect, but the two coexist to this day. In French, the original perfect amāuī is continued as j’aimai (passé simple), while the innovated habeō amātum gives us j’ai aimé (passé composé). The former is often treated as a more literary alternative for the latter, but their Italian counterparts, amai (passato remoto) and ho amato (passato prossimo) are still functionally distinct (narrative past tense versus past with present result). Formal forerunners of the periphrastic constructions can be found as early as Plautus and Cato, but here the meaning is still entirely predictable from their component parts, with habeō indicating possession of a thing that is in the state brought about by the action of the verb in the passive participle.⁴⁶ Reanalysis of habeō as an auxiliary happens relatively late, by which time the word order was fixed to auxiliary + participle, a constellation which did not lend itself to univerbation and the creation of a new inflection type, as was to happen with the future, which we will discuss shortly. Sardinian is the only Romance variety which continues the Latin imperfect subjunctive as such. The other ‘imperfect’ subjunctives of Romance continue Latin pluperfect subjunctives. The new pluperfect subjunctive in Romance is a novel creation, formed with a have-auxiliary in the past subjunctive and the passive participle. Again, the process is driven by semantics. In early Latin, potential and unreal subjunctives are not yet fully distinct, although the classical system is beginning to spread (cf. 1.2). Plautus and Terence can still use the present subjunctive

44 See now also Danckaert 2016; though not without problems, the article is largely convincing and considers the future perfect type factus fuerō as the starting-point of the shift. 45 Details in Haverling 2016. 46 Compare Plaut. Trin. 347: multa bona bene parta habēmus, ‘we have many goods, acquired well’.

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for present unreal events (‘I would do’),⁴⁷ but the classical construction with the imperfect subjunctive is gaining ground.⁴⁸ In later Latin, present unreal events are beginning to be expressed with the pluperfect subjunctive (Hofmann and Szantyr 1965, 321), and this is why the old imperfect subjunctive is ousted.⁴⁹ What we can see here is a gradual shift to more and more extreme pasts in order to express the irrealis, because the past, metaphorically, can indicate the removal of an action into the realm of imagination.⁵⁰ In Plautus, the past unreal could be expressed by the imperfect subjunctive,⁵¹ but the classical construction with the pluperfect subjunctive was also already in existence.⁵² Since in later Latin the pluperfect subjunctive came to indicate present unreal events, the subjunctive needed for past unreal events had to be even further removed in time, and the new form mentioned above was created. As with the passive periphrasis, we are dealing with a chain shift driven by semantic factors. The Latin simple future is not continued by the Romance languages. However, it was not lost without replacement. In its stead arose various periphrastic constructions, many of them coalescing and leading to new inflectional forms. It is sometimes argued that the reason for the loss of the original future is phonological: in the first conjugation, forms like amābit ‘he will love’ would merge with perfects like amāuit, and in the third, forms like aget ‘he will do’ would merge with present indicatives like agit ‘he does’. However, while this may be a contributing factor, it is certainly a minor one: in the first conjugation, only the third person singular and the first person plural would be affected, and in conjugation 3a, the second and third person singular. Elsewhere, there is no real overlap. Thus, it is more likely that the simple future disappeared because the new periphrases became so productive. In this process, some odd things happened; in Spanish, for example, the present of ‘to be’ is soy ‘I am’, eres ‘you are’, es ‘he is’. The third person goes back to est, with regular loss of final -t, but this would then have become homophonous with the second person, Latin es. The Spanish second person continues the simple future, eris! In English, the future can be formed with will or shall, originally indicating volition and obligation. In Romanian, a periphrasis consisting of uelle ‘to want’ +

47 In Plaut. Aul. 492–3, sī … fīāt, … parent means ‘if it were to happen (but it does not), they would prepare (but they do not)’. 48 In Ter. Andr. 259, aliquid facerem means ‘I would be doing something (but I am not)’. 49 This process begins with esse and habēre as well as various modal verbs (Adams 2016, 182 and 561). 50 The Spanish imperfect subjunctive comes in two forms: from tomar ‘to cut’, we get tomase and tomara, continuing an old pluperfect subjunctive and pluperfect indicative, respectively. 51 Mitterēt in Plaut. Curc. 700 means ‘he would have sent (but he did not)’. 52 In Ter. Andr. 258, sī … rescīssem means ‘if I had found out (but I did not)’.

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infinitive became the regular future, and in Sardinian, the auxiliary was dēbēre ‘to have to’. In Italian, French, and Spanish and Portuguese, the auxiliary was habēre, which also indicated obligation. The construction seems to have grammaticalized early on, at a time when auxiliaries still most commonly followed the infinitive.⁵³ Since infinitives ended in -e and habēre was at this stage pronounced without h-, normal elision rules applied, and this aided univerbation and reanalysis of the forms of habēre as inflectional endings. Thus we find in Italian, from cantare ‘to sing’, canterò ‘I shall sing’, canterai ‘you will sing’, canterà ‘he will sing’. The Spanish equivalents of cantar are cantaré, cantarás, cantará. The situation is similar in Portuguese, but here the process of univerbation is not quite as complete as in Spanish: clitic pronouns can follow the future forms, but also be wedged inside, hence darás-me ‘you will give to me’ or dar-me-ás. The new future formation also allowed for the creation of a new subjunctivelike form, the conditional. In English, I will go is a simple future, but if the auxiliary is put in a past tense, we get a conditional, I would go, because the past indicates one further step away from the reality of the present. Exactly the same happened in Romance; if instead of a present of habēre an imperfect or perfect was used, a conditional was created, resulting in forms like Italian canterei ‘I would sing’, canteresti ‘you would sing’, canterebbe ‘he would sing’. Yet again it makes little sense to speak of simplification in the verb system.

3.4.3 What Makes Morphology Stable or Unstable? In this chapter we have seen different factors that can lead to syncretism: semantic change and phonological change are critical factors, as are morphology-internal factors like formal overlap between paradigms. Yet the complete loss of morphological categories is more often than not initiated by sound change, by phonological attrition. But since sound change is normally blind to morphology, we have to ask ourselves: why are Latin nouns so heavily affected by category loss, when verbs are relatively stable, losing some categories, but also creating new ones? Ainsworth 2019 examines the diachrony of case in a range of languages, but with a focus on Latin-Romance developments and on Finno-Ugric. She looks at case-increasing, case-steady, and case-reducing languages and notices recurrent patterns. Languages which create new cases, often from reanalysed postpositions, tend to have morphological structures that allow for a clear mapping of meaning onto smaller, stable chunks; in other words, languages which are at the

53 Details in Adams 2013, 252–60.

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agglutinating end of the spectrum, with morphs whose shapes are not determined by declension classes.⁵⁴ A language of this type is Veps, a close relative of Finnish. By contrast, case-reducing languages like Latin tend to have morphs with multiple meanings; for example, -um can be the neuter nominative of the second declension, the neuter or masculine accusative of the second declension, or the genitive plural of the third declension. And finally, case-stable languages can be of either type, but if they belong to the second one, they tend to have small case inventories, with typically less than ten cases. I have already mentioned that case-increasing languages have a tendency to reanalyse postpositions as case markers. Word order matters. While a few languages mark case by prefixes, the overwhelming majority of languages employs suffixes for this purpose, and the reason is simply that postpositions are more easily reanalysed than prepositions because cross-linguistically, the end of words is phonologically weaker than their start.⁵⁵ Case-reducing languages have morphs with multiple meanings; Ainsworth speaks of schematic patterns because we do not have a one-to-one mapping of form and function. There are clear predictive patterns within a paradigm; for example, if I know that a word in -um is a nominative singular (talentum ‘talent’), I can predict all forms in its paradigm because it is a neuter of the second declension, or if I know that a word in -um is an accusative singular (gladium ‘sword’), I can predict most cells in its paradigm, but not all, because the noun belongs to the second declension, but could be either masculine or neuter.⁵⁶ The important point, however, is that these predictive patterns do not extend across paradigms: if -um is a genitive plural (cōnsulum ‘of consuls’), it entails a very different paradigm, so that the presence of -um without syntactic context is not very informative. When sound change happens, it may lead to syncretism within a paradigm, but because speakers of such languages think of predictive patterns mostly within the paradigm rather than across paradigms, these syncretisms are not undone by morphological innovation, and over time the case system is eroded. Latin verbs also partly follow schematic patterns: in a form like rēxistī ‘you have ruled’, there is multiple exponence, with a perfect -s-, but also a lengthened root vowel and an unambiguously perfect ending; in addition, the -ē- in regēs ‘you

54 Transparent phonological alternations, caused by vowel harmony or final devoicing, do not matter here. 55 This has to do with processing constraints and also explains why many languages allow complex consonant clusters as onsets, but are more restrictive with codas; onsets receive more attention and can handle a larger number of contrasts. 56 Nominative gladius, but also gladium on occasion! The shift to the neuter was facilitated because the word often occurs in combination with scūtum ‘shield’.

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will rule’ marks future tense, but the one in amēs indicates present subjunctive. However, the endings for person and number are entirely unambiguous; -ō or -m can only be a first person singular, -tis is always a second person plural, and so on. This final bit, then, shows clear form-to-function mapping, even if it does not have a complete one-to-one correspondence (-s marks second person singular, but in the perfect indicative it is a different ending, -istī).⁵⁷ The Latin verb, then, is less schematic, and when syncretism happened, it was regularly undone. Compare amābam ‘I loved’ and amābat ‘he loved’, which should both end up as Italian amava (still true for some dialects); but the syncretism was undone, because based on present amo ‘I love’, a new imperfect amavo was created, clearly distinct from third-person amava. I noted earlier that postpositions can be reanalysed as case markers, but that this rarely happens to prepositions. A similar phenomenon can be seen among the verbs: early periphrases, in which the finite auxiliary followed the infinitive, could univerbate, leading for example to a new future tense paradigm; but later periphrases, in which the finite auxiliary preceded the non-finite form, have remained periphrastic to this day, hence Italian ho cantato ‘I have sung’.

3.5 Excursus: Grammatical Gender in Latin I want to end this chapter with a foray into morphosyntax, exploring grammatical gender in Latin. Gender is a property of nouns that is reflected in agreement on adjectives, pronouns, and participles. Just as tense reflects the extra-linguistic category of time, gender across languages corresponds most closely to either biological sex or animacy. Tense is not a very precise category: the perfect or imperfect can be used for the same event, which goes to show that tense does not simply mirror time; tense also indicates whether an event is important (perfect) or the background to something else (imperfect), but when it comes to temporal precision, tense is no match for lexical expressions like this morning or fifteen days ago. In the same way, gender in most languages is not a particularly accurate reflection of biological sex or animacy, but also reflects declension classes or other features. We can think of gender as a tracking device: in a language like Latin, where adjectives can be separated from their nouns, agreement in gender, along with case and number, helps us to see which noun an adjective belongs to.

57 Crucially, the mapping goes from potentially more than one form to a single meaning, but not from several meanings to one form.

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There is no doubt that first-language learners acquire gender through memorizing agreement patterns for a vast number of nouns, but once these patterns have been learned, a system emerges and new nouns are assigned gender with ease. Modern grammars mimic this by presenting gender rules, but as with the word-and-paradigm model, such rules are a convenient shorthand for the less neat knowledge a native speaker has; our economy of presentation is not an accurate reflection of how first-language speakers acquire or store gender. Loanwords are a good test of how reliable our gender rules are; a good grammar has to be able to predict what gender they will acquire, often in contrast with the gender they have in the source language. Thus, for most German speakers operating outside prescriptive rules, Virus, E-mail, and Genre are masculine, feminine, and neuter, even though uīrus ‘poison’ is neuter in Latin, E-mail is neuter in English, and genre is masculine in French, and even though prescriptive grammar demands the neuter for the first two of these. Latin is no different. Greek nouns in -μα are neuter, and while educated writers treat γλαύϰωμα ‘eye disease’, διάδημα ‘crown’, and βάπτισμα ‘baptism’ as neuters, with genitives in -atis, writers closer to everyday speech integrate such nouns into the first declension and give them a genitive in -ae.⁵⁸ All languages with grammatical gender have a group of core nouns for humans where gender assignment is driven by purely semantic factors like biological sex or animacy.⁵⁹ But surprisingly few languages have purely semantic systems. In Tamil, there are three genders, masculine for male rational entities (men and gods), feminine for female rational entities (women and goddesses), and neuter for everything else, including children and animals. In Dyirbal, an Australian aboriginal language, there are four genders, one for male humans and animals (regardless of sex), one for female humans and dangerous objects, one for edible plants, and one for everything else. Dyirbal shows that such purely semantic classification systems need not be based entirely on sex; moreover, there can be further complications in semantic systems, so that for example birds are in the gender for female humans because they represent the spirits of deceased women. In Latin, as in many language families, gender assignment is based on morphological class, but for some semantic groups, meaning trumps morphology. We will come back to Latin in a moment. Finally, gender assignment can be based on phonology. We can see this in Yimas, a Papuan language. Genders 1–4 are for male humans, female humans, higher animals, and plants providing food, respectively.

58 Accusatives glaucūmam in Plaut. Mil. 148 and diadēmam in Pompon. com. 163. 59 Further discussion and examples in Corbett 1991.

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Genders 6–11 are based on the final phonemes. And gender 5 is used for everything that does not fit into these categories. Let us now look at Latin. Gender assignment for most nouns is based on declension class. Nouns of the first and fifth declension are feminine; those of the second and fourth are masculine if they end in -us, and neuter if they end in -um / -ū; and those of the third can belong to any of the three genders. In the third declension, however, assignment is also far from random. Here, derivational suffixes determine gender, so that for instance nouns in -tiō are feminine and those in -men are neuter. Some nouns do not have suffixes that indicate a gender unambiguously. Interestingly, in such cases our texts often exhibit gender variation.⁶⁰ There are three types of exceptions to morphological gender assignment. The first is core nouns for human beings and domesticated animals, where sex matters. Hence, agricola ‘farmer’ is masculine, even though it is in the first declension. Optiō ‘choice’ is feminine as an abstract noun, but when it refers to a military rank, it is masculine. Astaphium and Pinacium are Greek-derived names in Roman comedy; the former refers to a woman, the latter to a boy, so they are feminine and masculine, respectively. Only two nouns referring to humans are neuter, scortum ‘prostitute’ and mancipium ‘slave’. Other nouns for prostitutes and slaves show sexbased gender assignment, but with these two, we are dealing with metaphors (‘piece of leather’ and ‘purchase’), and the original meaning is still felt clearly enough to prevent sex-based gender assignment. Socrus ‘mother-in-law’ belongs to the predominantly masculine fourth declension, but of course the noun is feminine. However, in Italian we get suocera because the mismatch between declension class and gender was considered jarring, so that the noun was put into a different class. For animals, sex-based gender assignment only exists where sex mattered to Romans, for example because it was noticeable (leō ‘lion’, leaena ‘lioness’) or because the animals were domesticated (equus ‘stallion’, equa ‘mare’). Interestingly, in the early period, the dove was referred to as columba, regardless of sex, but when the Romans started to breed them, a form columbus was created for the male (see Varro ling. 9.56). The second group of exceptions is also based on meaning. Owing to mythological associations, no longer clearly perceived in every case, trees and cities tend to be feminine, and winds and rivers masculine. Since these associations are less obvious than biological sex, there are occasional exceptions, so that for instance fīcus ‘fig-tree’ is also attested as masculine (Mart. 1.65.4).

60 Cf. fīnis ‘boundary’, mostly masculine, but feminine in Cic. fam. 12.1.1 and elsewhere; or rudēns ‘rope’, mostly masculine, but feminine in Plaut. Rud. 938.

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The third group of exceptions is very small. Here the semantic basis is synchronically opaque. In the fourth declension, porticus ‘portico’ and manus ‘hand’ are feminine, and in the fifth, diēs ‘day’ is masculine. For porticus, masculine gender is already attested in Petronius (77.4). Manus as a high-frequency item, however, remains feminine in all Romance languages to this day. Diēs is masculine because it started as the name of the sky god, Diēspiter ‘Father Day’.⁶¹ This connection was not felt acutely in the classical period, and as diēs was the only masculine noun in the fifth declension, it started to take on feminine agreement as well. Somewhat artificially, Caesar chooses feminine agreement for the meaning ‘set date’, but masculine agreement elsewhere. Virgil says longa diēs ‘long day’ and summa diēs ‘final day’, where the masculine adjective would not fit into the metre, but where there is a choice, he always picks the masculine, hence ille diēs ‘that day’, never illa diēs. Many Romance reflexes are feminine, but Spanish keeps the noun masculine, even though it got integrated into the first declension (el día). We can see the different factors at play in the word for ‘tongs’, forceps, which started as a feminine noun. Metathesis led to forpex, still feminine. Then forfex was created, and since this looks like an agent noun in -fex, Vitruvius made it masculine (10.2.2). We saw gender assignment based on phonology with Yimas. Interestingly, French gender assignment is also based on final phonemes (Tucker et al. 1977). There is still a semantic core where masculine and feminine are determined by sex, but this group only includes humans, not trees or rivers any longer. For the remaining nouns, the final two or three phonemes are enough to predict gender with a very high degree of accuracy. This should perhaps not come as a surprise. French has undergone a greater degree of phonological erosion than, say, Italian or Spanish, and derivational suffixes are much harder to separate. The system was then reanalysed as a phonological one. Two more issues deserve discussion, hybrid nouns and gender resolution. Hybrid nouns are those where biological sex and grammatical gender are in conflict. We see this in Greek παιδίoν ‘child’ or German Mädchen ‘girl’, both of which take neuter articles because they are diminutives. For such nouns, the ‘agreement hierarchy’ matters: attributive > predicate > relative pronoun > personal pronoun.

61 Cognate with Ζεὺς πατήρ; the nominative Iūpiter started as the vocative, perhaps not surprisingly for a deity that was prayed to more often than talked about.

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The more to the left an item is, the more likely it is to have formally assigned gender; the more to the right it is, the more likely it is that semantics wins the day. So for the two nouns just mentioned, the article will have to be neuter, but personal pronouns can often be masculine or feminine. In Latin we do not have a great deal of data for hybrid nouns. Elephantus ‘elephant’ takes a feminine adjective grauida ‘pregnant’ in Plautus (Stich. 168-9) because a female one is referred to; but in Varro (rust. 3.12.5), lepus ‘hare’ takes a masculine relative connection quī, even though the topic is pregnant hares. Gender resolution is required when nouns of different genders are coordinated. The adjective will be plural, but what will its gender be? For groups consisting of men and women, the masculine form is normally chosen; for inanimate nouns, the adjective may be neuter. But there is an alternative tendency for the adjective to agree only with the noun it stands next to and not to have gender and number resolution at all, and it is often hard to see why one strategy is chosen over another.

3.6 Further Reading Haspelmath and Sims 2010 is a reliable first introduction to the problems of morphology. Matthews 1974 is somewhat more advanced. Blevins 2016 is excellent for word-and-paradigm models. On word-formation I recommend Plag 2003. The developments from Indo-European to Latin are sketched very well in Meiser 1998. Weiss 2009 is more detailed. For the verb, Meiser 2003 remains unsurpassed. For Romance developments, Väänänen 1981 is a good starting-point, with useful material also in Penny 2002 for Spanish and Harris 1988 for French. For smaller case studies, readers should consult the articles quoted in the Romance section of this chapter. For grammatical gender, Corbett 1991 is a detailed and reliable guide. A shorter piece, discussing also pronoun usage in English, is de Melo 2021. For French, the work by Tucker et al. 1977 is illuminating.

Chapter 4 Syntax Greek σύνταξις literally means ‘putting together’; although Varro does not use the Greek term, he picks up the concept when he says that the third part of his work on the Latin language is about ‘how they (i.e. words) create a sentence when they are joined with one another in a logical way ’ (ut ea inter sē ratiōne coniūncta sententiam efferant, ling. 8.1). The way we put words together to form sentences is complex. Syntax has to show which word depends on which other word, as in domus patris ‘father’s house’, where domus is the superordinate element and pater depends on it. Such dependencies can be indicated by word order or by morphology, as here through the genitive case, or by both. When we discussed phonology and morphology, different theories were mentioned for these fields. Within phonology, many scholars work with autosegmental phonology, some still cling on to optimality theory, and others work in yet other frameworks. However, there is general agreement on the basic facts of phonology, and to some extent the different theories complement each other rather than being genuine rivals. It is different in syntax. The theories on offer make vastly different assumptions, use different methodologies and terminologies, and often have different goals. One group of theories falls under the umbrella of generative grammar. It is associated with Noam Chomsky and his followers and started with Chomsky’s seminal Syntactic Structures (1957). One of the basic tenets of such theories is that child language acquisition is qualitatively different from adult language acquisition and that children do not learn, but acquire, syntax; the input they receive is supposedly insufficient in quantity and quality to create a grammar from scratch (‘poverty of the stimulus’ argument), so that the child has to fall back on universal grammar structures. Language acquisition is thus thought to be very different from other kinds of cognitive learning processes. In the Chomskyan model, there is a ‘deep structure’ of language that marks which elements depend on which others, and there are ‘surface structures’ that we can hear or see in writing and which are derived from the deep structures via ‘transformational’ rules. Later incarnations of this model were called ‘Government and Binding’ theory (fashionable in the 90s) and the ‘Minimalist Programme’ (still in use today). Another group of theories is referred to as functional grammars. Such models were developed by Foley and Van Valin (‘Role and Reference Grammar’), but especially by Simon Cornelis Dik in the Netherlands. Dik’s ‘Functional Grammar’ arose in discussions with generative grammarians, but developed a life of its own and was developed throughout his career. After his untimely death in 1995, his work https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111172002-004

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was continued by Kees Hengeveld and later also by Lachlan Mackenzie (then under the name ‘Functional Discourse Grammar’). In functional grammars, the direction of constructing a sentence is the exact opposite from what I present in this book: first comes pragmatics, dealing for example with the question of what is old information and what is new in the sentence we want to create, what kind of perspective we want to take, and so on; next, semantic roles like agent and patient are assigned; all this has repercussions for morphology and syntax; and finally, the phonology of the utterance is created. This is indeed how speakers produce utterances, but for our purposes, we go the other way round because we analyse the finished product. I have learned a great deal from several different syntactic theories and their practitioners, but I feel a special affinity with Dik’s Functional Grammar. This is partly because it strikes me as more intuitive and employs functional and typological explanations for data wherever possible, having recourse to innate structures only when other explanations fail; and partly it is because most classicists working on syntax use this framework, not least because Dik himself was trained in Latin and Greek before moving on to linguistics. In what follows, I occasionally have recourse to Functional Grammar, but on the whole I try to be as theory-neutral as possible. I firmly believe that any linguistic finding, if presented in a specific framework, should be ‘translatable’ into a different framework. Any linguistic explanation should account for the data we have correctly and enable us to predict usage patterns correctly; and it should do so in a simple and intuitive manner. In what follows, we will be looking at some recurrent topics in Latin syntax, but I can only give a first overview here. We will start with case, move on to tense, and then examine how constructions can change when meanings change. Next we will look at word order and then, finally, at some issues of subordination.

4.1 The Case System Case is the morphological expression of syntactic functions such as subject and object, recipient and instrument. As such, case often competes or is combined with word order and adpositions.¹ The distinction between adpositions and cases is not always clear across languages; as a tendency, adpositions attach to noun phrases once, while cases are marked on every word within a noun phrase, and case endings often differ according to declension class, while adpositions do not. When looking at the Latin case system, we will first turn to the cases assigned through verbal valency, then to cases at the noun phrase level, and finally to the genitives of personal pronouns, which present more complex issues. 1 I.e. prepositions and postpositions.

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4.1.1 The Verb Phrase Valency and Macro-Roles However large the differences in word classes may be across languages, we now know that every language has nouns and verbs. Verbs can express a variety of actions and states, but normally they have to be combined with nouns in order to do so. Valency deals with the question of how many nouns or pronouns a verb needs in order to express an action or state. If a verb needs two nouns or pronouns, we say that it takes two arguments, or has a valency of two, or is a two-place predicate. Among one-place verbs, we find cough, grin, and sleep. Examples of two-place verbs are despise, hit, and love. The list of three-place verbs includes give and hand over. In addition, there are zero-place predicates like rain, snow, and thunder. In English, the subject slot needs to be filled, so this group of verbs is combined with dummy pronouns (it is raining), even though such pronouns do not refer to anything. In Latin, no subject pronoun is used (pluit ‘it is raining’), but the ending is third person singular, which is the default ending for finite verbs. Note also that many verbs have alternative frames: drive and sing can be used absolutely, without object, but also with objects like a Mercedes and a song. Driving and singing are completely different activities. When we drive, we use our hands and feet; when we sing, we use our mouths. Nevertheless, people who are driving and people who are singing are usually marked in the same way in a language, for instance by placing them in front of the verb or by putting them in the nominative case. It would be inefficient if we had to learn different word orders or different cases for every semantic role because there are as many semantic roles as there are verbs. Languages always lump several semantic roles together to form macro-roles. Macro-roles are more or less the same for every language. We can distinguish between agent, patient, recipient, beneficiary, instrument, location, and time. Subject and Object But which of these macro-roles will end up as the subject of a clause? In what follows, I adopt a semantic definition of subject similar to that used in a Functional Grammar framework (Dik and Hengeveld 1997, 247–54): the subject is that constituent which is the vantage point from which an event is looked at.²

2 This also explains why uidērī is normally combined with a nominative and infinitive rather than an accusative and infinitive, and why its English counterpart to seem exhibits a similar kind of ‘subject-to-subject raising’: Mārcus stultus uidētur esse ‘Mark seems to be stupid’ makes Mark the formal subject, even though from a semantic perspective one would expect Mark being stupid to

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Compare: (1) John ate all the sandwiches. (2) All the sandwiches were eaten by John. (1) and (2) present the same event, but from different perspectives. In (1), the event is presented from John’s perspective, so he is the subject. In (2), the event is presented from the perspective of the sandwiches; they are the subject. It is more normal to present this event from John’s perspective. If we choose a different perspective, we either need a different verb or a different voice. In English this alternative voice is the passive, which is much rarer than the active (between 1% in spontaneous narratives and 18% in academic prose). Subject assignment (in the unmarked active voice) is not random. If a verb has only one constituent, this will be the subject, regardless of its semantic role. If a verb has more than one constituent, subject assignment follows this (incomplete) hierarchy: animate agent > inanimate agent / instrument > marginally affected patient > highly affected patient. The more to the left a constituent is, the more likely it is to become subject. Thus, if a door (patient) is opened and John is the agent and a key is the instrument, the unmarked construction will be: (3) John (agent = subject) opened the door (patient) with a key (instrument). If the subject is the primary vantage point from which an event is viewed, the (direct) object could be described as the secondary vantage point. If we take a two-place verb, the constituent which is not subject will be object. If we take a three-place verb and assign a subject, the direct object will be the second-most important constituent, that constituent which is more highly affected by the action than the other. Compare: (4) John sprayed the wall (direct object) with the paint. (5) John sprayed the paint (direct object) on the wall.

be the subject of to seem. However, looking at the sentence from the perspective of a subordinate clause is only possible metaphorically, hence the promotion of a noun to subject status.

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(4) implies that the wall is completely covered with paint because as the direct object it is highly affected; (5) carries no such implication, but implies that the paint has been used up, which is not necessarily the case in (4). Some Latin verbs have similar contrasts, for example dōnāre ‘to give, to present’: (6) Sed quaeso, ubinam illic restitīt mīles modo qui hanc mihi dōnāuīt, quem ego uocāui ad prandium? (Plaut. Poen. 468-9) ‘But please, where on earth did that soldier stop now who gave me that present (i.e. a silver mina) and whom I invited for lunch?’ (7) Addūxi ancillās tibi ĕccās ex Syriā duās, īs tē dōnō. (Plaut. Truc. 530-1) ‘Look, I’ve brought you two slave-girls from Syria; I present you with them.’ In (6), dōnāre follows the construction of dare ‘to give’, with a dative recipient and an accusative patient object of the gift. In (7), on the other hand, the recipient stands in the accusative, and the gift is in the ablative. This choice is not random: the dative recipient is less affected than the accusative recipient. In (6), the recipient is a rich pimp, who is happy to receive money, but is not heavily affected by such a gift and does not want to present himself as being deeply affected. In (7), the speaker is a soldier who is presenting a prostitute with a big gift, two slave-girls. Not only is this a significant gift, he also wants to emphasize his generosity because he is competing with other lovers; this is why the recipient is put into the accusative. Incidentally, it has been noted that this alternation does not exist when the recipient is a deity; in such cases, the god or goddess will always be in the dative, because it would be disrespectful to treat the deity as heavily affected by a human gift (see also Pinkster 2015, 152). Active and Passive Let us briefly return to subject and direct object and to the topic of passivization, which will be dealt with again in 6.2.2. English has two voices, the active and the passive: (8) John ate the apple. (9) The apple was eaten (by John). In (8), John is the subject and the apple is the object. In (9), the apple is the subject and John is a non-obligatory constituent. But despite these differences, the sentences

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also have much in common: in both of them, John is the agent and the apple is the patient. Such pairs are equivalent concerning their truth conditions. So why do we passivize? The answer must be that active and passive differ pragmatically. That also explains why not all active sentences can have passive counterparts: (10) John is too ill to work, but his brother supports him. (11) John is too ill to work, but he is supported by his brother. (12) John supports the Liberal Democrats. (13) ?The Liberal Democrats are supported by John. (10) and (11) show that support can normally be used in both active and passive. (12) also contains the verb support, but the passive, in (13), sounds odd. Why? Subject assignment is about perspective. The subject is that constituent from whose perspective an event is looked at. In (10) and (11), John and his brother are equals and it does not matter from whose perspective we look at the event. But (12) is different. Unless John is a millionaire, his support is of minor significance for the party. We can view the event from his perspective: he is giving a certain percentage of his money to the party, so he is supporting it. For this it does not matter if the party is very small or very big. But it is difficult to view this event from the party’s perspective and still regard it as real support. For the party, John is just one of thousands of supporters, and unless his contribution is substantial, the passive with the party as subject is odd. Like its English counterpart, the Latin passive obligatorily demotes an agent subject, which may be expressed in an oblique phrase or left out entirely. If the underlying verb is transitive, the patient object is likewise promoted to subject status; however, in Latin, unlike in English, intransitive verbs can also be passivized: (14) Saluē. Quid agitur? – Stātur hīc ad hunc modum. (Plaut. Pseud. 457) ‘My greetings. What are you up to? – I’m standing here like this.’ Instead of quid agis? ‘what are you doing, how are you doing?’, with a transitive verb, we get a passivized version, which is not uncommon in greetings either. The response is deliberately cheeky, taking the question literally and providing a blindingly obvious and hence meaningless answer. What is interesting about the answer is that stāre ‘to stand’ is an intransitive verb, but that it is passivized here, for jocular effect. Since one of the functions of the passive is the promotion of an object to

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subject status, and since this is impossible for intransitive verbs, the main reason why they get passivized is that the subject needs to be demoted, either because it is unknown or because it is vague: (15) Ītur in antīquam siluam. (Verg. Aen. 6.179) ‘One goes into the ancient forest.’ Here the passive is partly used for variation and partly to leave it vague who exactly is going. Arguments and Adjuncts: The Basics Now that we have looked at semantic macro-roles and subject and object assignment, the rules for case are, for the vast majority of verbs, very straightforward. The nominative is the case for subjects, regardless of whether the verb has a valency of one, two, or three. The accusative is the case for direct objects if the verb takes two or more arguments. If the verb takes three arguments, meaning comes into play. If the third argument is animate and acts as a recipient or addressee, as with dīcere ‘to say something to somebody’, this third argument is normally in the dative, but if the third argument is inanimate and has some other semantic function, it will typically be in the ablative, as with implēre ‘to fill something with something’. The vocative stands somewhat outside this system, being reserved for address. Historically, the various ablative endings continue endings of three IndoEuropean cases, the ablative proper, the instrumental, and the locative (see 3.3.1). The merger is not yet complete in the classical period insofar as there are separate locative forms for the first and second declensions. However, their usage is very restricted. In Plautus, we can still find a phrase like diē septumī ‘on the seventh day’ (Persa 260), where fifth-declension diēs is in the ablative because no separate locative form exists, but the adjective modifying it, being in the second declension, has a locative ending. However, by the classical period, the locative for time expressions has disappeared. It only continues for place names that fall under the concept of the πóλις, such as cities or small islands; within this restricted semantic category, the locative is somewhat productive and can be used for new place names.³ Other than that, no separate locative forms exist, and in fact the third-declension ablative ending -ĕ formally continues an old locative, which shows how far the merger of the old cases has gone.

3 But note that already Augustus used prepositions with place names; Suet. Aug. 86.1, who points this out, states that prepositions dētractae afferunt aliquid obscūritātis, etsī grātiam augent ‘when taken away, lead to a certain amount of obscurity, even though they increase elegance’. In separative function, Livy frequently combines the ablative of place names with ab.

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The ablative has three main functions: as already stated, it can be the third, inanimate argument of three-place verbs; it can be used for adjuncts in various semantic functions; and it can be governed by various prepositions. There is little point trying to connect the various semantic functions of the adjuncts with the original meanings of the ablative, instrumental, or locative, since the morphological merger of these cases presupposes a semantic merger; rather, the ablative merely indicates that we are dealing with an adjunct, and it is up the listener or reader to compute the exact meaning from the wider context and the lexical meaning of the words in the adjunct. Latin prepositions can be combined with the accusative or the ablative.⁴ Since the accusative could originally indicate ‘motion towards’, as is still the case with place names (Rōmam ‘to Rome’), we can find a small number of prepositions which contrast accusative and ablative. Thus, in ‘into, in’ and sub ‘under’ take the accusative for directions and the ablative for locations. For most prepositions, however, one single case became normal before our earliest texts. Often, this case can be motivated from the original case meaning, as with per ‘through’, which takes the accusative of direction. But in many instances, this is not possible; hence propter ‘next to’, which indicates place where, but takes the accusative.⁵ We have not yet discussed the genitive. While it can be combined with a few verbs to be discussed below, its main function is as the case of the noun phrase par excellence, and we shall examine this particular phenomenon in the next subsection. Transitivity as a Spectrum Let us now look at some seeming exceptions to this neat case system. The average two-place verb takes a nominative subject, in agent function, and an accusative object, as a highly affected patient. Verbs of this type are called transitive. However, transitivity is best regarded as a spectrum rather than something that either is or is not the case. Not all two-place predicates are fully transitive.⁶ And some verbs express events that can be more or less transitive, depending on the circumstances. We can see this with ōsculārī ‘to kiss’ in Plautus:

4 Novel adpositions like uice ‘in place of’ or causā ‘for the sake of’ are not yet fully grammaticalized and retain some nominal properties, hence the combination with the genitive of nouns (amīcī causā ‘for the sake of a friend’), but with the feminine ablative of possessives (meā causā ‘for my sake’). 5 But compare proptereā ‘because of this’, with a fossilized ablative pronoun, dating back to a time when most prepositions could take more than one case. 6 For linguistic repercussions of reduced transitivity see especially Hopper and Thompson 1980.

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(16) Vt si illic concrīminātus sīt aduorsum mīlitem meus cōnseruos, eam uīdisse hīc cum aliēno ōsculāri, eam arguam uīdisse apud tē contrā cōnseruom meum cum suo amātōre amplexantem atque ōsculantem. (Plaut. Mil. 242–5) ‘So if that fellow slave of mine accuses her in front of the soldier, saying that he’s seen her kissing someone else, I’ll rebut him and say that he’s seen this one at your place embracing and kissing her lover.’ (17) Iāiūnitātis plēnus, animā foetidā, senex hircōsus tu ōsculēre mulierem? (Plaut. Merc. 574–5) ‘On an empty stomach, with stinking breath, you goaty old man would kiss a woman?’ (18) Prehende auriculīs, comparā labella cum labellīs. – Tēn ōsculētur, uerberō? (Plaut. Asin. 668–9) ‘Grab me by the ears and put your lips on mine. – She should kiss you, you thug?’ Kissing, when consensual, is normally a reciprocal activity and hence not fully transitive, because the kisser is also being kissed by the other. In such cases, Plautus uses cum, as in (16), where the context shows that the kissing is mutual and enthusiastic. When the kissing is one-sided, the verb becomes transitive and takes an accusative. This happens in (17), where the old man wants to kiss a young woman, who would presumably not reciprocate, or at least not willingly. (18) is slightly different, but comparable. The first speaker is a slave who has got hold of money; his young master needs this money, but the slave will only hand it over if the master’s girlfriend makes out with him. The woman is meant to press her lips on the slave’s mouth, in order to show her affection and to humiliate her boyfriend. This is why the young master in his response also uses a transitive construction; the slave kissing the girl back is less relevant than her kissing him.⁷ Loquī ‘to talk, speak’ is often intransitive. A direct object such as uēra ‘the truth’ can be found in Amph. 843, but the addressee is never in the accusative, unlike with the compound adloquī ‘to address’. Loquī again normally indicates a reciprocal activity and as such takes cum, if an addressee is expressed: (19) Quid agit, quid loquitur tēcum? (Plaut. Cas. 321) ‘What is she doing, what is she talking about with you?’

7 Or potentially the one-sided kissing would indicate that the slave is aloof and distant, while the girl desires him, which could increase the young master’s humiliation even further.

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However, the dative is also found, but then it is not a reciprocal activity, but rather a stern ‘talking-to’: (20) Chrȳsalus mihi ūsque quāque loquitur nec rēctē, pater. (Plaut. Bacch. 735) ‘Chrysalus is reviling me all the time, father.’ The Same Case Used Twice A more disparate group of exceptions to the above rules of case usage consists of all those examples where the same case is used twice. This group contains several subgroups. First, there are examples like cōpiās Rhēnum trādūcere ‘to lead one’s troups across the Rhine’; trādūcere is an obvious compound of trāns ‘across’ and dūcere ‘to lead’, and cōpiās is the object of the verb, while Rhēnum is governed by the preverb. The second subgroup contains cases of identity: ‘to be called’, ‘to turn someone into something’, and so on, require identity of case to match the identity of substance. In early Latin, such usages go further than in classical Latin: (21) Nōmen Arctūrō est mihī. (Plaut. Rud. 5) ‘Arcturus is my name.’ In classical Latin, one would expect an apposition in the nominative, Arctūrus, or a genitive of the personal name dependent on nōmen. Here, on the other hand, the dative is used, agreeing with the possessor of the name. The third subgroup exhibits ‘semantic incorporation’ (cf. Adams 2016, 69–70): (22) Explōrātōrem hunc faciāmus lūdōs suppositīcium adeō dōnicum ipsus sēsē lūdōs fierī sēnserit. (Plaut. Pseud. 1167–8) ‘Let’s make fun of this pretend spy till he himself realizes he’s being made fun of.’ Lūdōs facere ‘to play tricks on someone, make fun of someone’ is a fixed phrase, so idiomatic that a compound lūdificārī was created from it; because lūdōs forms a close unit with the verb, the verb can take another accusative object.⁸ Leftovers of an Earlier System Latin also has a group of impersonal verbs whose constructions deviate from other two-place predicates. Pudet ‘there is a feeling of shame’, piget ‘there is a feeling

8 Note also how the accusative lūdōs remains in the passivization in our example.

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of unhappiness’, and others put the experiencer in the accusative and the thing experienced in the genitive (or in the nominative if it is a pronoun). This type forms its own subgroup and is clearly inherited, with parallels in other Indo-European languages; even Early Modern English still has methinks next to I think. Related to this is the construction for pain; dolet mihi caput ‘I have a headache’ has a dative experiencer, but the body part forms the nominative subject. This construction changes to personal doleō ab early on. The remaining exceptions are few and far between, so that one cannot really speak of a homogeneous class. They are leftovers of an earlier system in which cases had more independent meaning. The dative after parcere ‘to spare’ and inuidēre ‘to be jealous of’ can, historically, be explained as a dative of advantage or disadvantage, but synchronically such constructions are simply exceptions.⁹ Meminisse ‘to remember’ and oblīuīscī ‘to forget’ normally have the thing remembered or forgotten in the genitive, although the accusative is also attested and is in fact the norm with pronouns. Here the genitive originally indicated that the thing remembered or forgotten is not as affected as an accusative object would be. And finally, a number of deponents, ūtī ‘to use’, fungī ‘to make use of’, fruī ‘to enjoy’, are most commonly combined with the ablative, although in the classical period this is possibly the result of language purism, since in earlier Latin the ablative already coexists with the accusative: (23) Nam parasītus octō hominum mūnus facile fungitur. (Plaut. Men. 223) ‘The hanger-on easily does the job of eight people.’ Incidentally, verbs of this semantic field sometimes take divergent cases in other Indo-European languages as well. German genießen ‘to enjoy’ originally took the genitive, a usage still found in the early twentieth century, but this genitive was replaced by the accusative. The Dutch cognate genieten is combined with van ‘of’, which systematically replaces earlier genitive constructions.

4.1.2 The Noun Phrase As I said in what precedes, the genitive is the prototypical case on the noun phrase level. We can see this very nicely when we look at participles. As their name states,

9 Note also that Vitruvius and others combine nocēre ‘to harm’ with a dative, but form a passive from it as if the verb took an accusative in the active (Adams 2016, 171–72); this is an instance of regularization in progress.

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participles share the properties of two word classes, verbs and nouns.¹⁰ What verbs refer to is normally more transient than what nouns refer to; actions have a shorter lifespan than things. Participles which denote less permanent properties often mark their arguments in the same way as verbs do, while those which denote more permanent qualities take the genitive: (24) Vīn tū tē mihi opsequentem esse an neuīs? (Plaut. Merc. 150) ‘Do you wish to be obedient to me or not?’ (25) Faciam utī proinde ut est dignus uītam colāt, Accheruntis pābulum, flāgitī persequentem, stabulum nēquitiae. (Plaut. Cas. 158–61) ‘I’ll make sure he leads the life he deserves, this fodder for the Underworld, seeker of disgrace, heap of infamy.’ In (24), the obedience talked about refers to a specific action, not to a permanent state; opsequēns thus takes the dative mihi, just as finite verb forms would. In (25), on the other hand, the awful husband is permanently awful, hence persequēns with a genitive flāgitī rather than the accusative which a finite verb form would take. Traditional grammars ascribe a variety of functions to the genitives dependent on other nouns; such genitives can be possessive, or they can be subject or object genitives. Menge et al. 2000, 367–68 present a few classical examples in which a subject genitive as well as an object genitive depends on a noun; thus, we find frātris repulsa cōnsulātūs ‘his brother’s rejection for the consulship’ (Cic. Tusc. 4.40) or dēspērātiō omnium salūtis ‘everyone’s despair about being rescued’ (Caes. civ. 1.5.3). They point out that either the subject genitive precedes and the object genitive follows the head noun, or both genitives precede or follow the head noun, but in such a way that the subject genitive precedes the object one. That is descriptively correct, but it would be better to say that noun phrases cannot have the complexity of verb phrases, and that the genitive is used as an all-purpose case which neutralizes oppositions that have to be expressed at the verb phrase level. The genitive is thus just a marker of dependency, and it is up to the listener or reader to figure out the semantic relationship between it and its head noun. The fact that so-called subject genitives precede so-called object genitives is also straightforward: just as subjects, being the entities from whose perspective we examine sentences, most frequently precede objects, so the genitives that indicate agents tend to precede the

10 On the properties of participles see especially Haspelmath 1994.

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other genitives because it is their perspective which matters. However, word order is not always a good indication of how to interpret a phrase: (26) Nōn ego illam mī dōtem dūco esse quae dōs dīcitur, sed pudīcitiam et pudōrem et sēdātum cupīdinem, deum metum, parentum amōrem, et cognātum concordiam. (Plaut. Amph. 839–41) ‘I don’t consider that to be my dowry which is called a dowry, but chastity, modesty, self-control, fear of the gods, love for my parents, and friendship with relatives.’ In the third line, we can see three ‘object’ genitives, each one preceding its head noun. Incidentally, possessive pronouns are supposed to be equivalent to genitives of nouns, but very rarely do they function like ‘object’ genitives. In (27), suā is possessive in interpretation, but the adjective aliēnō, modifying metū, has object function (‘(his) fear of someone else’, not ‘someone else’s fear (of him)’): (27) Hoc patrium est, potius cōnsuēfacere fīlium suā sponte rēctē facere quam aliēnō metū. (Ter. Ad. 74–5) ‘This is a father’s job, to accustom his son to behave correctly out of his own free will rather than out of fear of someone else.’ Just as participles can follow the construction patterns of finite verbs, action nouns in -tiō can still follow the constructions of their base verbs in Plautus:¹¹ (28) Quid tibĭ hanc digitō tāctiō est? (Plaut. Poen. 1308) ‘Why do you touch this girl even with a finger?’ Tangere takes an accusative object, and the thing we touch with stands in the ablative; this is precisely how tāctiō behaves here. Adjectives often take dependent genitives as well, but sometimes there are alternatives: (29) Nam haec quidem edepol lārŭārum plēna est. (Plaut. Amph. 777) ‘Truly, she’s possessed by evil spirits.’

11 Lowe 2017, 263–74 presents data from other Indo-European languages.

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(30) Aspice ad sinisteram caelum ut est splendōre plēnum. (Plaut. Merc. 879-80) ‘Look to the left, how the heaven is full of brightness.’ Plēnus ‘full of’ takes the genitive in (29), but in (30) it takes the ablative because it is clearly connected with implēre and complēre, both meaning ‘to fill’, and these are combined with an ablative.¹² Finally, I can only mention here that prepositional phrases may also depend on nouns; traditional grammars tend to warn students against using such constructions and recommend instead that we should translate ‘a ring of gold’ as ānulus aureus, with an adjective, or as ānulus ex aurō factus, with the prepositional phrase depending on a participle. However, ānulus ex aurō also occurs. The reason prescriptive grammars warn us against such constructions is that they are rarer in Latin than in many modern European languages; but rarity of a phenomenon should not prevent the occasional imitation.¹³

4.1.3 The Genitive of Personal Pronouns We have just seen the neutralization of cases on the noun phrase level, where the genitive of nouns indicates a connection with their head nouns, but does not tell us whether the relationship involved is possessive or could be described in terms of subject or object. But what about personal pronouns? Here the situation seems to be more complex. Let us look at the details. It is normally assumed that possessive pronouns are semantically equivalent to genitives, as can be seen from phrases like meā ipsīus causā ‘for my own sake’, where the adjectival possessive pronoun stands in the feminine singular ablative so as to agree with causā, while the pronoun ipse stands in the genitive. The genitive forms of personal pronouns are clearly connected with possessive pronouns etymologically: meī, tuī, nostrī, and uestrī are genitives of neuter singular forms, while nostrum and uestrum are genitives of masculine plural forms. Their usage patterns are quite different. I take my classical material from Menge et al. 2000, 93–94, but

12 In early Latin, the genitive is still substantially more common with plēnus than the ablative, and that is also true of Cicero; Quint. inst. 9.3.1 notices that the ablative is becoming more common in his own time. 13 The best study on prepositional phrases dependent on nouns is Wharton (2009), who concludes that their frequencies vary drastically from author to author; Cicero and Caesar are at the lower end, Vitruvius (not considered by Wharton, but by Adams 2016, 186) is at the higher end.

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have expanded the quotations a little because the truncated quotations presented in the book are shortened so much that on occasion they can be misleading. In general, forms like meī and nostrī are used when the genitive has object function; nostrum and uestrum are used for the whole in part-whole relationships (which is why there are no corresponding singular forms); and adjectival possessive pronouns are used for everything else, whether the pronoun indicates possession or a subject. Here are examples of the object genitive in -ī: (31) Vincēbātur enim fortūna ipsa dēbilitātae grātiae nostrae tuī cāritāte et meō perpetuō ergā tē amōre cultō ā tē dīligentissimē. (Cic. fam. 6.12.1) ‘After all, the misfortune of my weakened influence was overcome by my affection for you and my constant love towards you, which has been most carefully cultivated by yourself.’ (32) Quīntus mīsit fīlium nōn sōlum suī dēprecātōrem sed etiam accūsātōrem meī. (Cic. Att. 11.8.2) ‘Quintus sent his son not only as an intercessor for himself, but also as an accuser of me.’ (33) Grāta mihi uehementer est memoria nostrī tua, quam significāstī litterīs. (Cic. fam. 12.17.1) ‘Your memory of me, which you have indicated through your letter, is enormously welcome to me.’ (34) Mīrum mē dēsīderium tenet urbis, incrēdibile meōrum atque in prīmīs tuī, satietās autem prōuinciae. (Cic. fam. 2.11.1) ‘A wondrous desire for the city has got hold of me, an incredible desire for my friends and especially for you, and also a weariness of the province.’ In (31), the ‘objects’ of cāritās and amor are expressed through a genitive tuī and a prepositional phrase ergā tē, which are parallel in function; the possessive function is expressed through a regular possessive pronoun meō, agreeing with amōre. In (32), the ‘object’ genitives are suī and meī, dependent on dēprecātōrem and accūsātōrem; regular possessive pronouns in adjectival function (suum and meum) would have been equally possible because the relationship could also be interpreted in possessive terms. (33) shows that the subject or possessive relationship implied by memoria is expressed through a possessive pronoun tua, while the object relationship is rendered through the genitive nostrī. In (34), the head nouns are dēsīderium, dēsīderium left out by ellipsis, and satietās; the dependents are the nominal genitives urbis and prōuinciae, the nominalized possessive meōrum

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‘of my people, friends’, and tuī, the genitive of the personal pronoun; all these are functionally equivalent. This last example shows that ‘my people’, meī, or the equivalents of other pronouns, have regular genitive plurals in -ōrum, as also in (35): (35) Diūtius cum sustinēre nostrōrum impetūs nōn possent, alterī sē, ut coeperant, in montem recēpērunt, alterī ad impedīmenta et carrōs suōs sē contulērunt. (Caes. Gall. 1.26.1) ‘When they could no longer withstand the onslaught of our men, some withdrew, as they had begun, to the mountain, and others moved to their travelling equipment and waggons.’ As already indicated, the object relationship is not always expressed explicitly through a genitive, and is sometimes left vague, through a possessive adjective: (36) Nunc autem uester, iūdicēs, cōnspectus et cōnsessus iste reficit et recreat mentem meam. (Cic. Planc. 2) ‘But now, judges, the act of seeing you and this gathering of yours restores and revives my mind.’ (37) Ea quae faciēbat tuā sē fīdūciā facere dīcēbat. (Cic. Verr. II.5.176) ‘What he was doing, he said he was doing out of trust in you.’ In (36), we see this with uester, which could be replaced with uestrī, and in (37), with tuā, for which tuī could also be used. For the part-whole relationship, the forms in -um are normal, as in nēmō nostrum ‘none of us’. Occasionally, this genitive is also found elsewhere, when we would expect a possessive adjective or indeed a genitive in -ī: (38) Recordāminī, quī diēs nudius tertius decimus fuerit, quantus cōnsēnsus uestrum, quanta uirtūs, quanta cōnstantia, quantam sītis ā populō Rōmānō laudem, quantam glōriam, quantam grātiam cōnsecūtī. (Cic. Phil. 5.2) ‘Remember twelve days ago how great your agreement was, how great your strength, how great your steadfastness, and what praise, what reputation, what gratitude you received from the Roman people.’ (39) Quā rē nōlī mē ad contentiōnem uestrum uocāre, Laterēnsis. (Cic. Planc. 16) ‘Therefore do not call upon me to make a comparison between you, Laterensis.’

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In (38), uester would be expected; Hofmann and Szantyr 1965, 61 argue that this usage is meant to avoid an abundance of adjectives, but this explanation seems a little forced for our passage. In (39), uestrī would be expected. All that this shows is that the distinctions made by traditional grammars work in the majority of cases, but usage is still in flux. Plautine usage is quite similar, but there are additional morphological variants: (40) Duōrum labōri ego hominum parsissem lubēns, meī tē rogandi et tīs respondendī mihī. (Plaut. Pseud. 5–6) ‘I’d have been happy to spare two people from trouble, me from asking you and you from answering me.’ In (40), rogandī takes an accusative tē and respondendī takes a dative mihī, just as the finite verbs would. The subjects are expressed through the genitives meī and tīs;¹⁴ the construction as such has not been discussed above, but has classical parallels.¹⁵ What is unusual is the form tīs, which is highly oldfashioned and for our passage only transmitted through Gellius. A variation that is well attested concerns the genitives for the whole, nostrum and uostrum, which alternate with nostrōrum and uostrōrum. Nostrōrum is found three times; here are two of the tokens: (41) Nam nostrōrum nēmō dignust. (Plaut. Poen. 861) ‘None of us deserves it.’ (42) Nec nōs quemquam flāgitāmus nec nōs quisquam flāgitāt; tuā causā nēmō nostrōrum est suōs ruptūrus rāmitēs. (Plaut. Poen. 539–40) ‘Neither do we demand anything from anyone, nor does anyone demand anything from us; none of us is going to rupture his lungs for your sake.’ (41) and (42) are not straightforward equivalents of the classical usage. In (41), the speaker is Syncerastus, a pimp’s slave, and he addresses the slave of another owner. He states that the gods should love neither himself nor his addressee, and that they should not love the pimp either. Nostrōrum nēmō could be treated as the equivalent of the classical construction, and I have translated it accordingly, as ‘none of us (three)’; but it could also mean ‘none of ours’, that is, nobody in the pimp’s

14 For the origin of this form see Meiser 1998, 157; it is based on an inherited form, but remodelled, and thus not necessarily older than tuī. 15 See Menge et al. 2000, 94–95 on the construction of gerundives.

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household, not the pimp, not Syncerastus, not any of the prostitutes. In that case, nostrōrum would be the genitive of nostrī ‘our people’, a large group of individuals, and not of nōs ‘us’, the three people mentioned in the preceding discourse. Similarly, nostrōrum in (42) could be treated as equivalent to classical nostrum, and again I have translated accordingly, ‘none of us’; but it could also mean ‘no one of our people’, that is, ‘no one who has the same (lowly but confident) social standing as us’, in which case the circle is widened. The two concepts are, however, closely related and easily confused. Originally, nostrum was simply the older form eventually replaced by nostrōrum, and nēmō nostrum was fully equivalent to nēmō nostrōrum, both meaning ‘no one among our people’. This then got reinterpreted as ‘no one of us’. While classical Latin chose the ending -ōrum for most nouns and adjectives, it retained the oldfashioned ending -um in this reinterpreted type of collocation. In this collocation type, early Latin still has the morphological variation between the old, successful form and the more modern, unsuccessful one; all instances can be interpreted in the classical way, but (41) and (42) do not have to be interpreted thus and are, in fact, ambiguous. But they are the only ambiguous tokens. The third attestation of nostrōrum is equivalent to classical nostrum: (43) … quī nequeās nostrōrum uter sīt Amphitruō dēcernere. (Plaut. Amph. frg. xiv) ‘… you, who cannot decide which of us is Amphitruo.’ Since there are only two people involved, the meaning is ‘which of us’, not ‘which of ours’, and we are dealing with a straightforward, classical part-whole relationship. In principle, the attestations of nostrum should in some instances also be ambiguous, but none of them are: (44) Nunc experiēmur nostrum uter sīt blandiōr. (Plaut. Cas. 274) ‘Now we’ll test which of us is more persuasive.’ Again only two people are involved, so the meaning is ‘which of us’. This is one of five attestations of nostrum, all with an unambiguous meaning. Vostrum is found six times, uostrōrum four times, and again the meaning is equivalent to classical uestrum each time. A bigger question now arises. Since pronouns make a distinction between possessive forms and forms for object genitives and forms for genitives of the whole, do we need to posit such underlying distinctions for the genitives of nouns as well, even though they do not surface? Are traditional grammars right after all? Sometimes it is sensible to posit underlying distinctions which never surface. For instance, we make a distinction between dative and ablative plural, even though they always

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look identical, because we can make such a distinction in morphological terms in the singular. However, here our situation is different. Pronouns are a separate word class, and the differences between the various types of pronominal genitive should perhaps almost be treated as lexical in nature. Lexical expressions are always more precise than grammatical ones, as we will also see with tense, our next topic.

4.2 Tense and Aspect 4.2.1 The Classical Tense System and the Sequence of Tenses One of the best outlines of tense across languages can be found in Comrie 1985. Here I follow a similar approach, based on the traditional Reichenbachian framework. Tense is a ‘deictic’ category, a category used for (metaphorical) pointing, which locates an event on the time axis. If we subscribe to such a linear understanding of time, we can locate three points on the axis: S, the moment of speech; E, the time at which the event we are talking about happens; and R, a reference point, providing us with a perspective from which we look at the event. In many cases, the reference point will be identical with the moment of speech; we speak of absolute tenses. These can be past, present, and future, as in English you sang, you sing, you will sing, where E happens before S, during S, and after S, respectively. German has a similar system, but the future tense is not as commonly used as in English, and the ‘present’ can be used instead; this is a leftover of an earlier Germanic system in which a past tense contrasted with a non-past. Thus, what is traditionally labelled the German present tense, du singst, could equally well be described as a non-past, with E happening at the same time as or later than S. In a tense system, the reference point may also be distinct from the moment of speech. The English past perfect is such a tense: you had sung is a double past tense, as it were; the event happens before a reference point which is, in turn, earlier than the moment of speech. Thus, when we use you had sung, this act of singing happened before some other past event, whether that past event is made explicit or left implicit. Another tense in which the reference point is different from the moment of speech is the past prospective, you were going to sing: here, the reference point lies before the moment of speech, but the event time comes later than the reference point (and often also later than the moment of speech). The tense expresses a plan made in the past and leaves it open whether that plan came to fruition or not. Next to the past prospective, there is also the present prospective, you are going to sing, with a reference point that is identical to the moment of speech. The event

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of singing is posterior to this reference point. But this raises the question what the difference is between you will sing and you are going to sing: the future tense locates the event after the moment of speech, and the prospective locates it posterior to a reference point which happens to be identical with the moment of speech; at first sight, then, these should not differ. And indeed, if we were to look at tense as no more than a poor reflection of time, there need not be any temporal difference; many events could be referred to with either tense. However, tense does more than locating events on the time axis; it can inform us which events are background and which ones are foreground, and so on. The simple future you will sing presents an event as much more inevitable than the prospective you are going to sing, which is more of a plan and may be cancelled. In many instances, we have a choice between such tenses, because the time reference is identical, but there are subtle nuances of meaning that can be conveyed through such choices.¹⁶ For aspect across the world’s languages, Comrie 1976 still provides an excellent introduction. Aspect also has to do with time, but it is not a deictic category. Rather, aspect is about ‘situation-internal’ time. For instance, the difference between the English progressive (periphrastic constructions in -ing) and non-progressive is that between a snapshot view of an event and viewing an event as a whole. The progressive looks at the event from the inside, as it were, and the non-progressive, from the outside: (45) I was reading the newspaper when Stuart burst in. Here, the progressive was reading does not entail that the event reached a conclusion; I may have finished the paper later, or I may not have done so, but the sentence does not tell me. We get a snapshot view of the event reading the newspaper. The non-progressive burst in, on the other hand, describes that event as a whole. Aspect interacts with the type of action that is expressed by a verb and its complements. For example, knock on the door only takes a second or so. But now compare (46): (46) Stuart was knocking on the door. It is hard to take a snapshot view of an event that has almost no duration. By using the progressive, then, we indicate that the knocking was repeated several times. This repetition makes a ‘situation-internal’ view possible.

16 For such nuances in English see especially Leech 1976.

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Other languages, like Russian, have a distinction between imperfective and perfective, which is similar to the one between progressive and non-progressive; but while in English the progressive is the marked choice in all tenses other than the present, in Russian the imperfective is more common than the perfective. There is a fair amount of overlap between these systems, but we cannot equate them. A different kind of aspect, somewhat akin to a tense, is the perfect aspect; a past action has present relevance. This is a core meaning of the classical Greek perfect. The English perfect, you have sung, is somewhat similar in function insofar as it requires both a past and a present component; notice how it is not possible to combine you have sung with yesterday or other past adverbials. But the exact kind of present connection differs from verb class to verb class. You have lived in London for ten years means that you are still living there, while you lived in London for ten years implies that you are now elsewhere. On the other hand, you have eaten all the sausages does not mean that you are still eating; the present relevance may consist in the fact that none are left. The best discussion of Latin tense and aspect is, in my opinion, still Pinkster 1983. Pinkster’s starting-point is morphology; Table 4.1 presents an inventory of the forms of the active indicative (see also de Melo 2007c, 28). Table 4.1: The tense system in the active indicative.

Past Present Future

Anterior (dīc-s-)

Simultaneous (dīc-)

Posterior (dictūrus)

dīxeram ‘I had said’ dīxī ‘I have said’ dīxerō ‘I will have said’

dīcēbam ‘I was saying’ dīcō ‘I am saying’ dīcam ‘I will be saying’

dictūrus eram ‘I was going to say’ dictūrus sum ‘I am going to say’ dictūrus erō ‘I will be going to say’

This is an incredibly neat system, with no gaps in the morphology. For Pinkster, the match between form and meaning is equally neat. The verb stem (or the participle in -ūrus) expresses relative tense: anterior for the perfect stem, simultaneous for the present stem, and posterior for the forms in -ūrus. The endings (or the copula in the case of the periphrastic forms) express absolute tense, past, present, future. Such a neat one-to-one match between morphology and meaning should not be taken for granted. Not all languages with symmetrical morphological systems allow us to calculate the meaning of individual forms based on their constituent parts. In English, for example, the distinction between progressive and non-progressive shows one obvious asymmetry: in most tenses, the non-progressive indicates that an action is performed in its entirety, compare I was reading the book (but perhaps did not finish) with I read the book (and did finish); in the present, on the other hand, I am reading entails work in progress, but I read is habitual. This asymmetry

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is easy to explain: the present is difficult to combine conceptually with performing something in its entirety.¹⁷ In Latin, however, almost all tense usages are predictable from morphology. Corresponding to the English distinction between you will sing (simple future) and you are going to sing (prospective), we have a Latin one between simple future and -ūrus sum, with an identical meaning difference: the progressive indicates a plan which can be cancelled. This cancellation is particularly common in the past prospective in -ūrus eram. Just as simple future and present prospective can refer to the same event, but with different perspectives, so perfect and imperfect can be used for identical events. If something is anterior to the moment of speech, it can also be viewed as being simultaneous with a past reference point. However, the two tenses are, again, not interchangeable. The perfect is used for main events that are foregrounded, while the imperfect is used for background information. We can see this statistically: perfect and imperfect both occur in main and subordinate clauses, but the frequency of the perfect is substantially higher in main clauses, which are of course associated with foregrounded events. When perfects are combined, they typically denote a sequence of events, as in Caesar’s famous uēnī uīdī uīcī ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’; in our analysis, imperfects are simultaneous to something past, and so a string of imperfects will be interpreted as overlapping in time. That explains why with expressions like bis ‘twice’, we never find the imperfect, since we are dealing with sequences; in the clause sed fuī … bis in Bīthȳniā ‘but I was in Bithynia twice’ (Cic. Planc. 84), eram would be impossible. It is sometimes claimed that the future perfect is not yet an anterior tense in early Latin, but expresses perfective aspect. This claim arises from the fact that there are quite a few attestations of the future perfect in main clauses. If the future perfect was an anterior tense, how can we explain its appearance in main clauses? I discuss this matter in some detail in de Melo 2007c, 21–50. While it is indisputable that at some point the future perfect did indeed mark perfective aspect rather than anteriority, there are few idiomatic leftovers of this earlier situation to be found in Plautus. On the whole, the future perfect is indeed more common in subordinate clauses than in main clauses: within two comedies, there are 185 simple futures in main clauses, but only 5 future perfects; whereas in subordinate clauses, there are 17 simple futures and 24 future perfects. Over the whole of Plautus, there are admittedly quite a few main clause future perfects, but they pale into insignificance compared with the sheer number of simple futures. Most of these future

17 There are of course exceptions, like performative speech acts (I declare you man and wife) or live sports reports (here comes Jones and scores!).

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perfects can be explained as being anterior to some other main clause, without this anteriority being reflected in formal subordination. The table above, with its nine cells, works very well for the active indicative. That said, in the passive and in the subjunctive, there are fewer cells. In the passive, the entire righthand column disappears: the participle in -ūrus simply does not have a passive counterpart; here, the ‘simultaneous’ forms are really non-anterior and do duty for simultaneity and posteriority (Table 4.2). And in the subjunctive, the bottom row vanishes because there is no subjunctive of the future tense. The subjunctives that mark ‘present’ tense are really non-past forms here, doing duty for present and future (Table 4.3). And finally, if we combine passive and subjunctive, only four cells are left. Table 4.2: The tense system in the passive indicative.

Past Present Future

Anterior (dictum)

Non-anterior (dīc-)

dictum erat ‘it had been said’ dictum est ‘it has been said’ dictum erit ‘it will have been said’

dīcēbātur ‘it was said’ dīcitur ‘it is said’ dīcētur ‘it will be said’

Table 4.3: The tense system in the active subjunctive. Anterior (dīc-s-)

Simultaneous (dīc-)

Posterior (dictūrus)

Past

dīxissem ‘I would have said’

dīcerem ‘I would be saying’

Non-past

dīxerim ‘I may have said’

dīcam ‘I may be saying’

dictūrus essem ‘I would be going to say’ dictūrus sim ‘I may be going to say’

Tense and aspect always interact with mood and voice. Since subjunctives are partly a sign of subordination and are thus more common in subordinate clauses than in main clauses, the combination of subjunctive mood and imperfect tense is extremely common, as is the combination of indicative mood and perfect tense. Statistically, imperfect indicatives and perfect subjunctives are less common. Similarly, passives more commonly express states than actives do; and since the perfect tense has a complex meaning, of being anterior to a present reference point, it can function both as a past narrative tense and as a present state. Now the narrative function predominates in the active, and the stative one in the passive, and we can see this neatly from the sequence of tenses: secondary sequence, a diagnostic for past meaning of the superordinate verb, is more common with the perfect active than with the perfect passive.

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On this note, we can now turn to the cōnsecūtiō temporum or ‘sequence of tenses’; if we accept the meanings of the verb stems and endings outlined above, the sequence of tense rules make a great deal of sense. English has a similar phenomenon to what we find in Latin, called ‘backshift of tenses’: (47) I believe that Susan will be a great athlete (in future, if she keeps practising) / is a great athlete (now) / was a great athlete (in the past, when she was younger). (48) I used to believe that Susan would be a great athlete / was a great athlete / had been a great athlete. In (47), the superordinate verb, believe, is in the present tense, and the subordinate clause can be posterior to it, simultaneous with it, or anterior to it; these three alternatives are expressed through the future will be, the present is, and the simple past was. If the superordinate verb stands in a past tense, like the past habitual used to believe in (48), we can still express the relative concepts of posteriority, simultaneity, and anteriority, but there is also a ‘backshift of tenses’, or an assimilation in absolute tense: hence would be instead of will, was instead of is, and had been instead of was. In English, backshift is not always obligatory: (49) The teacher even had to tell him that two times two equalled / equals four. Backshift (equalled) is possible when we want to make it explicit that the subordinate clause renders the content of the teacher’s words and that the main and subordinate clauses are closely linked. But lack of backshift (equals) is also common in order to show that the content of the subordinate clause is a timeless truth. The Latin sequence of tenses can be explained with a few made-up examples: (50) Magister nōbīs dīcit quid factūrus sit / faciat / fēcerit. ‘The teacher is telling us what he is going to do / is doing / has done.’ (51) Dat mihi argentum nē sē nēquīquam adiuuem / adiūuerim. ‘He is giving me money so that I am not supporting / have not supported him for nothing.’ (52) Magister nōbīs dīxit quid factūrus esset / faceret / fēcisset. ‘The teacher told us what he was going to do / was doing / had done.’ (53) Dedit mihi argentum nē sē nēquīquam adiuuārem / adiūuissem. ‘He gave me money so that I would not support / had not supported him for nothing.’

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In (50), the superordinate verb is in the present tense; an indirect question depends on this non-past verb. The tenses used in such indirect questions are the periphrastic subjunctive for posteriority, the present subjunctive for simultaneity, and the perfect subjunctive for anteriority. If we accept the table above, these usages are easy to explain: the endings (or the copula) all mark the absolute tense ‘present’, while the verb stems (or the future participle) indicate the relative tenses, posterior, simultaneous, and anterior. It may seem awkward to describe the perfect subjunctive as a present, but it is a present only insofar as it marks a state of affairs that is anterior to a present anchoring point. In classical Latin, posteriority is only expressed in indirect questions and quīn-clauses, and in early Latin, the expression of posteriority is even more restricted; we will come back to this in the next part. (51), a comparable example with a main clause in the present tense, only has two options in the subordinate ut-clause because posteriority cannot be expressed; in such cases, the ‘present’ subjunctive is really a non-past form (simultaneous with or posterior to a present reference point). While (50) and (51) are examples of ‘primary’ sequence, (52) and (53) show ‘secondary’ sequence or backshift. The superordinate verbs, dīxit and dedit, are now in the perfect, and in the subordinate clauses, the posterior subjunctive with sit is replaced by one with esset, the present subjunctive is turned into an imperfect subjunctive, and the perfect subjunctive gives way to a pluperfect one. As we can see, the stems in these subordinate clauses are the same as in the preceding two examples: the future participle for posteriority, the present stem for simultaneity, and the perfect stem for anteriority. But the endings have been backshifted to past, as an assimilation to the past meaning of the main clause. The sequence of tenses thus follows naturally from the meanings of stems and endings outlined in the table above. There are various finer points to the sequence of tenses, but they can all be explained by clashes between morphology and meaning. I have already mentioned that perfects can take secondary sequence or primary sequence, the latter being rarer; this depends on whether the perfect functions as a narrative past tense or as a present state. Similarly, historical presents can take primary or secondary sequence; in the former case, the sequence rules follow the normal morphological pattern, but in the latter case, they treat the main clause verb as a past tense, which is its actual function. For other such cases, see de Melo 2007c, 57–87.

4.2.2 The Rise of the Forms in -ūrus In classical Latin, the use of forms in -ūrus is not optional: in indirect questions and quīn-clauses that are posterior, such forms have to be employed within

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periphrastic subjunctives, and if an accusative-and-infinitive construction is posterior, a periphrastic infinitive is likewise obligatory. In early Latin, the situation is more complex. Let us begin with the periphrastic subjunctive and usages that are also normal in classical Latin: (54) Nescīs quid ego āctūrus sim nec facinus quantum exōrdiār. (Plaut. Bacch. 722) ‘You don’t know what I’m going to do and what great deed I’m beginning.’ (55) Ībo hinc intrō, perscrūtābōr fānum, si inueniam uspiam aurum. (Plaut. Aul. 620–1) ‘I’ll go inside and search the shrine, to see if I can find the gold anywhere.’ (56) Sĭ est, factūrus ut sīt officium suom, faciāt. (Ter. Ad. 514–15) ‘If it is the case that he’s going to do his duty, let him do it.’ In (54), we can see usages that mirror those of classical Latin precisely: posteriority is expressed through a periphrastic form, āctūrus sim ‘I am going to do’, while simultaneity is rendered with a regular present subjunctive, exōrdiār ‘I am beginning (now)’. In (55), the sī-clause is not really conditional or pseudo-conditional, but functions as an indirect question. Finding the gold is, strictly speaking, posterior, but even in classical Latin one would not use a periphrastic subjunctive, since the subjunctive expresses a modal, potential meaning, and for such meanings, posteriority is usually not expressed. In ut-clauses, one does not normally find periphrastic future subjunctives, but (56) contains such a subjunctive; since in ut-clauses the present subjunctive is vague between simultaneity and posteriority, and here the emphasis is on posteriority, the periphrastic subjunctive makes sense (and could also be used in classical Latin). So far we have not seen anything that goes against classical rules. In de Melo 2007c, 57–60, I note that periphrastic future expressions are remarkably rare in indirect questions and quīn-clauses in the early period; however, while this constitutes a clear statistical difference from classical Latin, it is also hard to find examples where early Latin uses a non-periphrastic form and classical Latin would have to use a periphrastic one. Normally, the non-periphrastic forms allow for modal explanations. Ultimately, then, the rules are basically the same for the early and the classical period, but their application differs, with classical Latin having a preference for expressing futurity. However, when it comes to the accusative-and-infinitive construction, the rules do differ between early and classical Latin (details in de Melo 2007d). Here are some accusative-and-infinitive constructions expressing posteriority:

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(57) Ego quidem amōrēs meōs mēcum cōnfīdō fore. (Plaut. Poen. 1165) ‘I for one trust that my sweetheart will be with me.’ (58) Me īnferre Venerī uōuī iāientāculum. (Plaut. Curc. 72) ‘I vowed to offer a breakfast to Venus.’ (59) Nōn ita rēs est, nam cōnfīdō parasītum hodie aduentūrum cum argento ad mē. (Plaut. Curc. 143–4) ‘It’s not like that; I trust that my hanger-on will come to me today with the money.’ In (57), posteriority is expressed through the future infinitive fore,¹⁸ in (58), through the present infinitive īnferre, and in (59), through the future infinitive aduentūrum. In (57), fore could probably not be replaced by esse, but in (58) and (59), present and future could be interchanged. The main factor here is telicity. An event is telic if it has a clear endpoint, as in run a mile, and atelic if it lacks such an endpoint, as in run. No one runs forever, so it is understood that run will also come to an end sooner or later, but this endpoint is not expressed by linguistic means. We can see whether an event is telic or not if we interrupt it: Mary stopped running a mile entails that she did not run a mile, while Mary stopped running entails that she did, in fact, run. ‘To be with someone’ in (57) is atelic; the speaker does not envisage an endpoint. But ‘to offer’ in (58) and ‘to come’ in (59) have natural endpoints. In Plautus and Terence, posteriority is regularly expressed when an event is atelic; but when it is telic, there is a choice between present and future infinitive. But why should this be the case? Let us look at some English examples: (60) (at a party:) I think John is leaving. (61) (at a party:) I think John is going to leave. (62) (at the beach:) I think John is swimming. (63) (at the beach:) I think John is going to swim. To leave is telic, to swim is atelic. With telic events, the difference between present progressive and the periphrasis with going to is minimal or non-existent. Perhaps

18 Historically, this infinitive continues a present infinitive of *bh uH2 - ‘to become’, as can be seen clearly from the ending.

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in (60) John has already put on his jacket or made some other move, while this is not the case in (61); but in many scenarios, the two sentences are interchangeable. This is because telic events have an endpoint, and this endpoint can never be strictly simultaneous with the superordinate verb. A present progressive must then be interpreted as posterior. But the situation is different with atelic events: in (62), John is already swimming, in (63), he has not yet started. With atelic events, the difference between simultaneous and posterior is obvious, and this means that there is a clear difference between present progressive and the periphrasis with going to. Within Indo-European languages, infinitives were created relatively late. They are normally fossilized case forms of verbal nouns. Ancient Greek dialects have vastly different infinitive endings, and the Latin present infinitive in -re (old locative of an s-stem, *-s-i) is also very different from the Osco-Umbrian ones in -om (old accusative). But the Latin future infinitive is a particularly late creation, with no semantic parallels in Osco-Umbrian. Before these future infinitives were created, the present infinitive could have been more accurately described as a non-past infinitive, to be interpreted as present or future, as required by context. When future infinitives arose, it made sense that they should have become obligatory for atelic events first, since there the difference between simultaneous and posterior is obvious. Only after they had become obligatory there did they spread to telic events.¹⁹ But we can go one step further. Gellius (1.7, see also Postgate 1894 and 1904) tells us that originally the future infinitive ended in -ūrum, regardless of the gender and number of the subject accusative. Such forms would not be combined with esse. Not all of Gellius’ examples are equally convincing, but at the same time not all of them can be explained by textual corruption: (64) Per omnīs deōs et deās dēierāuīt occīsūrum eam hāc nocte quīcum cubārēt. (Plaut. Cas. 670–1) ‘She swore by all the gods and goddesses that she’d kill the man who she sleeps with this night.’ The subject of dēierāuīt ‘she swore’ is Casina, a woman; the subject accusative is not expressed, but the subject of the infinitive is again Casina. Hence one would expect occīsūram, agreeing with her. But here we have the original type of uninflected infinitive, with an old and fossilized accusative ending. When such forms were combined with masculine or neuter singular subject accusatives, they could be reanalysed as participles, and this is how the future participle began its life. In

19 Note again fore, a future infinitive of ‘to be’; this started as a present infinitive of ‘to become’, a telic verb, which allowed this reanalysis.

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the accusative and infinitive, it was then combined with esse (although esse is still often left out in early Latin, as a hangover of the earlier situation). And from there, a periphrastic future subjunctive was created, but, as we said earlier, such forms were still comparatively rare in early Latin because their genesis was even later.

4.2.3 The Sigmatic Future in Plautus and Terence Early Latin contains a substantial number of forms that do not fit into classical paradigms. While a subjunctive like siem can simply be ‘translated’ into classical sim ‘I may be’, occupying exactly the same present subjunctive slot, the same cannot be said for forms like faxō and faxim, from facere ‘to do, make’, or duim, from dare ‘to give’, or attigam, from attingere ‘to touch’. These forms do not fit into the neat opposition between present and perfect stem. Faxō functions as some type of future, while the other forms are subjunctives. But what are their exact temporal or aspectual meanings? And how productive are they? I discuss such forms extensively in de Melo 2007c as well as de Melo 2002, 2004, 2005. Here I want to present the main findings for the future type faxō because of the diachronic element involved; all too often, morphological reconstruction does not take synchronic patterns into account, but I believe that sometimes such synchronic patterns can help us when the morphology is obscure. A look at the data reveals a remarkable pattern of distribution. Table 4.2 presents the tokens of sigmatic futures in Plautus and Terence, in other words, the raw numbers of all the attestations. Table 4.4: The sigmatic future (tokens).

Plautus Terence

Subordinate clauses

Main clauses

53 1

70 9

In Plautus, there are more tokens in main clauses than in subordinate ones; in Terence, tokens remain moderately common in main clauses,²⁰ but in subordinate clauses there is only one token left. However, let us now look at types instead, in other words, at how many different verbs all the attestations actually belong to (Table 4.3). 20 The Terentian corpus consists of only six comedies as opposed to the twenty complete ones by Plautus.

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Table 4.5: The sigmatic future (types).

Plautus Terence

Subordinate clauses

Main clauses

29 1

1 1

This table shows that there are twenty-nine different verbs in Plautus that have sigmatic indicative forms in subordinate clauses, but that there is only one verb that appears in main clauses in such a form. And we must add that the verbs in subordinate clauses occur in all persons and numbers, while the only form in main clauses is faxō, the first person singular. Terence, too, only uses faxō in main clauses. Because of this distributional pattern it is essential to look at the semantics, register, and productivity of the forms in subordinate and main clauses separately. Let us begin with subordinate clauses. The vast majority of sigmatic indicative forms in subordinate clauses occur in conditional clauses (forty-eight in Plautus, one in Terence); only a few forms are found in relative clauses (two in Plautus) and in temporal clauses (three in Plautus). As we have seen, it is generally acknowledged that these forms have future reference, but that in itself does not tell us much about their semantics. However, the sigmatic futures in subordinate clauses are often co-ordinated with future perfects, as in (65): (65) Si hercle tu ex istōc locō digitum trānsuorsum aut unguem lātum excesseris aut sī respexis, dōnicum ego tē iusserō, continuo hercle ego tē dēdam discipulam crucī. (Plaut. Aul. 56–9) ‘Well, if you leave your place by just a finger’s or a nail’s breadth or if you look back before I’ve told you, I’ll immediately put you on the cross, and that’ll teach you your lesson.’ In (65), the clause with the future perfect excesseris is co-ordinated with the clause containing the sigmatic future respexis. It is unlikely that respexis has a temporal reference different from that of excesseris, since it merely introduces a more specific condition, not a new one. Similar co-ordination of sigmatic future and future perfect in conditional clauses can also be found elsewhere. Other instances of co-ordination and parallelism also seem to indicate that the sigmatic futures have the same temporal reference as the future perfects in subordinate clauses. The future perfects are used to show that the event in the subordinate

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clause is over before the one in the main clause begins. Consequently, the sigmatic futures are also likely to indicate anteriority. Just like the future perfects, they can all be interpreted as perfective, but unlike them, they are restricted to telic verbs. This restriction may not be relevant for the synchronic semantics, but it could point to an aoristic origin of the sigmatic forms. While it is true that we expect the protases of most conditional clauses to refer to events anterior to those mentioned in the apodoses (and similar considerations may be made for other subordinate clauses), the anterior reference of our sigmatic forms does not necessarily depend on the subordinate clauses to which they belong. We can also find conditional clauses which do not express anteriority to main clauses, and in such cases it is the simple future that is used in the protases: (66) Immō sī placēbit, ūtitōr, cōnsilium sī nōn placēbit, reperītōte rēctius. (Plaut. Epid. 263–4) ‘Well, if you like my plan, use it; if you two don’t like it, find a better one.’ In (66), the addressees must still like the plan when the main clause action begins. In other words, the co-ordination of sigmatic forms and future perfects is significant. If this is so, how do the sigmatic futures differ in usage from the future perfects? The distinction is not one of meaning, but of register, with the sigmatic forms preferring high-register contexts (song rather than spoken verse, parodies of laws, and so on). The fact that the sigmatic forms in subordinate clauses belong to a higher register may be interpreted in different ways. At one extreme, high register may signal that the forms have lost their productivity and are restricted to formulae that have an archaic and solemn ring to them. Is this a likely interpretation for the forms in Plautus and Terence? In relative and temporal clauses they are indeed so rare that they can hardly be called productive in Plautus, and in Terence they do not occur at all in these contexts. However, in conditional clauses there are forty-eight tokens in Plautus (as opposed to the one form in Terence). This is not a negligible number; can we therefore call the sigmatic indicatives productive in Plautine conditional clauses? They are not found in formulaic phrases, and the forty-eight tokens belong to twenty-seven different verbs. Such a pattern of distribution does not speak for fossilization. Let us now look at main clauses. The only form that occurs in main clauses is faxō: there are forty-one instances in Plautus and nine in Terence. They are found in different constructions, for example in the type faxō hīc aderit, which could provisionally be translated as ‘I shall bring it about that he shall be here’. Consequently, this is a causative construction.

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Typical examples are (67) and (68): (67) Cētera haec posterius faxō scībis ubi erit ōtium. (Plaut. Epid. 656) ‘I’ll let you know about the rest later when we have leisure.’ (68) Immo ollī mītem faxō faciant fustibus. (Afran. com. 67 (Diuortium)) ‘I shall see to it that those people make his … soft with cudgels.’²¹ The verb with which faxō is construed can be (i) a simple future as in (67) (forty-eight times in Plautus, five times in Terence), (ii) a present subjunctive as in (68) (fourteen times in Plautus, twice in Terence), (iii) a future perfect (five times in Plautus), and (iv) a perfect subjunctive (once in Plautus). In addition, there is one instance of faxō ut (Plaut. Asin. 897), and there is also faxō with a double accusative (once in Plautus and twice in Terence). If we compare these constructions with those of classical Latin, one obvious contrast is in the use of ut: faciō ut + subjunctive is the normal causative formation of classical Latin, while ut is almost always missing here. In early Latin, however, we have many sequences of verbal forms followed by subjunctives without ut. Particularly frequent is the type fac + subjunctive, where the imperative fac alternates with fac ut; less frequent, but attested, is the future faciam + subjunctive. Thus, in the constructions of faxō we must assume that the forms without ut are the original ones, while the one example with ut is an innovation based on faciam ut. What is a striking phenomenon is not the absence of ut, but the presence of a future or future perfect in the slot otherwise occupied by the subjunctive. This could perhaps be explained if faxō began as a parenthetic causative construction. Are there any semantic differences between the constructions? As far as we can see, faxō + simple future and faxō + present subjunctive are not distinct from each other. They occur in the same contexts and there are no restrictions as to what verbs can be governed by faxō. In those instances where faxō selects a future perfect, this future perfect has the value it would also have in independent main clauses. In (69), for instance, the future perfect indicates the result of the action expressed by the verb:

21 The line is textually problematic. It is a complete iambic senarius, but Nonius does not regularly quote complete syntactic units. It is not clear which body part needs to be softened (if we take ollī as a dative); alternatively, ollī could be a nominative plural, and we have to understand hunc or some other accusative pronoun from context.

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(69) Iam ego hŏc ipsum oppidum expugnātum faxo erit lēnōnium. (Plaut. Pseud. 766) ‘I’ll make sure that this pimp town itself will be conquered instantly.’ Here, Pseudolus uses the future perfect not to indicate that he will be doing something, but rather that he will have done it and that the results will then be obvious to everyone. However, a causative interpretation is not always possible, as can be seen from (70): (70) Atque ob ĭstanc industriam etiam faxo amābit amplius. (Plaut. Men. 791) ‘And because of your officiousness I bet he’ll make love to her even more.’ Here the causative translation ‘I shall bring it about that’ would be absurd. The speaker is a father telling his daughter off and warning her that her husband will be drawn to a prostitute even more because she is such a controlling character. A father cannot want his daughter’s husband to love a courtesan. The father is not the causer – he has nothing to do with his son-in-law’s love for another woman. In fact, the cause is his daughter’s behaviour. In contexts like this, faxō has been reanalysed and can be translated adverbially as ‘certainly’ or ‘surely’. It has become a marker of certainty. There are two ways in which we can interpret this: the first is that in contexts like these, faxō has been reanalysed syntactically and has become an adverb (in faxō + future) or a ‘subordinator’ selecting the subjunctive (in faxō + subjunctive). The word ‘subordinator’ is not a very good one, though, because subordinators introduce subordinate clauses that cannot stand on their own, while faxō does not do so. But we can compare faxō to forsitan + subjunctive (‘perhaps’). Alternatively, faxō could have been reanalysed purely semantically and could have become a parenthetical expression meaning ‘I assume’. In many cases, faxō can be interpreted as either causative or non-causative: if the speaker wants to be seen as the causer, faxō is verbal; otherwise it is a marker of certainty. But in that respect most examples are ambiguous because the speaker has a choice. Sometimes one interpretation is more likely than the other, for instance in (71): (71) Vbi nunc Curculiōnem inueniam? – In trīticō facillumē, uel quīngentōs curculiōnēs pro ūnō faxō reperiās. (Plaut. Curc. 586–587) ‘Where should I now find Curculio, this weevil? – Very easily in the wheat; I bet you’ll even find five hundred weevils instead of one.’

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In (71), the person who replies can hardly be seen as the causer, so we interpret this as a marker of certainty. But (70) and (71) are the only examples where faxō is clearly not causative. If faxō as a marker of certainty is not verbal any more because it has been reanalysed in some contexts, we can look at syntactic criteria as to where faxō has to be verbal and thus causative: in faxō ut, faxō is verbal because otherwise there could be no subordinator ut. And when there is ego faxō instead of mere faxō, this must be verbal – otherwise it would make no sense to express a subject ego. Similarly, when faxō is combined with a double accusative it has to be verbal, or the clause would have no verb at all. But if faxō as a marker of certainty is still verbal, only faxō + double accusative has to be causative from a syntactic point of view. What is the temporal meaning of faxō? We used ‘I shall bring it about that’ as a provisional translation for faxō. In subordinate clauses, the type faxō can always be interpreted as anterior; in main clauses, no such interpretation is possible. Here the speakers simply refer to the future; it is impossible to detect any anteriority. The examples can be translated perfectively, but not imperfectively: ‘I’ll be in the process of making them make’ does not make any sense. However, this perfective interpretation can simply be the result of the kinds of speech acts that we are dealing with: faxō is used in promises and threats, and we normally promise or threaten to do things completely, from beginning to end. We learn more from the tenses with which faxō is co-ordinated. In (72) it is the simple future: (72) Ībo ego ad trīsuirōs uostraque ibi nōmina faxo erunt, capitis tē perdam ego et fīliam. (Plaut. Asin. 131–2) ‘I’ll immediately go from here to the Board of Three and make sure your names are with them. I’ll destroy you and your daughter utterly.’ Here, faxō is co-ordinated with two simple futures, ībō and perdam. The general conclusion is that in main clauses faxō has simple future meaning and does not correspond to a future perfect. This is a crucial difference from the sigmatic forms of the subordinate clauses. It is time to move towards a broader picture. Two questions arise immediately: first, why is there a variety of forms in subordinate clauses, but not in main clauses? And second, why do we only find faxō in main clauses, that is, a first person singular indicative, and neither first persons of other verbs nor other persons of the same verb? We need not be too surprised to find a difference between subordinate and main clauses. Typologically, it is well known that these two types of clauses can

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obey different constraints. Quite often there are prosodic and syntactic differences: in Vedic the verb is accented in subordinate clauses, but unaccented and clitic in main clauses, and in German and Dutch the word order is not the same in the two clause types. But it has to be admitted that these are differences of syntax rather than of morphology as in the Latin case. And why do these archaic, high-register forms in subordinate clauses occur mainly in conditional protases? The reason is not entirely clear, but it may well be that old and solemn legal phrases such as sī quisquam aliuta faxit (‘if anyone does otherwise’, Lex reg. (Paul. Fest. p. 6)) are partly responsible. After all, legal language is especially rich in conditional clauses. The survival of faxō in main clauses is only understandable if faxō + future or subjunctive has a special idiomatic status, either as a causative construction or as a marker of certainty (be it verbal or not). As some uses of faxō are clearly verbal, we must ask why we have no evidence for faxis or other persons of this verb in main clauses. Here there may be a series of concomitant reasons. The form appears mainly in promises and threats, and speech acts like these naturally call for firstperson verbs. We asked initially what the function of the sigmatic indicative forms was and whether they indicated tense or aspect. They do mark futurity, but there seems to be a clear split between the forms used in subordinate and main clauses. The ones in subordinate clauses alternate with the future perfect tense and indicate future anteriority and conclusion; on the other hand, the isolated faxō in main clauses cannot indicate anteriority as the future perfects do and seems much closer to the simple future tense. The examples can all be interpreted as being perfective, but synchronically this aspectual feature does not seem to be their main characteristic. The difference in usage between main and subordinate clauses naturally raises the question of how the split may have occurred and what the tokens in main and subordinate clauses have in common. The fossilized main clause faxō is more likely to have preserved the original value, and therefore the anterior meaning of the other forms seems to be secondary. Two factors may have caused them to take on the anteriority meaning of the future perfects: (a) the preponderance of anterior statements in some types of subordinate clauses in general and in the protases of conditionals in particular, and (b) the fact that the sigmatic indicatives are restricted to telic verbs, and that the forms can always be interpreted as perfective. As we have seen, the productivity of the sigmatic forms is limited. In conditional clauses they are still a real presence in early laws and in Plautus, but almost entirely absent from Terence. After that they only survive as archaisms. This is not surprising since their semantic content does not differ from that of the future perfect, which is much better integrated into the regular Latin tense system. To judge from Terence, faxō in main clauses had a longer life, partly because its idiomatic

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uses guaranteed its survival. However, as a causative its role was taken over by faciam ut, while there were other contenders for its function as a marker of certainty. Morphologically, faxō was isolated, and that furthered its disappearance. With regard to the question of why the forms die out in the way they do, it seems that the lack of integration into a paradigm combined with the lack of a special meaning is one reason. Moreover, it is the forms in subordinate clauses that die out first, presumably because they are stylistically marked. We can now briefly look at reconstruction. Sigmatic forms are variously considered to go back to modal forms of the s-aorist or to s-desideratives; either one could easily yield futures. On morphological grounds, it is almost impossible to decide: none of the reconstructed s-desideratives is an exact match for the Latin formations, but at the same time faxō as an aoristic formation could not be old either, because for this verb we can securely reconstruct a root aorist (continued in fēcī). This is where our synchronic analysis can be helpful: while desideratives or modal aorist formations could be reanalysed as futures, the perfectivity of the main clause form faxō and the subsequent reanalysis of sigmatic futures as future perfects in subordinate clauses only make sense if these forms go back to perfective forms, and aorists are perfective, while desideratives need not be so. Here I do not have space to discuss the meaning of the sigmatic subjunctives, but again, their distribution patterns fit well with modal forms of the aorist: they are common in wishes and prohibitions, but absent in commands; common in nēclauses, but excluded from ut-clauses. But if we accept an aoristic prehistory of our forms, what do we make of faxō? I assume that despite its frequency, it is a relatively recent analogical formation, based on forms like dīxō ‘I will have said’ and its subjunctival counterpart dīxim. We can now turn to the question of how meaning and intended meanings can influence syntax.

4.3 Pragmatic Influences on Syntactic Patterns In this section, we will look at indirect speech, at the influence that one construction can exert on another because of a related meaning, and at the diachronic side, reanalysis and grammaticalization.

4.3.1 A Footnote on Indirect Speech The rules for indirect speech are straightforward: declarative main clauses are turned into accusative-and-infinitive constructions, while subordinate clauses

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must stand in the subjunctive;²² the sequence rules are followed. Main clauses which are questions become indirect questions, again as one might expect. Exceptions are predominantly motivated pragmatically. Thus, rhetorical questions are not turned into indirect questions, but into accusative-and-infinitive constructions, as in (73) and (74) (both taken from Menge et al. 2000, 657): (73) Quodsī ueteris contumēliae oblīuīscī uellent, num etiam recentium iniūriārum memoriam dēpōnere posse? (Caes. Gall. 1.14.3) ‘But if they wanted to forget about the old insult, would they also be able to let go of the memory of recent injustices?’ (74) Quid esse leuius aut turpius quam auctōre hoste dē summīs rēbus capere cōnsilium? (Caes. Gall. 5.28.6) ‘What was weaker or more loathsome than to make a decision about issues of the utmost importance on the advice of the enemy?’ The rationale for this behaviour is obvious: rhetorical questions are formally questions, but no answer is expected, because pragmatically they function as forceful statements. Meaning matters more than form. The situation is, naturally, the same for questions that function as exclamations: (75) Quae Lucceium loquī, quae tōtam Graeciam, quae uērō Theophanem! (Cic. Att. 9.11.3) ‘What was Lucceius saying, what was the whole of Greece saying, and what, moreover, was Theophanes saying!’ Again, function overrides form. Relative clauses behave in interesting ways. Most of the time, they remain finite and are turned into subjunctival clauses. However, on occasion they end up in the accusative and infinitive instead: (76) V̄numquemque nostrum cēnsent philosophī mundī esse partem, ex quō illud cōnsequī, ut commūnem ūtilitātem nostrae antepōnāmus. (Cic. fin. 3.64) ‘Philosophers believe that each of us is a part of the universe, from which it follows that we should place the common good ahead of our own.’

22 The exception consists of those subordinate clauses which are the author’s own comments and thus stand outside the confines of the indirect speech proper.

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The explanation proffered by Menge et al. 2000, 658 is that in indirect speech, relative clauses in the subjunctive reflect genuine relative clauses, but those in the accusative and infinitive would, in direct speech, be main clauses with relative connections. While this explanation can be made to work in most instances, it is a little post hoc for my taste. Perhaps it is better to accept that the boundary between main and subordinate clauses is somewhat fluid, especially among relative clauses, and that there is therefore some fluidity in how they behave in indirect speech (see also Pfister 1995).

4.3.2 Constructions Influencing Each Other In the discussion of the Latin case system, we saw some synchronic oddities, like parcere ‘to spare’ with the dative. Sometimes, these are made to follow the regular patterns: an entity that is the second argument of a verb is put in the accusative, the case of direct objects, rather than the dative, which can only be explained with recourse to an earlier stage of the language, when case usage was driven more strongly by the semantics of the cases. One such normalization is mentioned in Cicero, in connection with his discussion of inuidentia ‘envy’, a rare term possibly coined by Cicero himself: (77) Verbum ductum est ā nimis intuendō fortūnam alterīus, ut est in Melanippō: Quisnam flōrem līberum inuīdīt meum? Male Latīnē uidētur, sed praeclārē Accius; ut enim uidēre, sīc inuidēre flōrem rēctius quam flōrī. Nōs cōnsuētūdine prohibēmur; poēta iūs suum tenuit et dīxit audācius. (Cic. Tusc. 3.20) ‘This word has been derived from looking at another’s good fortune too much, as there is in the Melanippus: Who has looked covetously at the bloom of my children? It seems bad Latin, but Accius has spoken magnificently; for just as we say uidēre ‘to look at’, so we say inuidēre ‘to look at covetously’ more correctly with flōrem (accusative) ‘bloom’ than with flōrī (dative). We are prevented from doing so by usage; the poet has made use of his right and has spoken more boldly.’ Inuidēre originally meant to uidēre ‘look at’ with an evil eye, so in- ‘onto’ here has negative connotations. Originally, when cases had meanings rather than functions, the dative with inuidēre made sense, as a dative of disadvantage. But

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when it became the norm that two-place predicates should have a nominative and an accusative, inuidēre, which retained the old construction, became an exception. Accius is following the more regular pattern, but is the only author who does so. Occasionally, however, we can see verbs going in the other direction. There are various reasons for this. Let us begin with cupere ‘to desire’, which normally takes an accusative object, as in (78): (78) Omnia quae tū uīs, ea cupiō. (Plaut. Persa 766) ‘I desire everything that you want.’ This is the regular construction for this verb, with the direct object in the accusative. (79), with the dative, is not a genuine exception: (79) Mitte ōrāre. V̄na hārum quaeuīs causa me ut faciam monēt, uel tū uel quod uērumst uel quod ipsī cupiō Glyceriō. (Ter. Andr. 904–5) ‘Stop entreating. Every single reason among these admonishes me to act, you, or the fact that it is true, or that I wish well to Glycerium herself.’ Here, the speaker does not desire Glycerium, but desires good things for her. The good things are unexpressed, but would be in the accusative, and the dative, the beneficiary, is a third argument, very much in line with the rules outlined above. However, occasionally we do find a genitive instead of an accusative: (80) Egone ut ad te ab lībertīna esse audērem internūntius, qui ingenuīs satis respōnsāre nequeās quae cupiunt tuī? (Plaut. Mil. 962–3) ‘Would I dare to be a go-between for you from a freedwoman? You can barely reply to all the freeborn women who desire you.’ The women desire the man himself, and instead of tuī we could equally well get tē. The genitive here is presumably the result of analogy: cupidus ‘desirous’, like many adjectives, regularly takes the genitive, and since it is a frequent adjective, it influences the use of the cognate verb. The situation is different in (81): (81) Domus haec feruit flāgitī (Pompon. com. 101) ‘This house is seething with disgrace.’

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Feruere / feruēre ‘to seethe, boil’ is normally intransitive.²³ But here it is not the literal meaning that is intended; it is a colourful expression that basically means ‘to be full of’, but with the negative connotations of seething. Since plēnus takes the genitive,²⁴ we can again see how one construction can influence another if that second construction has a metaphorical meaning close to the literal meaning of the first, even if the words in question are not morphologically related. This is also what is happening in (82), where an intransitive verb is becoming transitive: (82) Nec sitiō honōrēs nec dēsīderō glōriam. (Cic. ad Q. fr. 3.5+6.3) ‘I do not thirst for honours nor do I desire glory.’ Sitīre ‘to be thirsty’ is normally intransitive, but in its metaphorical meaning, ‘to desire’, it is equivalent to dēsīderāre, which takes the accusative, as here; hence also sitīre ‘to thirst for’ with an accusative. Perīre and dēperīre are more complicated: (83) Certe edepol adulēscēns ille, quoĭ ego emo, efflīctim perīt eius amōre. (Plaut. Merc. 444–5) ‘That young man who I am buying her for is certainly absolutely mad because of his love for her.’ Perīre literally means ‘to perish, to die’. The young man in our example is not literally dying, but is dying metaphorically because he is so madly in love. The verb here follows the construction that one would expect for literal dying: he is dying for a reason expressed in the ablative, and the woman he is in love with is not expressed through an accusative object. But since the metaphorical meaning ‘to be in love with’ is equivalent to amāre, perīre can also take an accusative object: (84) Eī duae puellae sunt meretrīcēs seruolae sorōrēs: eārum hic alteram efflīctim perīt. (Plaut. Poen. 1094–5) ‘He has two slave girls, prostitutes and sisters: this chap is madly in love with one of them.’ (85) Trēs ūnam pereunt adulēscentēs mulierem. (Plaut. Truc. arg. 1) ‘Three young men are madly in love with one woman.’

23 For the change of conjugation class see 3.3.4. 24 Or the ablative, but the genitive is much more common in Republican Latin.

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However, this construction is extremely rare. In Plautus himself I have only come across the instance in (84) and Poen. 96 (an almost identical line), while (85) is from a plot summary written four centuries later; these plot summaries are meant to imitate Plautine diction, but they do so rather poorly. Let us now look at dēperīre; in its literal meaning, ‘to die’, it is very rare: (86) Ascrīptīuī dictī, quod ōlim ascrībēbantur inermēs armātīs mīlitibus quī succēderent, sī quis eōrum dēperīsset. (Varro ling. 7.56) ‘Ascrīptīuī “supernumeraries” were called thus because in the past those without arms ascrībēbantur “were enrolled as extras” so as to take the place of the armed soldiers if any of them should be killed.’ Most commonly it is used metaphorically, for ‘dying from love’. Livy uses the construction one would expect for the literal meaning: (87) Praesidiī praefectus dēperībat amōre mulierculae, cuius frāter in exercitū Fabiī cōnsulis erat. (Liv. 27.15.9) ‘The chief of the guard was languishing with love for the young woman whose brother was in the army of the consul Fabius.’ The reason for perishing metaphorically is expressed in the ablative, and the woman is not an accusative object. There is a Plautine touch to this passage, also seen in the diminutive muliercula,²⁵ but Livy does not go for a genuinely Plautine construction; one is reminded of the Plautine plot summaries, but unlike those, Livy never intends a genuine imitation of archaic style. The Plautine construction can be seen in the next example: (88) Numquam edepol quemquam mortālem crēdo ego uxōrem suam sīc efflīctim amāre, proinde ut hic te efflīctim dēperīt. (Plaut. Amph. 516–17) ‘I don’t think any mortal ever loves his wife as madly as he dotes on you.’ Here, dēperīre is construed transitively, like amāre. This type is very common in Plautus. What is interesting is that the actual overlap between perīre and dēperīre is surprisingly small. The former is mostly used literally and the latter is mostly used metaphorically. The synonymity is thus partial at best, and disambiguation of literal and metaphorical meanings is never an issue. One is reminded of an example I presented in my introduction: price can be used literally or metaphorically, but

25 A term which is, however, not restricted to comedy.

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ambiguity is rare; the two meanings combine with different adjectives, high for the literal meaning and heavy for the metaphorical one. Constructions influence each other throughout the history of Latin; in fact, this is very much a universal phenomenon. In the Christian period, benedīcere and crēdere change constructions, but they do so because they acquire new meanings. Benedīcere ‘to speak well of’ originally took the dative, but acquired the accusative when it came to mean ‘to bless’, and crēdere was originally combined with the dative of the person whom one believed, but came to be combined with in + accusative when it began to mean ‘to believe in (God)’. These changes are explicable on their own, through changes in semantics, but they are also influenced by Greek usages, εὐλoγεῖν with dative ‘to praise’ versus εὐλoγεῖν with accusative ‘to bless’, and πιστεύειν with dative ‘to believe (someone)’ versus πιστεύειν εἰς ‘to believe in (God)’.

4.3.3 Reanalysis and Grammaticalization Reanalysis can affect any area of grammar; in phonology, for example, a nadder ‘a snake’ was reanalysed as an adder in Middle English,²⁶ and an ekename ‘an additional name’²⁷ became a nekename ‘a nickname’. If this reanalysis turns lexical material into grammatical items, or turns grammatical items into ones with more specialized grammatical meanings, we speak of grammaticalization.²⁸ Here, I want to demonstrate how such reanalysis can work. We will look at three words, ast, quīn, and cauē. Ast was originally used for a second, more specific conditional clause; we find this usage in the Twelve Tables, from 450 BC: (89) Sī nox fūrtum faxit, ast im occīsit, iūre caesus estō. (Lex XII tab. ap. Macr. Sat. 1.4.19) ‘If he (X) has committed theft by night, if he (Y) has killed him, he (X) shall have been killed lawfully.’ Since this law is transmitted in Macrobius, its orthography is very different from what it would have been like when the law was originally written down. Nox ‘at

26 Cf. German Natter! 27 Cf. eke out ‘make last longer’. 28 For such processes see especially the classic treatments by Hopper and Traugott 1993 or Bybee et al. 1994.

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night’ is a syncopated genitive of time, and faxit and occīsit are sigmatic futures of the type discussed earlier in this chapter. The law permits the inhabitants of a house to kill a burglar breaking and entering by night, but not in daytime; in daytime, one can call for help, and neighbours would come, but at night it is too dangerous to go out, so that this ultimate measure of self-defence is acceptable. The first conditional clause is introduced by sī. The second condition is a more specific one: it is not simply a second, independent condition, but one which can only materialize if the first condition holds true. Under such circumstances, archaic Latin employs ast. This usage is already rare in Plautus, where we find it in elevated registers: (90) Si ego hīc perībo, ast ille ut dīxīt nōn redīt, at erit mi hoc factum mortuō memorābile. (Plaut. Capt. 683–4) ‘If I die here and if he doesn’t return as promised, this deed of mine will still be worth remembering when I’m dead.’ Here again we can see ast in a second, more specific condition, at the height of dramatic tension, when a young man is prepared to lay down his life for his master. Since ast was already archaic in Plautus’ day, people would most often have encountered it in legal language. Most speakers would no longer use this word actively in day-to-day conversations, but when trying to imitate older language, they could still employ it. However, this kind of limited revival can lead to reanalysis: many speakers felt that ast was simply ‘but’, a word used to express a contrast, and we can already see ast in this function in Plautus: (91) Atque oppido hercle bene uelle illī uīsus sum, ast nōn habēre quoi commendārem capram. (Plaut. Merc. 245–6) ‘I seemed very well disposed to it (i.e. the monkey), but not to have anyone who I could entrust the goat to.’ The existence of usages like this makes us wonder whether for Plautus, ast in (90) felt like the introduction of a more specific, second conditional, or already like little more than a formal, oldfashioned word for ‘but’. Ambiguities of this type are at the heart of reanalysis and grammaticalization. Quīn is more complicated. The etymology of quīn in main clauses is uncontroversial: an old i-stem ablative quī ‘through which, why’,²⁹ followed by a syncopated

29 Cf. the relic quīcum ‘with whom / with which’ in classical Latin.

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form of the question particle -ne ‘not’.³⁰ The original meaning was thus ‘why not?’, and we can still find this meaning quite regularly in Plautus: (92) Quīn hūc addūcis meum cognātum Naucratem? (Plaut. Amph. 918) ‘Why aren’t you bringing my relative Naucrates here?’ However, pragmatically such questions are most commonly used as commands, as is in fact the case in (92); Amphitruo had said to Alcumena that he would bring Naucrates, but since this did not happen, she asks why, while at the same time pushing for Naucrates to come. In early Latin, the second person singular of deponents most commonly ends in -re, while the classical ending -ris is still unusual. We can find such a form in a quīn-clause in our next example: (93) Quid ergō pōnam? Quīn tu ēloquere quidquid est suō nōmine. (Plaut. Aul. 639) ‘So what should I put down? Why don’t you call whatever it is by its proper name.’ We could interpret ēloquere as a present indicative, in which case we would formally be dealing with a question, exactly parallel to the one that precedes. However, since questions with quīn regularly function as commands, and since -re is also the ending of the imperative, such instances lend themselves to reinterpretation; speakers could then begin to use quīn also with unambiguous imperatives: (94) Quīn tu aps tē socordiam omnem reice et segnitiem āmouē. (Plaut. Asin. 254) ‘Shake off all sluggishness from you and get rid of your laziness!’ Given such unambiguous instances of quīn with the imperative already in Plautus, (93) above is best taken as ambiguous; we could indeed be dealing with a question in the indicative, functioning as a command, or with quīn followed by the imperative. In subordinate clauses, quīn has a double origin: the element quī can be an old ablative, as above, or a nominative. These separate origins explain some of the divergent uses: (95) Tū mē uīuos hodiē numquam faciēs quīn sim Sōsia. (Plaut. Amph. 398) ‘So long as I’m alive you’ll never bring it about today that I’m not Sosia.’

30 In classical Latin, -ne is neutral, but in Plautus, the original meaning ‘not’ is still common.

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(96) Sed fugam in sē tamen nēmō conuortitur nec recēdit locō, quīn statim rem gerāt. (Plaut. Amph. 238–9) ‘But nonetheless no one turned in flight or deserted his place, but instead fought at his post.’ In (95), we have a proleptic accusative mē, but quīn does not refer back to it; it is more likely that this is an instance where quīn has the old ablatival (instrumental) meaning, ‘whereby not’: ‘you won’t do anything whereby I am no longer Sosia’. In (96), on the other hand, quīn is best interpreted as a negated nominative, ‘no one deserted his place, who would not instead fight at his post’. In classical Latin, quīn remains common in main clauses, but in subordinate clauses its use is much more restricted. The old etymological connections are no longer felt acutely here, and we can mostly see quīn after negative expressions meaning ‘it cannot be done’ or ‘there is no doubt’. Finally, we can turn to cauē, the imperative of cauēre ‘to beware of’.³¹ Apart from this imperative (second person singular present), all other forms of the verb are combined with nē-clauses if the complement is a clause rather than just a noun phrase. Cauē, too, can be combined with nē, as one would expect: (97) Molliter sīs tenē mē, cauē nē cadam. (Plaut. Pseud. 1296) ‘Please hold me gently, make sure I don’t fall.’ (98) Cauē nē cadās, astā. (Plaut. Most. 324) ‘Watch out so you don’t fall, stand up.’ For (97), where the subjects of the superordinate clause and the subordinate one differ from each other, no other construction can be envisaged. In (98), on the other hand, the two subjects are identical. And since here we have an alternation within the positive counterpart of the construction, namely an alternation between fac ut ueniās ‘see to it that you come’ and fac ueniās, we find that cauē nē + subjunctive can, by analogy, also alternate with cauē + plain subjunctive. This type is also common in Plautus: (99) Fac fidēle sīs fidēlis, caue fidem flūxam gerās. (Plaut. Capt. 439) ‘Make sure you’re absolutely faithful, take care you don’t have fluctuations in your faithfulness.’

31 Cf. especially Barrios-Lech 2016, 71–79.

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Here we can see a neat parallelism between fac without ut and cauē without nē, both combined with the present subjunctive. Cauē was then further grammaticalized as a mere marker of prohibition: (100) Caue quemquam aliēnum in aedīs intrō mīserīs. (Plaut. Aul. 90) ‘Mind you don’t let any stranger into the house.’ (101) Iamne hoc tenētis? Sī tenētis, dūcite, caue dirrumpātis. (Plaut. Poen. 116–17) ‘Have you got it? If you’ve got it, pull; make sure you don’t break it off.’ Among early Latin prohibitions, nē + present subjunctive and nē + perfect subjunctive are particularly common; by analogy, cauē + present subjunctive therefore acquired an alternative, cauē + perfect subjunctive, as in (100). This proves that cauē has lost its verbal meaning: nē + perfect subjunctive makes diachronic sense, as the continuation of a non-past modal form of an Indo-European aorist, but synchronically this tense usage is an oddity; and cauē with a perfect subjunctive should, according to the rules of the sequence of tenses, mean ‘see to it that you have not done’ rather than ‘see to it that you do not do’. Thus, cauē has lost its verbal force and become comparable to nē. The fact that cauē need no longer be verbal can also be seen in (101), where it is combined with a plural verb. The audience is addressed as a whole, so the meaning cannot be ‘you (singular addressee), see to it that you all don’t break it off’, but rather, ‘you all, don’t break it off’. Yet while in such instances cauē must have lost its verbal force, in examples like (97) and (98) it must still have this verbal meaning, hence the combination with nē. And, as so often, many attestations are ambiguous: cauē with a plain present subjunctive could in principle have or not have its verbal force; there is no way of deciding. Let us now turn to the complexities of Latin word order.

4.4 Word Order Latin word order may at first have little to do with reanalysis and grammaticalization. We will first look at clitics, then at pragmatic and semantic factors, and then return to the diachrony of clitics; here, however, reanalysis will become relevant again in the Tobler-Mussafia rule.

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4.4.1 Clitics Latin is often said to be a language with ‘free’ word order. Of course, no language has entirely free word order; what is meant is that Latin word order is determined less by syntactic rules than in many languages, and more by semantic and pragmatic factors such as topic and focus. We will return to this issue below, but before that I want to look at ‘clitics’, that is, typically unstressed elements whose placement is also driven by phonological factors.³² Many connectives are clitic: words like -que ‘and’ or -ue ‘or’ attach enclitically to the second element of a coordinated pair, as in fīlius fīliaque ‘son and daughter’. And while et ‘and’ and aut ‘or’ are not usually described as clitic, their order is equally fixed, this time in the middle of a coordinated pair, as in fīlius et fīlia ‘son and daughter’. Prepositions tend to behave as proclitics, and inscriptions which separate words through spaces or interpuncts often treat prepositions as if they were part of the following word. The category most commonly discussed when it comes to clitics consists of sentence connectives occupying the second position, often splitting up names, as in Mārcus autem Tullius Cicerō ‘but M. Tullius Cicero’. In Plautus, enim need not always be enclitic: (102) Enim mī quidem aequom est purpuram atque aurum darī. (Plaut. Aul. 500) ‘In truth, it’s only fair that I should be given purple and gold.’ (103) Certe enim ego uōcem hīc loquentis modo mi audīre uīsus sum. (Plaut. Aul. 811) ‘I’m sure I heard the voice of someone speaking here just now.’ In (102), enim stands in first position and is not clitic; in such cases it means ‘in truth, indeed’. In (103) it is clitic, as in classical Latin, and provides a reason for what precedes. In such instances, the first word tends to be emphatic. In Plautus, sed is always proclitic and stands clause-initially, while autem is consistently enclitic:³³

32 See also the discussion of nē … quidem in 2.1.5. 33 Cledonius (gramm. 5.74) claims that Plautus can use autem in first position, but this goes against all the evidence from our comedies in direct transmission.

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(104) Ego complexum huius nīl morōr, meum autem hic aspernātur. (Plaut. Asin. 643) ‘But I can’t be bothered about his hugs, while he despises mine.’ Here, autem comes in second position in its clause and is attached to meum, a word that is focal because it contrasts with huius. While words like autem are always clitic and cannot be emphasized, others can be non-clitic when contrastive, and clitic when non-contrastive. This is the case for many personal pronouns, whether they are in the nominative (ego ‘I’, tū ‘you’) or in oblique cases (mihi ‘for me’, mē ‘me’). The phenomenon, known from Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, was reconstructed as a rule for Indo-European by Jacob Wackernagel 1892; more recent work, such as Adams 1999, focuses more strongly on how the situation developed further within Latin. Forms of esse ‘to be’ can also clitically attach to other words, but there are phonological and semantic restrictions, discussed in Pezzini 2015. (105) and (106) exemplify the placement of mihi: (105) Scelestissume, audēs mihī praedicāre id, domī te esse nunc qui hīc ades? (Plaut. Amph. 561) ‘You hardened criminal, you dare tell me that you, who are here, are at home now?’ (106) Mihi quoque assunt testēs qui illud quod ego dīcam assentiant. (Plaut. Amph. 824) ‘I also have witnesses to corroborate what I’m saying.’ In (105), an impudent slave is being reprimanded for his audacity. The emphasis lies on audēs ‘you dare’, presented as an incredulous question. Mihi naturally attaches to this focal host. The situation is very different in (106): Amphitruo and his wife are having an argument, and he states that he has witnesses who can confirm his account; his wife retorts that she also has witnesses for her account, which differs from his, so the most straightforward interpretation is that mihi here is contrastive and hence focal. Clitics form a phonological unit with the word they attach to, but that does not mean that they all behave alike; some phonological connections are much tighter than others. Pronominal clitics, but also enim and quidem, cannot be used at the end of iambo-trochaic lines if the preceding word is iambic or ends in an iamb; in other words, they behave as independent words as far as the law of Bentley and Luchs is

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concerned.³⁴ The law of Bentley and Luchs (Questa 2007, 371–83) forbids phrases like pater meus ‘my father’ at line end, where pater constitutes an iamb, meus constitutes another iamb, and word end intervenes. The rationale for this law is presumably that non-observance of this rule would make it more difficult to discern where the line end is: an inattentive listener might think it already comes after pater. Given this rationale, it is no surprise that sequences like colōniam ‘colony’ and māter mea ‘my mother’ are legitimate: no misunderstanding can arise, since the line cannot end in the middle of a word like colōniam, and since the line cannot end after māter either because that word is a spondee.³⁵ It has sometimes been argued that possessive pronouns are clitic, but this is unlikely: not only can they stand in hyperbaton, that is, separated from their head nouns, but they can also precede or follow them. The main argument for clitic behaviour comes from the phrase uoluptās mea, a term of endearment used towards women. The phrase alternates with mea uoluptās. Let us look at scansion: (107) Heia! Haud ab rē, mea uoluptās, tibi ĭstic obuēnīt labōs. (Plaut. Truc. 521) ‘Goodness! That labour hasn’t fallen onto you to your disadvantage, my darling.’ (108) Ex Ārabiā tibī attulī tūs, Ponto amōmum. Tenĕ tibī, uoluptās mea. (Plaut. Truc. 539–40) ‘From Arabia I’ve brought you incense, from the Black Sea balsam. Take it, my darling.’ In Plautus and Terence, unaccented syllables can be subject to iambic shortening, whether they contain a long vowel or are heavy ‘by position’. In (107), we have the pattern mea uoluptās, attested fifteen times in Plautus, and never subject to iambic shortening. In (108), on the other hand, we have the pattern uoluptās mea, attested eleven times in Plautus, always at line end, and always scanned with -lupas a light syllable.³⁶ If uoluptās is said in isolation, -lup- bears the accent and cannot

34 The situation is more complicated with quidem because it can attach so closely to some words that they form a recognizable phonological unit; sī quidem may scan as two words, but also as one, sĭquidem, with ‘shortening in enclisis’. 35 For linguistic explanations of metrical laws see especially de Melo and Pezzini 2023. 36 In addition, there is one instance of uoluptās tua (Cas. 454), with iambic shortening and at line end; this is clearly an unusual combination, mocking the regular uoluptās mea.

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be shortened, but in uoluptās mea it is likely that the accent has moved on to -tās, allowing for the shortening of -lup-. Such an accent shift is understandable if the possessive pronoun functions as a clitic like -que, which causes accent shifts. However, we should not make too much of this one phrase. The law of Bentley and Luchs makes it abundantly clear that in most instances, possessive pronouns function as separate words, not as clitics. Voluptās mea diverges from this regular behaviour because it has become a collocation, a fixed, idiomatic expression, and while such expressions can still be divided into words, they often show divergent semantic and phonological developments.³⁷ A similar phenomenon can be observed with certain phrases which seem to break the law of Bentley and Luchs: (109) Colaphīs quidem hercle tuom iam dīlīdam caput, nisi aut auscultās aut … īs in malam crucem. (Plaut. Poen. 494–5) ‘I’ll smash your head to pieces with blows right now, unless you either listen or … go and be hanged.’ (110) Tuos ēmīt aedīs fīlius. – Bonān fidē? (Plaut. Most. 670) ‘Your son bought a house. – Honestly?’ Malam crucem ‘to crucifixion’ and bonā fidē ‘in good faith’ should not be allowed at the end of iambo-trochaic lines because they lead to a sequence of two iambs, with word end between them. The fact that these sequences are allowed shows that they are almost treated like a single word. Of course it makes no sense to treat an adjective as clitic or to speak of univerbation here – note that -n(e) is allowed to split up the sequence in (110) –, but we are dealing with fixed, idiomatic expressions in which word order patterns cannot be changed and where the two elements predict each other and create a meaning that cannot be fully arrived at through decomposition, even if this is not reflected in phonological phenomena like shortening through enclisis.³⁸

4.4.2 Other Issues Since in Latin, word order is not simply a matter of syntactic relations, such that subjects have a dedicated slot in the sentence or that adjectives consistently precede

37 See also the discussion of business in 3.1.3, a word which has become disyllabic and whose meaning cannot be fully deduced from its constituent parts. 38 For the ‘idiom principle’, see 1.3.

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or follow their head nouns, we need to examine the interplay of various factors. These factors do include syntactic ones, but also phonological, semantic, and pragmatic ones. The placement of clitics is partly determined by phonology, but the influence of phonology goes further: there is a tendency for longer and more complex (‘heavier’) constituents to be placed later within a clause,³⁹ as well as a tendency to structure discourse into cola or intonation groups. However, the obvious absence of any speech recordings, combined with the fact that in any language, speakers may divide up one and the same sentence into intonation groups of different lengths, makes the study of the influence of phonology on Latin syntax problematic. The placement of clitics and various restrictions in metrical texts can mitigate such problems, but only to a limited extent. As for semantic factors, Marouzeau 1922, 17 and 75 noted that there is a strong tendeny in classical Latin for qualifying adjectives to precede their head nouns, while determinative ones follow them. Qualifying adjectives are those which can be used predicatively (the clever student / the student is clever) and which admit comparative and superlative forms (the cleverer student / the cleverest student). Determinative adjectives are not normally used predicatively (the British flag / ??the flag is British) and do not normally admit comparative and superlative forms (the British flag / ??the most British flag). Some adjectives can function either way: an urbānus praetor is a praetor who is witty, as befits an inhabitant of the city of Rome, while a praetor urbānus is a praetor of the city, who may or may not be witty. Similarly, a longa nāuis is any ship that is long, while a nāuis longa is a battleship. While there is clearly some truth in this, especially when fixed phrases like nāuis longa are involved, the situation is more complex; Langslow 2012 argues that in urbānus praetor, the anteposition of the adjective is owed not to the meaning of the adjective, but to contextual factors. Pragmatics can also influence word order patterns. What matters here is which elements are given – described as ‘topical’ – and which ones are new or emphatic – described as ‘focal’. However, pragmatic functions like topic and focus are defined differently by different scholars; no universal agreement exists, and for those who think of topic as that which a sentence is ‘about’, there are also new topics, which may very well be focal. In English and many other languages, intonation can provide valuable clues as to which elements are topical and which are focal, but for Latin no such help is available, and it is unclear whether for instance focal

39 This tendency is also at the heart of Behaghel’s law, the Gesetz der wachsenden Glieder (‘law of increasing member size’): it explains why one normally says aurum et argentum ‘gold and silver’, even though one should normally mention the less precious element first.

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elements could simply be marked by intonation rather than by word order, or a combination of word order and intonation. Given these difficulties, it is often hard to determine what should count as topic and focus; next to unambiguous examples there are many which are open to interpretation, and there is a certain subjectivity to any such analysis, which means that it cannot be replicated precisely by a different researcher. There are ways to reduce this subjectivity, but not to eliminate it entirely. If we accept that word order is the result of a complex interplay between these different factors, it becomes an issue of paramount importance to determine which factors matter more than the others and can overrule them. In order to do so, we have to look beyond the study of individual, carefully chosen examples and move on to statistical analyses. Such analyses should also take poetry into account, which is commonly ignored in studies on word order; however, while poetry may not always show us what is normal, it can show us what is possible. Besides, some metres are far more restrictive than others: the iambo-trochaic metres of comedy are flexible and allow for a great deal of freedom, while the lyric metres of Horace reduce an author’s options drastically. Spevak’s study on word order (2010) emphasizes the pragmatic factors involved in different patterns. Some of her assumptions are questionable, for instance the idea that there can only be one focus per clause (2010: 39); it would be easy enough, at least in English, to find counter-examples.⁴⁰ That said, she establishes very clear criteria for what constitutes topic and focus and how to determine these more objectively than by mere intuition.⁴¹ Here I cannot do justice to all of Spevak’s findings, but a few deserve to be mentioned. Spevak 2010, 46 speaks of verum focus if a sentence can be thought of as an answer to the question is it really the case that…?. Such sentences overwhelmingly have the verb in initial position. In existential sentences (‘there is X’), the verb ‘to be’ is in initial position in 70% of the cases, and comes after the entity introduced in 26% of the cases; the second pattern is particularly common if the entity being introduced is inanimate. Anaphoric pronouns like is ‘this one’ or ibi ‘there’ can stand sentence-initially or sentence-medially, but there is a difference (2010: 91): if sentence-initial, they pick up a salient constituent from the immediately preceding sentence, but if

40 Compare No, Júlia gave it to Jáne in response to a sentence such as John gave the present to Jim, am I right?. 41 Devine and Stephens 2006 is heavy on syntactic theory, but makes an effort to incorporate pragmatics; however, the book barely discusses potential pitfalls and mostly takes earlier research in the area for granted. Unfortunately, much of this earlier research does not put safeguards into place in the way that Spevak does.

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sentence-medial, they refer to a previously established entity, the discourse topic of a longer piece of text. Collocations like arma capere ‘to take up arms’ contain an object which is inanimate, has a low degree of individuation, and forms a pragmatic unit with the verb; such objects typically stand directly in front of the verb (2010: 120). ‘Hyperbaton’, the separation of elements that belong together syntactically, is much more common in poetry than in prose. In poetry, there can be up to three hyperbata in one sentence, while in classical prose it is typically no more than one (2010: 25). Fixed expressions like populus Rōmānus ‘the Roman people’ very rarely allow hyperbaton (2010: 229).⁴² Their order is normally unchangeable: in time expressions, hōra ‘hour’ is followed by the numeral, but uigilia ‘night watch’ is preceded by it (2010: 249). Outside fixed expressions, Marouzeau’s hypothesis concerning adjectives is in need of refinement (2010, 229–30): across languages, objective qualities like red stand closer to the noun than subjective ones like beautiful, hence a beautiful red ballon, or in other languages balloon - red - beautiful. In Latin, such adjective blocks most commonly follow the noun, in the universal order.⁴³ As for genitives, they tend to stand before their nouns if they are contextually bound and predictable from the preceding text, but they follow if they provide new information (2010: 268). My own study of word order (de Melo 2010a) is much more limited than Spevak’s. I merely examine the position of possessive pronouns in Plautus. However, the study of possessive pronouns offers several advantages over that of other modifiers, like adjectives: first and foremost, the meaning of possessive pronouns is very simple; they create a connection between two entities, but there are no further semantic subcategories like ‘evaluative’ or ‘objective’. Second, the pragmatic value of possessive pronouns is much easier to determine: they are focal if contrastive (‘my book (not yours)’), and non-focal otherwise. And finally, while their meaning and pragmatic functions are simple, they do not all scan in the same way, allowing us to check to what extent word order in Plautus is influenced by metre.

42 Some expressions are more fixed than others; there is of course a diachronic dimension to such processes. In Plautus, Ennius, and Cato, rēs pūblica ‘Republic’ is still often split up, but soon thereafter, hyperbaton becomes rare. When in the sixth century Corippus says pūblica rēs (Iust. 2.204), partly for metrical reasons, it is a highly artificial situation. The septem triōnēs ‘seven plough-oxen’, referring to the Plough as a constellation, also became fixed, but an added factor in this process was that the word triōnēs fell out of use. This then enabled the creation of septemtriō, a singular, which Virgil artificially splits up, septem subiecta triōnī ‘underneath the Plough’ (georg. 3.381). 43 Note that in French, subjective and evaluative adjectives precede, while objective ones follow, hence un joli gros ballon rouge ‘a pretty, big balloon which is red’.

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Possessive pronouns can occur in four positions relative to their head nouns; the examples presented here all contain non-focal possessives: (111) … quam techinam de auro aduorsum meum fēcit patrem. (Plaut. Bacch. 392) ‘… what a trick he played on my father about the gold.’ (112) Meam pauperiem conquerōr. (Plaut. Aul. 190) ‘I’m moaning about my poverty.’ (113) Manufestō teneo in noxia inimīcōs meōs. (Plaut. Cas. 507) ‘I’ve caught my enemies in the act, red-handed.’ (114) Nunc hinc parasītum in Cāriam mīsī meum. (Plaut. Curc. 67) ‘Now I sent my hanger-on off to Caria.’ In (111), the pronoun precedes its head, but is separated from it (‘pre-modifier hyperbaton’); in (112), it precedes it immediately; in (113), it follows it immediately; and in (114), it follows it at a distance (‘post-modifier hyperbaton’). In all of these positions, possessive pronouns can also be focal. Of all the relevant possessive pronouns in Plautus, 16.65% (467 tokens) are in the same position as in (111); 37.02% (1038 tokens) are in the same position as in (112); 32.31% (906 tokens) are in the same position as in (113); and 14.02% (393 tokens) are in the same position as in (114). The patterns seen in (111) and (114), that is, those with hyperbaton, together make up more than 30% of all cases; this is a substantial number, and certainly a much higher one than in contemporary prose. Metre clearly has some influence on word order, demanding greater flexibility. That said, the differences between the individual possessive forms are not listed here because they are very small, which is a clear indication that Plautine metres are in turn flexible enough not to interfere with word order patterns overly much. In other words, metre can exaggerate naturally occurring tendencies towards hyperbaton, but it does so across the board, regardless of how individual pronouns scan. We can see the influence of metre in (115): (115) Perge, Nox, ut occēpistī: gere patrī mōrem meō. (Plaut. Amph. 277) ‘Continue, Night, as you’ve begun: oblige my father.’ Patrī and meō are separated from each other by mōrem, but inverting the order to mōrem patrī meō would be unmetrical; the line is a trochaic septenarius, and the inversion would violate the law of Bentley and Luchs.

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Similarly, within iambo-trochaic lines, ‘for my sake’ is always meā causā, as in prose, but at line end this would be impossible, hence the artificial pattern causā meā, not normally found in prose or within iambo-trochaic lines. We have seen how possessive pronouns are distributed, but how does that relate to focus? The short answer is that none of the four positions is unambiguously reserved for focal or non-focal possessives. However, the more a possessive stands to the left, the more likely it is to be focal: 44.33% of the pronouns in the same position as in (111) are focal; 30.54% of those in the same position as in (112) are focal; 16.24% of those in the same position as in (113) are focal; and only 10.94% of those in the same position as in (114) are focal. Word order does not tell us clearly what is focal and what is not, but it can give hints.

4.4.3 From Wackernagel to the Tobler-Mussafia Rule In 4.4.1, we discussed Wackernagel clitics in Latin. Modern Romance languages have not preserved any traces of clitics like autem ‘but’ or enim ‘therefore’. However, unstressed pronouns attach to verbs as clitics. In earlier Romance, such clitics were subject to a law very similar to Wackernagel’s, namely the Tobler-Mussafia rule, named after Adolf Tobler and Adolf Mussafia, two scholars of early Romance who independently reached similar conclusions. How did the system of clitic pronouns change over time? In a seminal article, Mussafia 1886 demonstrated that unstressed personal pronouns are avoided in clause-initial position in early Romance; he argued that the reason for this is phonological in nature: medieval Romance varieties avoided unstressed monosyllables in initial position. Not much later, scholars rightly pointed out that this outright ban of unstressed monosyllables was an overstatement: early Romance does allow articles and prepositions in initial position, and these are mostly unstressed. The rule concerning pronouns thus had to be given a slightly modified explanation. Subsequently it was argued that early Romance pronouns are enclitic and need to lean onto a strong word to their left. The Tobler-Mussafia rule has generated a fairly large amount of literature, not because the rules of word order are unclear as such, but because of the question whether the rule needs to have a phonological basis. The arguments are reviewed in Fischer 2002 and Kuchenbrandt 2016; here I want to focus on syntactic reanalysis. Let us begin with two examples (from Kuchenbrandt 2016, 82): (116) Et dizen le en este tiemp … Calyz. ‘And in that time they call it Calyz.’

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(117) Y lo llaman en este tiempo Calyz. (116) is from Old Spanish, while (117) is its Modern Spanish equivalent. Dizer ‘to say’ (from dīcere) has been replaced by llamar (from clāmāre). Note also that et / y ‘and’ in initial position does not matter for the sake of Tobler-Mussafia. What we can observe, then, is that in (116) the pronoun follows the verb, according to the rule, while in (117) the pronoun precedes the verb as a proclitic. The Tobler-Mussafia rule can be observed in early forms of French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese; French gave it up around 1300, while Italian and Spanish did so at a later date, and (European) Portuguese follows the rule to this day. If we look at Old Spanish as an example of earlier Romance more closely, we can see that clitic pronouns need to stand next to the verb, and they may follow or precede it, but precede it only if that does not lead to sentence-initial position. The rules are as follows: if the verb is non-finite, the pronouns will attach after it;⁴⁴ if the verb is finite, there is a split between main and subordinate clauses; in main clauses, the clitic follows, and in subordinate clauses, the clitic mostly precedes. In absolute terms, the clitics can thus stand in second position or later, depending on these regularities, but the Tobler-Mussafia rule prevents the placement of unstressed pronouns in initial position; given the word order patterns of early Romance, the Tobler-Mussafia rule is particularly relevant in verb-initial declarative sentences. In Modern Spanish, the rules for clitic pronouns are simple. They need to attach to a verb; if that verb is in the infinitive, the gerund, or the imperative, they will follow it, but if the verb is in a (non-imperatival) finite form, they will precede it. Pronouns can end up in sentence-initial position, but they are still clitics. The only factor that matters for their placement is whether the verb is finite or not. How did these changes come about? The answer to this problem is syntactic reanalysis. In classical Latin, unstressed personal pronouns are typically Wackernagel clitics and attach to a stressed host in initial position. In theory, they need not be adjacent to a verb at all. However, since sentences are typically shorter in spoken language than in written varieties, such pronouns would often come in contact with verbs, whether these verbs were focal or not. Imperatives are focal by their very nature and often stand in clause-initial position; finite forms typically come later in the sentence. These patterns could, over time, lead to reanalysis: unstressed pronouns were still prohibited from first position, and that situation persisted into early Romance, but they would have to be in contact with a verb. Since imperatives are often sentence initial, they would follow them, but precede finite forms. Eventually, the clitics were reanalysed as full-on verbal clitics, leading to the situation we find in 44 Unless there is sentence-initial negation, in which case the clitic precedes infinitives.

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French, Italian, or Spanish; they would still follow imperatives, but would precede finite forms, and it became irrelevant whether or not their position with regard to finite verbs led to sentence-initial placement. Our final topic for this chapter is complementation; we will be looking at selected types of subordinate clauses.

4.5 Complementation Subordinate clauses can be classified, on semantic grounds, as relative clauses, complement clauses, and adverbial clauses. Relative clauses, whether finite or non-finite (participium coniūnctum), modify a noun or noun phrase. Complement clauses depend on the verb in the superordinate clause and can function as subject or object. Adverbial clauses modify another clause, but do not depend on it in terms of valency. Subordination can be achieved through highly diverse constructions across languages. However, within one single language there is usually a strong tendency for some kind of iconicity, for a neat mapping of meaning onto syntactic structures (Foley and Van Valin 1984, 238–319; Lehmann 1989). This means that the more closely a clause is linked to another, the more likely it is to be non-finite or at least in the subjunctive rather than the indicative, to follow sequence-of-tense rules, and so on. In what follows, we will examine why factum est ‘it happened’ and similar eventive predicates are combined with ut-clauses under most circumstances, but with quod-clauses when some kind of evaluation is added. We will then move on to the question why, if complementation mirrors reality quite closely, consecutive ut-clauses stand in the subjunctive, a less factual mood, even though the clauses are typically factive. And finally, we can look at a diachronic development, the replacement of the accusative and infinitive with quod-clauses, meaning that often these quod-clauses can no longer be interpreted as factive.

4.5.1 Factum est ut Versus bene factum est quod If types of complementation reflect extra-linguistic reality particularly well, we may wonder why factum est ‘it happened’ or ēuēnit ‘it came about’ are sometimes combined with ut-clauses and sometimes with quod-clauses. Grammars point out that ut is used when factum est and ēuēnit are used on their own, but that quod is employed if there is an evaluative adverb like bene ‘well’ or male ‘badly’. We can see an ut-clause in (118):

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(118) Factum est illud, ut ego illīc uīni hirneam ēbiberim merī. (Plaut. Amph. 431) ‘That did indeed happen, that I emptied a jug of pure wine there.’ In (119), we find a quod-clause; the adverbial iam prīdem ‘already a long time ago’ is not evaluative in a qualitative sense, but estimates how long ago the event happened, with iam ‘already’ having a more subjective nuance to it: (119) Iam prīdem uidētur factum herĭ quod hominēs quattuōr in sopōrem collocāstis nūdōs. (Plaut. Amph. 303–4) ‘It seems a long time since yesterday when you stripped four men and put them to sleep.’ What does an adverbial of this type contribute to the meaning that could change the type of subordinate clause? Normally, differences in complementation go hand in hand with obvious differences in meaning. We can see this very clearly with verbs of speech, here exemplified with dīcere ‘to say’: (120) Dīc me igitur tuom passerculum, gallīnam, cōturnīcem, agnellum, haedillum mē tuom dīc esse uel uitellum. (Plaut. Asin. 666–7) ‘Then call me your little sparrow, your hen, your quail; call me your little lamb, your kid, or your little calf.’ (121) Dīc quid uelīs. (Plaut. Merc. 386) ‘Say what you like.’ (122) Philocōmasiō dīc, sī est istīc, domum ŭt trānseăt; hunc hīc esse. (Plaut. Mil. 1089) ‘Tell Philocomasium, if she’s there, that she should go home; say he’s here.’ In (120), the addressee is asked to make an assertion, and such assertions normally stand in the accusative-and-infinitive construction, as here. In (121), a question is subordinated to the same verb of speech; in Latin, this normally results in an indirect question in the subjunctive, again as here. If it is a command that is subordinated, it will be expressed in an ut-clause; this is the case in (122), where we find a neat opposition between an ut-clause for an indirect command and an accusativeand-infinitive construction for an indirect statement. The situation is not substantially different for verbs of perception; my next three examples contain uidēre ‘to see’:

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(123) Video hercle ego tē me arbitrārī, Euclio, hominem idōneum, quem senecta aetāte lūdōs faciās, hau meritō meō. (Plaut. Aul. 252–3) ‘I can see that you consider me a suitable person to make fun of in my old age, Euclio, even though I don’t deserve it.’ (124) Sed isne est, quem currentem uideō? (Plaut. Merc. 598) ‘But isn’t that him who I can see running?’ (125) Quo in loco haec rēs sīt uidēs. (Plaut. Epid. 81) ‘You can see in what state this situation is.’ The difference between (123) and (124), between accusative and infinitive and accusative and participle, is one of mental perception versus visual perception. In (123), uideō ‘I see’ is not so much dependent on the physical act of seeing as it is on deducing and thinking; in (124), on the other hand, the perception is physical, is seeing with one’s eyes. In the latter case, an accusative and infinitive is also possible. It makes sense to have a choice of constructions in (124), but not in (123): in an accusative-and-infinitive construction, the subject accusative depends on the valency of the infinitive, and we are thus looking at the state of affairs as a whole, which is possible physically and mentally; while in an accusative-and-participle construction, the accusative is a straightforward object of the superordinate verb and the participle modifies it, which is only possible if we see the entity in the accusative in its own right, and that requires physical seeing. Finally, in (125) we again find an indirect question, whose rationale is the same as in (121). That said, on occasion two constructions can be used with no perceptible difference in meaning. This does not mean that the two complementations are semantically equivalent everywhere, only that their spheres of usage overlap because their ranges of meaning overlap as well. We can see this with verbs of emotional affect, where in classical Latin the accusative and infinitive alternates with quod-clauses, while in Plautus there are other types of complementation besides the accusative and infinitive: (126) Saluos sīs, Mnēsiloche, saluom te aduenīre gaudeō. (Plaut. Bacch. 456) ‘Hello, Mnesilochus, I’m glad you’ve arrived safely.’ (127) Vtque tuus gaudet mīles, quod uīcerit hostem, sīc uictum cūr sē gaudeat, hostis habet. (Ov. trist. 2.1.49–50) ‘As your soldier rejoices that he has conquered the enemy, so the enemy has a reason why he should rejoice that he is conquered.’

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(128) Et quom grauidam et quom tē pulchrē plēnam aspiciō, gaudeō. (Plaut. Amph. 681) ‘I’m pleased to see you pregnant and beautifully round.’ (129) Nam quia uōs tranquillōs uideō, gaudeo et uolup est mihī. (Plaut. Amph. 958) ‘I’m happy and pleased to see you calm.’ (126) shows us an accusative and infinitive with gaudēre ‘to be glad’, a common construction also in classical Latin. Plautus does not use quod-clauses with this verb, but they are common in the classical period; note, however, that in an example like (127), from Ovid, the quod-clause could also be interpreted as causal rather than an object clause. (128) and (129), both from Plautus, show that he uses quom and quia where Ovid prefers quod. Again, these subordinate clauses could be interpreted as causal, but many scholars treat them as complementation equivalent to an accusative and infinitive, which is certainly not unusual from an etymological perspective, as quod, quom, and quia are all cognate.⁴⁵ We can now return to factum est ut and bene factum est quod. Why is there a difference in complementation? Quod is a factive subordinator. With verbs like gaudēre ‘to be happy’, it alternates with the accusative and infinitive, but with verbs of speech, the accusative and infinitive cannot be replaced by quod in the classical period. This is because the complement of ‘to be happy’ is a fact, while the complement of ‘to say’ is merely an assertion. We can see this if we negate: (130) I am not happy that John got a job. → John got a job. (131) I do not say that John got a job. → John may or may not have got a job. The negation does not affect the truth of the that-clause after ‘to be happy’, but it does affect its truth value after a verb of speech. Factum est ut gives us an assertion; if we negate, the truth value of the ut-clause changes. However, bene factum est quod evaluates and thus presupposes the truth of the subordinate clause, which becomes factive; hence quod rather than ut. The negation only negates the semantic value of the adverb and does not have scope over the subordinate clause.

45 Quod is the neuter accusative of an o-stem relative pronoun, quom started as the masculine counterpart before losing its connection to the rest of the paradigm, and quia was originally the neuter plural of an i-stem interrogative pronoun, which again lost its place in the paradigm.

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4.5.2 Motivation, Not Predictability: Consecutive ut-Clauses in the Subjunctive The Latin subjunctive has a range of different functions that are more difficult to describe than tense and aspect. The extra-linguistic category corresponding to grammatical mood is modality, a broad concept that even includes issues like negation, which are not expressed by verbal mood in Latin.⁴⁶ For our purposes, three types of modality matter: root modality, epistemic modality, and deontic modality. Root modality comprises concepts like ability or willingness, and in Latin, as in most other languages, these are not expressed through moods, but through modal verbs like posse ‘be able to’. In early Latin, there is an interesting phenomenon that arises in passivization: (132) Nam quom compressa est gnāta, fōrma in tenebrīs nōscī nōn quita est. (Ter. Hec. 572) ‘For when our daughter was raped, his outline could not be recognized in the darkness.’ In the active, this would be fōrmam nōscere nōn quīuīt ‘she could not recognize his outline’. The subject would be the daugher, and quīuīt would express her ability or lack thereof, a clear case of root modality. However, in the passive, fōrma is promoted to subject status, and since the rapist’s outline is not able to do anything, the modal verb changes its meaning from expressing root modality to expressing possibility, which in early Latin is marked through a double passive: nōscī is in the passive, as expected, but quita est is also in the passive in order to show that we are not dealing with ability, but with possibility.⁴⁷ This kind of double passive is already restricted in early Latin because posse and quīre / nequīre are morphologically irregular, so that next to a third person potestur there can be no equivalent in the first or second persons.⁴⁸ Possibility is part of epistemic modality; various degrees of weakened possibility can be expressed through the Latin subjunctive: traditional grammars speak of potential and unreal subjunctives. But the subjunctive can also express deontic modality, degrees of obligation or necessity: what traditional grammars refer to as the jussive subjunctive is one expression of deontic modality. Given

46 For mood and modality in general see the excellent introduction by Palmer 1986. 47 Note that it is meaning which matters here, not form; deponents do not trigger the passivization of modals. 48 In classical Latin, the double passive only persists in the perfectum of verbs expressing phasal aspect, incipere ‘to begin’ and dēsinere ‘to stop’.

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this broad range of subjunctival functions, it is an exercise in futility to search for one all-encompassing meaning of the Latin subjunctive, as Müller-Wetzel 2001 does. The epistemic and deontic functions of the subjunctive are clearest in main clauses, where there is a consistent opposition between indicative and subjunctive. Thus, uenit ‘he comes’ is a statement of fact, whereas ueniat ‘let him come’ can be interpreted deontically, as a command or a wish; and in (sī uenīret,) gaudērem ‘(if he were to come,) I would be happy’, the subjunctive marks epistemic modality, in this case impossibility. In some subordinate clauses, the modal value of the subjunctive is also very noticeable. We can see this in conditional clauses, where there is a clear contrast between indicative and epistemic subjunctive (potential or unreal). But even in many clauses where there is no such opposition, the subjunctive still makes sense. Final clauses with ut express a purpose and thus deontic modality, which explains the subjunctive; deontic modality is also reflected in the deontic negation nē used in final ut-clauses.⁴⁹ However, while in these clause types the subjunctive is predictable from their meaning, in others it is not. In ut-clauses that are consecutive rather than final, the negation is nōn rather than nē because we are not dealing with deontic modality: consecutive clauses express consequences pure and simple, not intended consequences like the final ut-clauses. And yet the subjunctive is obligatory in such ut-clauses. The tense usage in these clauses is entirely rational: (133) Quod Amerīnīs ūsque eō uīsum est indignum, ut urbe tōtā flētus gemitusque fieret. (Cic. S. Rosc. 24) ‘This seemed so outrageous to the inhabitants of Ameria that crying and moaning could be heard in the whole town.’ (134) Verrēs Siciliam per triennium ita uexāuit atque perdidit, ut ea restituī in antīquum statum nūllō modō possit. (Cic. Verr. I 12) ‘Over three years, Verres tortured and ruined Sicily so much that it can in no way be restored to its original state.’ In (133), the sequence of tenses is observed; the main clause is past and the consequence also lies in the past, so the non-anterior imperfect subjunctive is employed. In (134), the main clause is also past, but the consequence applies to the present day as well; in such cases there is a choice between following the sequence rules or,

49 Originally ut nē, still commonly found in Plautus and occasionally even in Cicero; but the ellipsis of ut became the norm eventually.

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as here, using absolute tenses. All this makes sense, but the subjunctive does not. However, while we cannot predict the subjunctive from the meaning of the clause, we can at least motivate it. Hofmann and Szantyr 1965, 638 present various examples where a subjunctive makes sense, such as (135), where Sosia wishes that the person beating him up were him, so that their roles would be exchanged: (135) Ita dī faciant, ut tū potius sīs atque ego te ut uerberem. (Plaut. Amph. 380) ‘May the gods do so, so that you are him instead and so that I am beating you.’ The main clause is a wish; I have translated the ut-clauses as factual, but in a context like this, it could also be treated as a wish. Other contexts, not necessarily deontic in nature, exist where a subjunctive is fully justified. Hofmann and Szantyr argue that the subjunctive spread from there to the factual ut-clauses, where it lacks any justification. Subordination patterns may not always be fully predictable from their meaning, but at least they can be motivated.⁵⁰

4.5.3 The Accusative-and-Infinitive Construction and Its Replacement with quod We looked at the difference between factum est ut and bene factum est quod above. In that connection, we also saw why verbs of speech cannot take quod-clauses in classical Latin: quod-clauses still have to be factive, but verbs of speech have complement clauses that are assertive. In later Latin, on the other hand, the accusativeand-infinitive clauses after verbs of speech alternate with quod-clauses (and also with clauses introduced by quia and quoniam, both in the new meaning ‘that’).⁵¹ The replacement process was a very gradual one, and one that clearly acquired a sociolinguistic dimension. With ‘accusative-and-infinitive verbs’, Tertullian, as an early Christian (160–225), still uses quod and the like in only 4% of all cases. Two centuries later, Jerome in his early letters (1–45) largely follows Tertullian: the figure rises just slightly, to 6%; but after his Bible translation, Jerome admits such clauses much more freely, with a figure of 20% in letters 117–54. Similarly, his contemporary Augustine employs finite clauses in only 3% of all instances before his conversion, but

50 Consecutive ut with the indicative first appears in the second century AD, though only sporadically; see Adams 2016, 298, who does not find influence from Greek ὥστε + indicative entirely convincing or sufficient as an explanation. Presumably a number of factors were at play, with some Greek influence, but also the factive meaning of the construction among them. 51 My discussion owes much to Heberlein forthcoming, the best treatment of the issue I have come across.

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after his conversion the figure rises to 17%. In pagan authors, the figures generally remain low, and Augustine himself can also revert to his earlier usage: in a letter to Augustine, Publicola uses quod and quia two-thirds of the time, while Augustine, who obviously did not like Publicola, exclusively uses the accusative and infinitive in his reply, an indication that it was considered more formal and could be used to distance oneself from the addressee (Adams 2016, 389–90).⁵² Adams 2005, 197 also demonstrates that quia is of lower register than quod, because quod had always been multi-functional, while quia had been purely causal and was now increasing its domain by analogy with quod, for which causality was just one of many functions; Augustine still avoids quia ‘that’ except in Biblical contexts. In some ways, perhaps one should actually speak of levelling rather than of a replacement process: as quod-clauses spread to verbs of speech and perception, the accusative and infinitive begins to spread to other verbs which originally took quodclauses, such as emotive verbs like mīrārī ‘to be surprised’ or discourse-organizing verbs like adicere ‘to add’. But insofar as quod and similar subordinators become alternatives where previously only the accusative and infinitive was allowed, we can see a shift that is driven by similarity of meaning; as Cuzzolin 1994 and 2014 shows, the distinction between factivity and assertion is not absolute, and quod spreads from fully factive environments to less factive ones. From discourse-organizing and emotive predicates, the subordinators spread to verbs of perception and then to non-factive verbs of speech, and finally also to verbs of belief like crēdere and putāre. While Cuzzolin’s treatment of the spread of quod is fully convincing, what he says about the moods in such clauses is more problematic. In Bell. Hisp. 36.1, we find the first attestation of quod with a verb of speech: renūntiāuērunt quod … habērent ‘they announced that they had’. Cuzzolin believes that the subjunctive here is quotative and thus expresses distance; the author is not committed to the truth of the assertion made by others. The opposition between indicative and subjunctive is therefore considered to be one between ‘speaker commitment’ and its absence. However, Heberlein forthcoming shows that the situation is more complex. With verbs of speech and verbs of believing, there is an inherent asymmetry: in the first person, the speaker automatically commits to the truth of the assertion, and it is impossible to express or even envisage non-commitment; in other persons, it is these other persons who commit to the truth of the assertion, so that the subjunctive cannot indicate true non-commitment, but at best non-commitment on the

52 On a more charitable interpretation, one could also say that Augustine followed the same precept as Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 1.10, also quoted by Adams 2016, 396–97): ἐπιδεξίως αὐτò μóνoν ἐϰεῖνo, ὃ ἔδει εἰρη̃σϑαι, πρoφέρεσϑαι ‘tactfully to bring in the very expression that ought to have been used’.

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part of the first person.⁵³ With verbs of cognition, such as ‘to know’, the speaker automatically commits to the truth, regardless of the person the verb is in, which is why we cannot say ∗I / you don’t know that X is the case.⁵⁴ In the end, then, a true opposition between speaker commitment and lack thereof only exists for emotive verbs, which are inherently factive; the subjunctive indicates non-commitment, while the accusative and infinitive as well as quod-clauses in the indicative are neutral with regard to commitment.⁵⁵ But ultimately, the opposition between indicative and subjunctive was bound to disappear even here in later Latin when the subjunctive spread among subordinate clauses. Heberlein then examines the usage in Macrobius (around AD 400). With verbs of cognition, where speaker commitment is determined lexically or through the choice of person, and with highly assertive, impersonal expressions like cōnstat ‘it is certain’ or sciendum est ‘one has to know’, no true opposition of meaning can exist, and therefore no opposition exists between the moods, so that we find the accusative and infinitive in free variation with quod + indicative as well as quod + subjunctive. With verbs of speech, on the other hand, accusative and infinitive and quod-clauses also alternate, but the mood in such quod-clauses is dependent on the source of the utterance; the indicative indicates that first-person commitment, while the subjunctive is quotative and marks lack of such commitment. With verbs of speech, then, Macrobius is more conservative than his pagan contemporary Symmachus, who uses the subjunctive consistently in his quod-clauses, even if there is speaker commitment. Macrobius uses quia only if there is speaker commitment, and only with the indicative, partly to indicate this commitment, and partly in adherence to classical norms, where quia always took the indicative.⁵⁶ Heberlein argues convincingly that Macrobius’ usage is driven by different factors. Macrobius, himself a Christian, happily adopts Christian usages; yet not in order to give his work a religious tone, but as novel expansions of stylistic norms. This is also why he is not averse to the new quia, which Jerome uses, but which the pagan Symmachus still eschews. For Macrobius, quod is neutral with regard to speaker commitment, while quia can only be used for positive, existing commitment, and ut is the preferred choice to indicate that the speaker does not believe in

53 Because such an opposition is rather artificial, Publicola already uses the indicative consistently in such cases. 54 We may of course not know whether something is or is not the case (indirect question). 55 With the indicative, non-commitment is a distinct possibility, as in queritur grauis, locuplēs, ōrnāta cīuitās quod nōn retinet … ‘the important, wealthy, and distinguished community complains that it does not retain…’ (Cic. Flacc. 56); Cicero’s sarcastic tone throughout the passage indicates that he does not share this view. 56 This adherence is curious, since classical quia has a completely different, causal, meaning.

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the contents of the subordinate clause; the neutral quod is therefore the functional continuation of the accusative and infinitive. Sciendum est quod seems to be so frequent because it sounds scientific and is calqued on νoητέoν ἐστὶ ὅτι / ὡς ‘one has to understand that’. And finally, Macrobius likes variation; quia is mostly used when the other options were already taken in the immediately preceding context.

4.6 Further Reading As a general introduction to syntax, I recommend S.C. Dik’s works; there is something to be learnt from all of them, whatever syntactic theory one settles for in the end. My first encounter with Functional Grammar was Dik 1978, a slim volume that was the perfect introduction for a beginner. Dik and Hengeveld 1997 is much more detailed and a must for more advanced students. As a first introduction to Latin syntax, Pinkster 1990 is still unsurpassed. Hofmann and Szantyr 1965 remains one of the best reference grammars, but should now be complemented with Pinkster 2015 and 2021, a work that is outstanding both in its descriptive detail and in its intelligent discussion. For case in general, Blake 2001 provides a beautiful introduction. Pinkster 1990 contains a clear outline of the Latin case system. Lehmann 2002 goes into valency from a typological perspective, putting the Latin data into a broader context. On tense and aspect, Comrie 1985 and Comrie 1976 are typologically sound and easy to follow. The Latin situation is dealt with in Pinkster 1983. My own work (de Melo 2007c) focuses on a number of specific problems, contrasting early and classical Latin. Grammaticalization is the topic of many books and articles. Hopper and Traugott 1993 is one of the classic treatments. Leumann 1973 anticipates such discussions for Latin. For the clitic forms of esse ‘to be’, Pezzini 2015 is now the standard reference work. For Latin word order in general, Marouzeau 1922, 1938, 1949 remains the most detailed descriptive treatment. A particularly intelligent discussion within a Functional Grammar framework is provided by Spevak 2010. Lehmann 1989 discusses subordination patterns in Latin from a typological perspective, with many valuable insights. For mood and modality in general I recommend especially Palmer 1986. For quod-clauses replacing the accusative and infinitive see Heberlein forthcoming.

Chapter 5 Dialectal Variation, Language Contact, and Sondersprachen So far we have looked at Latin largely as a monolith; a monolith which, it is true, changes over time, but which at any given point is relatively uniform. Yet such a picture is always an idealization of a messier reality. Just as the word-andparadigm model presented in chapter 3 is an idealization that is pedagogically useful, so phonology and syntax benefit from idealizations that allow us to see a system behind the messy reality. However, now it is time to embrace the beautiful mess of synchronic language variation. When we were looking at morphology, we saw how frequency patterns influence synchronic language processing and drive diachronic change; abstraction helps us to understand usage, but usage also explains apparent oddities in the system. Language, then, is best understood as the constant interplay between the abstract system and its concrete realization, between, to use the terminology of Ferdinand de Saussure, langue and parole. In the course of this chapter, I hope to show that the beautiful mess of synchronic variation is indeed beautiful, but less messy than it appears at first sight. We will begin with dialectal variation, move on to bilingualism and language contact, and finally look at Sondersprachen, technical language varieties created for specific groups of people. We will exemplify this phenomenon with Christian Latin, which is rich in special terminology created through loanwords, calques, and loanshifts, but which on occasion also shows syntactic interference from other languages. Another Sondersprache that we will look at more briefly is the Latin of the grammarians. But first, dialects.

5.1 Dialects In this section, we will examine four topics. First, what evidence is there for ancient dialects, and how reliable is it? Then we will turn to classifying and grouping dialects and the problems that arise in this connection. Third, we must look at lexical features, at the types of dialect words we can find in our texts. And finally, we will see that dialects have specific life cycles.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111172002-005

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5.1.1 The Nature of Our Evidence There is a fair amount of evidence for dialectal variation within Latin, but while we can make statements about pronunciation, morphology, and individual words or expressions, there is hardly any data for syntactic variation based on geography. Why is there such a discrepancy? It is a reasonable assumption that the dialects of Latin also exhibited subtle syntactic differences. However, the reason why we cannot recover these from our data is that our evidence comes from two types of sources. On the one hand, we have explicit statements by ancient writers. What is particularly salient to them, just as to linguistically untrained people today, is divergences in pronunciation or the lexicon. From time to time they will also notice aberrant morphology, and syntactic differences will not go unnoticed either. But most ancient writers, again just like the average person today, would have struggled to explain in what way one syntactic construction differs from another. Individual words are easiest to comment on because all one has to do is state that a certain group of people uses one term where others use another. However, that does not mean that we can accept such statements uncritically. For example, Varro (ling. 5.162) tells us that cēnāculum ‘attic’ used to mean ‘dining-room’, as is obvious from its etymology, and that this old meaning is preserved in Lanuvium at the temple of Juno, in the rest of Latium, in Falerii, and in Corduba. The Italian references are very specific and believable, especially since a religious use is referred to and we know that religious language is more conservative. But what are we to make of Corduba? Would this usage exist only there, or throughout Spain? Ultimately, whenever an ancient writer mentions a specific term in connection with a specific region, we cannot be sure about the exact geographical spread of the term. Matters are worse when it comes to pronunciation (cf. 7.1.5). Some writers tell us reasonably clearly about differences in pronunciation, as when Pompeius (15.6–8) says that it is a vice of the Africans to use only the dark l and not the clear one; although again one would have to ask, all inhabitants of North Africa, or only those of a specific region? But other statements are so vague as to be almost useless, as when Cicero (Arch. 26) speaks about lending one’s ears Cordubae nātīs poētīs pingue quiddam sonantibus atque peregrīnum ‘to poets born in Corduba, sounding somewhat fat and foreign’. What does that even mean? At this point in time, they were native speakers of Latin, so there can be no question of a non-native accent. ‘Fat’ could again refer to the dark l, but it does not have to. Since this comes from a court speech, we should not expect a phonetic analysis, but the vagueness is still frustrating. On the other hand, next to explicit statements we also get inscriptional evidence. This has its own set of potential pitfalls. Local lexical items may not occur there at all if they belong to specific semantic fields and the inscriptions cover

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different topics. Morphology is somewhat easier to study. But phonology is again tricky. Especially from the late Republic onwards, when spelling had become more standardized, the absence of any spelling mistakes does not prove that there were no phonological divergences; it simply shows that the writers were educated. Since many inscriptions are on the short side, studying dialectal syntax is almost impossible. The bulk of our evidence for dialectal variation comes from such explicit statements and from inscriptions. Literary texts by authors from specific parts of the Empire are not as helpful as one might expect. Such texts are usually written by educated authors, and even the humbler ones follow specific models and are anything but unadulterated local Latin. A final problem for the early period is the fact that Rome was just one town among many equally important ones, and that consequently our inscriptional documentation for Rome itself is relatively scant. The absence of certain features for the dialect of Rome need not be significant; what may look like a dialectal feature of other localities may in fact be no more than an early feature absent in our Roman record because of the accidents of transmission. A good example is the dative singular ending of the first declension. For the second and first declensions, we reconstruct ∗-ōi and ∗-āi, as retained in Greek -ῳ and -ᾳ. A second-declension ending of this type can still be seen on the fibula Praenestina, where we find NVMASIOI (= Numasiōi) ‘for Numasios’. But sound change led to phonologically conditioned allomorphy: if the next word began with a vowel, the diphthong was retained (but shortened to -oi and -ai); and if the next word began with a consonant, the final element of the diphthong dropped off, resulting in -ō and -ā. Eventually, these endings were reinterpreted as plain doublets, not as phonologically conditioned ones. In such cases, however, it is common that one of the elements disappears over time. In classical Latin, we end up with -ō, the old pre-consonantal variant, and -ae, the old pre-vocalic one. However, in earlier times, well after the phonological conditioning of such variants, but also before the elimination of doublets, there are interesting patterns. Adams 2007, 46–52 shows that of the forty tokens of the dative in -ā, thirtyeight come from outside Rome; and of the thirty-two tokens of the dative in -ai, twelve come from Rome. At first sight, then, one could say that in Rome, the dative in -ā was almost unheard of, and that outside Rome, both types occurred. However, as Adams demonstrates, that would be the wrong conclusion. Almost all of the datives in -ā occur in divine names or other sacred terms; and almost all of the datives in -ai are non-religious in nature. What we are dealing with, then, is not a regionalism at all, but a distinction between a religious and a profane register, yet the scarcity of the Roman evidence could easily have led us astray. Eventually, the profane register was generalized, as one might expect, since non-religious language is inevitably more frequent than religious usages.

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So far, we have not yet talked about how to classify dialects; we will come to this next.

5.1.2 Dialect Grouping Dialects are mutually intelligible varieties of the same language. However, mutual intelligibility is not a black-and-white issue. Much depends on speech rate, the enunciation of individual speakers, and so on. Even if we abstract away from such factors, we find that intelligibility may be a one-way street, as for example Portuguese speakers find it easier to understand speakers of Castilian Spanish than the other way round. Furthermore, in a dialect continuum spanning a vast geographical range, neighbouring towns may always be able to understand each other, but two towns at the opposite extremes of the territory may have varieties that are no longer mutually intelligible. Assessing mutual intelligibility in an ancient language is fraught with further problems, so before we return to this issue, we should perhaps first examine why speech communities drift apart. One reason is that when a language spreads, it may be acquired by a community with a different first language, which may then confer some of its native-language features onto the newly acquired language. Such ‘substrate’ influence often disappears in the next generation, which acquires the new language natively, but some features may persist. Let us look at CIL 12 . 401, an inscription from Luceria in Apulia. The area was originally Oscan-speaking, but the Romans founded a colony there in 315/14 BC, and this text dates to the second century BC. It was therefore probably written by native speakers of Latin, but some features indicate persistent substrate influence: (1) IN . HOCE . LOVCARID . STIRCVS NE[QV]IS . FVNDATID . NEVE . CADAVER PROIECITAD . NEVE . PARENTATID . SEI . QVIS . ARVORSV . HAC . FAXIT . [CEIV]IVM QVIS . VOLET . PRO . IOVDICATOD . N . L MANVM . INIECT[I]O . ESTOD . SEIVE MAC[I]STERATVS . VOLET . MOLTARE [LI]CETOD With quantities: In hōce loucārīd stircus nēquis fundātīd nēue cadāuer prōiecitād nēue parentātīd; sei quis aruorsu hāc faxit, ceiuium quis uolēt prō ioudicātōd nummum quīnquāgintā manūm iniectiō estōd, seiue magisterātus uolēt, moltāre licētōd.

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‘In this grove let no one spread out dung or cast out a corpse¹ or perform rites for the dead. If anyone acts against this, whoever of the citizens wishes to do so, may lay hands upon him just as for a fine of 50 nummī,² or if a magistrate wishes to fine him, it shall be permitted.’ The inscription was discovered in 1847 and unfortunately destroyed in the same year; the transcription is not fully reliable. Some features are best explained as the result of Oscan influence: macisterātus with anaptyxis breaking up the cluster -str-; stircus for stercus, with an Oscan-style raising of -erc- to -irc-; and the form loucār (nominalized adjective in -āris) instead of loucus / lūcus, with a parallel in Beneventum. On the other hand, the future imperatives fundātīd, prōiecitād, and parentātīd are highly unusual next to the regular forms estōd and licētōd. In Oscan third-person prohibitions, the perfect subjunctive is used; it ends in -tt-í-. Are fundātīd and parentātīd instead to be interpreted as perfect subjunctives? Or as blends between such subjunctives and the Latin future imperative in -tōd? And what are we to make of prōiecitād?³ Other dialect features arise when one area retains an archaism that others give up, or when one area innovates and others do not. We have already seen one such retained archaism in rural Latium, where cēnāculum retained its original meaning ‘dining-room’, whereas in Rome the meaning changed to ‘attic’. Another case of a retained archaism is adjectival cuius, cuia, cuium ‘whose’. Originally, cuius, the genitive of quis, did not inflect; it goes back to a genitive ∗kw -os ̯io reinforced with another genitive ending, ∗-s. But in constellations like quoiius erus ‘whose master’, this genitive could be reinterpreted as a masculine adjective in the nominative case, and from there we get quoiia and quoiium. In Plautus they are not particularly frequent, either because this innovation failed to spread easily, or because they were already going out of fashion again. Virgil’s cuium pecus ‘whose cattle’ (ecl. 3.1) is meant to imitate the oldfashioned speech of countrymen, but was already mocked by a certain Numitorius (in Donatus’ life of Virgil). When other poets use adjectival cuius, it is literary imitation rather than regional survival. However, in Spanish the word inflects to this day, as cuyo, cuya, and this proves subliterary survival of such forms in the Iberian peninsula.

1 That is, of someone who was denied burial. 2 Sesterces are meant. 3 Other features of this inscription are simply conservative: final -d was largely lost in pronunciation in polysyllables by now, but kept in many other contemporary inscriptions as well; forms with ar- rather than ad- before labial are very much of the period, with occasional survivals in classical Latin (arbiter ‘judge’, connected with adbītere ‘walk towards, join a meeting’); and the ablative with aruorsu is also easy to parallel.

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A dialectal feature based on phonological innovation is the monophthongization of -ae-. Eventually, this affected all varieties of Latin, but in the late Republic, the dialect of Rome still had the diphthong, as Varro (ling. 7.96) indicates, who compares pronunciations. Varro states that there are words which some people pronounce with an added -a-, a formulation which is imprecise. Five pairs are presented. Among these, scaena / scēna ‘stage’ and scaeptrum / scēptrum ‘sceptre’ are loans from Greek (σϰηνή and σϰη̃πτρoν), and since many speakers were aware of the ongoing Latin sound change of -ae- to -ē-, they wrongly considered these Greek loans to have undergone the Latin sound change and produced them with hypercorrect -ae-. Two other pairs, faenerātrīx / fēnerātrīx ‘female moneylender’ and faenisicia / fēnisicia ‘mown hay’, have etymologically correct -ē-, so that again we are dealing with hypercorrections (see de Melo 2019 ad loc.). In these four pairs, one could indeed speak of an added -a-. But the last pair, Maesius / Mēsius, a personal name, shows genuine monophthongization. Interestingly, only in this last pair is the monophthongal pronunciation ascribed to rustics. In Varro’s time, then, the difference between -ae- and -ē- was a genuine dialectal distinction, but it had sociolectal repercussions insofar as some speakers hypercorrected, trying to be more in tune with Roman speech. Just a century later, however, -ae- had become -ē- everywhere, so that this particular dialect difference had been levelled out.⁴ When people divide Italic into Osco-Umbrian and Latin-Faliscan, the underlying assumption, often spelled out explicitly, is that Faliscan constituted a separate language.⁵ But did it? Faliscan texts fall into three periods: early Faliscan in the seventh and sixth centuries; middle Faliscan thereafter until 241, when Falerii Veteres, the main city, was destroyed by the Romans; and late Faliscan after 241, when Roman settlers had been brought in. Our attestations of early Faliscan are few in number, and the texts are remarkably similar in language to contemporary Latin. Once we reach middle Faliscan, the language has become more distinct. Middle Faliscan has monophthongized ae to ē⁶ (personal name caesio or cēsi), au to ō (personal names aufilio and oufilio next to pōla ‘Paula’), ei to ē (hēc ‘here’), and ou to ō (loufir ‘Liber’, loifirtāto ‘freedom’ (genitive), lōfirta ‘freedwoman’); i has become e in front of another vowel (hīleo ‘son’), but e has been raised to i before r (loifirtāto). There is no vowel weakening. Final -r

4 Incidentally, in later orthography, words beginning with pr-, such as precēs ‘prayers’, were often written with hypercorrect -ae-; this has nothing to do with special pronunciations and is in fact caused by the frequency of the preposition / prefix prae ‘before’ (Adams 2016, 416). 5 Bakkum 2009 is one of the few addressing the question properly, concluding, as the title of his book indicates, that Faliscan was a dialect. 6 I assume that Faliscan has kept the original quantities; however, Faliscan marks neither long vowels nor geminate consonants in writing, just as contemporary Latin.

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has become -d (prētōd ‘praetor’). And initial f- is changing to h-, leading to variant spellings and hypercorrections. There are lexical differences, such as lecēt ‘he / she lies’⁷ instead of Latin situs / sita est in funerary inscriptions. And the onomastic material is heavily influenced by Etruscan personal names. Late Faliscan, by contrast, is essentially Latin with some divergent features. CIL 2 1 .365 is written in the Faliscan alphabet, from right to left, as was normal in Middle Faliscan, but is anything but pure and unadulterated Faliscan: (2) MENERVA . SACRV [L]A . COTENA . LA . F . PRETOD . DE ZENATVO . SENTENTIAD . VOOTVM DEDET . CVANDO . DATV . RECTED CVNCAPTVM With quantities: Meneruā sacru. Lars Cotēna Lartis fīlius prētōd dē zenātuo sententiād uootum dedet. Cuandō datu, rēctēd cuncaptum. ‘Sacred to Minerva. Lars Cotena, son of Lars, praetor, gave this in accordance with a decree of the senate as a votive offering. When it was given, it (sc. the ceremony) was performed correctly.’ There are some Faliscan features here: the spelling cu for the labiovelar, the form prētōd with monophthongization and final -r > -d, and the personal name. The double vowel in uootum, however, comes from Oscan via Latin and dates this inscription to 150 BC or later. The dative Meneruā is Latin, since Faliscan has -ai; and the genitive zenātuo (with loss of final -s) has an ending found elsewhere in Latin (fourth-declension senātuos also in CIL 12 .581.8), but z- is common in Faliscan. The vowel weakening in sacru, uootum, and datu is again Latin; in Faliscan we would expect -om or -o. In cuncaptum, the middle syllable does not have vowel weakening, the last one does, and the first one should have -o- in both Latin and Faliscan. One gets the impression that a local who could no longer speak Faliscan wanted to write Faliscan here, out of local pride and a feeling of Faliscan identity; but this attempt was not entirely successful. But what is Faliscan? A dialect of Latin or a separate language? Most scholars calling Faliscan a language have not given the matter much thought. All they want to indicate is that Faliscan is more different from Roman Latin than the Latin of Praeneste. On a family tree of Latin-Faliscan, Faliscan would have split off first, and Roman Latin and Praenestine Latin would have separated later. Faliscan underwent

7 Presumably pronounced with -g- and cognate with English lie and German liegen.

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its own sound changes and morphological developments, as did Latin, but this family tree model does not tell us whether Roman Latin and Faliscan were mutually intelligible or not. This question is difficult to answer, especially since there is not a great deal of Faliscan material, and much of it is onomastic. However, my educated guess would be that early Faliscan is no more than a dialect; by the middle Faliscan period, one can perhaps speak of a closely related language rather than a highly divergent dialect; and late Faliscan is the result of a resettlement policy and is essentially a dialect of Latin again. A final point before we can move on to dialect words is that usages can spread or shrink; ancient isoglosses cannot necessarily be equated with modern ones. Adams (2007, 279–80 and 338–40) makes this point with French aveugle ‘blind’, based on Latin ab oculīs.⁸ Aveugle has no genuine parallels in other Romance languages.⁹ Ab oculīs is found only once, in the Actus Petri cum Simone. Can we therefore assume that this text was composed in Gaul? Tempting though this is, we cannot be certain. There is, in fact, evidence that we are dealing with a regionalism due to shrinkage: Italian cieco ‘blind’ continues caecus, but some Italian dialects use orbo ‘bereft’ instead. Ab oculīs and orbus make less sense on their own than in combination. Presumably, a phrase like orbus ab oculīs ‘bereft of one’s eyes’ was subsequently shortened to orbus or ab oculīs, and these two would have coexisted for a while before one was eliminated in each region. Ab oculīs in our Latin text, then, does not allow us to pin it down geographically.

5.1.3 Dialect Words Much of our dialect material consists of individual words, collected masterfully in Adams 2007. Here I do not have enough space to assemble the material in any detail; instead, I will merely discuss two theoretical points, connected with each other, but at least in principle independent. The first is that dialect words may often come from a local language, but that there is always a substantial amount of dialect words which are either created from Latin morphemes or which are traditional Latin words that have acquired a new meaning. Loans from local languages are normally easy to identify. Among the many loans from local languages, we find paramus ‘plateau’ in Spain (Spanish and Portuguese páramo, Adams 2007, 425–26) or girba ‘mortar’ in North Africa (Adams 2007, 531). Dialect words consisting of native Latin material with new meanings are not always immediately obvious. In North

8 Or rather, a newly created adjective ∗aboculus. 9 Old Italian avocolo is borrowed from Old French.

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Africa, we find dulcor ‘grape syrup’ (Adams 2007, 535–36), marīnus ‘north-east wind’ (Adams 2007, 555–56), and baiae ‘baths’ (Adams 2007, 534–35). All of these are idiosyncratic developments of common Latin words. Dulcor originally had an abstract meaning, ‘sweetness’, and the switch to a concrete one is regional. Marīnus survives as marin in French, but refers to a wind from the east or south-east; originally the word simply meant ‘(wind) from the sea’, and the exact meaning depended on local geography. Baiae was a spa town in the Bay of Naples; the generalization to any spa is again a North African phenomenon, perhaps comparable with the English word hoover, which started as a brand name, but is now replacing vacuum cleaner regardless of brand. The second theoretical issue concerns the distinction between weak and strong regionalisms. All the words listed so far are strong regionalisms, which means that they are words for things that are not geographically restricted. This, in turn, means that speakers could in principle have chosen a different, non-dialectal word. A weak dialect word, on the other hand, is one for an animal, plant, or object that only exists in a specific place; its presence in a local text is less meaningful because speakers had no alternative to choose from, and speakers from other parts of the Empire would have had to use the same word, but they simply did not have the occasion to do so.¹⁰ Thus, when Europeans first arrived in Australia, the word kangaroo (probably from Guugu Yimidhirr) would have been a weak dialect term because the creature was unknown in the Old World. But a word like sheila, referring to any young woman rather than a woman with that name, constitutes a strong dialect term and marks the speaker as coming from Australia or New Zealand. In principle, strong and weak dialect terms can be loanwords or developments of native material. In practice, however, weak dialect terms are more likely than strong ones to be loans.

5.1.4 The Life Cycle of Dialects Finally, before we move on to language contact, a few words need to be said about the life cycle of dialects. One often hears these days that British dialects are disappearing fast. During the First World War, Wilhelm Doegen, a German language teacher and sound pioneer, travelled around camps in which prisoners of war were held and recorded soldiers from Britain and the colonies. The sheer variety of British accents is remarkable. Today there is indeed less variation, but

10 Sometimes a word may simply be more frequent in one region than in another; manicillium ‘glove’ is not restricted to Britain, but is more common there because of the inhospitable climate.

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the situation is more complex than a simple replacement process by Received Pronunciation. While some decades ago a trained dialectologist could have pinned down which village outside Manchester a speaker came from, today this is not possible; but instead of disappearing, these small local varieties have merged with larger ones, so that there is now a distinct dialect of Manchester and surroundings, as opposed to London and surroundings or Birmingham and surroundings. These bigger varieties have taken on some features of the smaller ones; diversity persists, yet it is not diversity on a small, local level, but rather, on a larger, regional and supra-regional level. The situation is similar in Greek. Ancient Greek had many distinct dialects, Attic-Ionic, Doric, Aeolic, and others. Modern Greek, too, has a variety of dialects, but with the exception of Tsakonian, which continues a Doric variety spoken in isolated regions in the Peloponnese, all of the modern dialects can be traced back to the ϰoινὴ γλω̃ σσα ‘common tongue’. This koine was largely based on morphologically simplified Attic, with a smaller influence from Ionic and other varieties. It arose in the fourth century BC, through the conquests of Alexander the Great, when an Empire was created and speakers of different varieties came into much more regular contact with each other. Later, this shared dialect fragmented again, leading to the modern situation. The Latin situation is comparable. Plautus mocks speakers from Praeneste, modern Palestrina, a town only 35 km east of Rome (Truc. 690–1). In the early Republic, each town appears to have inscriptional idiosyncrasies. This is no different from early Greek, or Britain during the First World War. However, as Rome gained power and influence, much of this variety disappeared. In the late Republic, Varro still compares Rome and the countryside, but the micro-variation has disappeared. A koine arose. But at some point it broke up again, and new, supra-regional dialects emerged. When writers of the Empire compare speech varieties, they compare the Latin of Italy with the Latin of North Africa¹¹ or other provinces.¹² Variation is still there, but it is not the old kind of dialectal distinctions that have survived. Modern Italian consists of a large number of very distinct varieties. All of these can be traced back to a fairly uniform Italian variant of Proto-Romance rather than the old Republican dialects.

11 Augustine (ord. 2.17.45) compares his own speech with that of the Italī rather than the Romans. 12 Pliny the Younger (epist. 9.23.2) relates an anecdote by Tacitus in which he was asked by a Roman knight, who could not place his accent, whether he was Italicus ‘Italian’ or prōuinciālis ‘from the provinces’. When Tacitus replied that they knew each other from school, the knight asked him whether he was Tacitus or Pliny!

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5.2 Latin in Contact with Other Languages Latin was in contact with many other languages. In the early period, the main contacts were other Italic languages, Etruscan, and Doric Greek. As Rome’s power expanded all over the Mediterranean and beyond, speakers of Latin interacted with those of many other Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. Such contacts varied from occasional exchanges with limited proficiency on either side to complex scenarios of bilingualism. Latin was partly shaped by its interaction with other languages; limited contact could still lead to loanwords, while intense and prolonged bilingualism might lead to syntactic and morphological influence. While the Roman elite in the early Republic would send their children to the Etruscans for higher education (thus Liv. 9.36), the influence of Etruscan was supplanted by that of Greek in the mid-Republic, and Romans came to define their identity in relation to Greek culture. Of all the languages Latin was in contact with, only Greek exerted a lasting influence that went beyond the purely lexical. In what follows, I shall briefly deal with theoretical issues of language contact and bilingualism before turning to Greek influence on Plautus and on Cicero; I want to focus on these two because they represent the extreme ends of a spectrum, and the contrast is instructive. Both Plautus and Cicero were part of the literary elite, but sub-elite language has much to offer, too; the final parts of this section will look at monolingual Latin texts with signs of interference from other languages, and at bilingual texts with a view to showcasing their diversity.

5.2.1 Some Theoretical Concepts Worldwide, bilingualism is more common than monolingualism; but people from predominantly monolingual countries like Britain or the United States often have a number of preconceptions about bilingualism. One is that in order to count as a bilingual, a speaker has to have the same degree of competence in both languages; however, fully ‘balanced’ bilingualism is relatively rare, including in individuals who grew up with both languages from birth. In fact, early acquisition correlates very highly with phonetic proficiency, as there is a critical age for acquiring native competence in articulation, but it is not the case that a first language necessarily remains a speaker’s dominant language for good; such a speaker may become highly proficient in a second language acquired later in life, a language which is perhaps not articulated with a native accent, but which the speaker may use with greater ease, at least in some domains. Domain-specific proficiency is very common among bilinguals regardless of the age at which they acquired the two languages. For example, in many African countries that have a host of local languages, speakers may

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use such a local language as the home language, for daily, mundane interactions, but education will be in English or French, and speakers will feel more confident in these languages when talking about academic topics. Since bilingualism is such a complex issue and speakers’ competence is particularly hard to measure if we only have what they left us in short inscriptions, I take a fairly broad view here and speak of bilingualism even if the knowledge of the second language appears relatively poor. Bilingual speakers often code-switch. Typically, this is not a random mix of the two languages, but one language provides the syntactic matrix and part of the lexical material, and the other language provides the rest of the lexical material that has to be integrated into the matrix structure in some way. Reasons for code-switching are varied. Sometimes, one of the two languages simply lacks the mot juste, or a speaker may have a momentary glitch in linguistic performance in one language and the other language provides the required material easily. At other times, the factors may be sociolinguistic: speakers may want to indicate their own in-group membership, or they may want to exclude some participants from certain parts of the conversation. In principle we need to keep code-switching separate from imperfect language acquisition or learners’ Latin. The person code-switching has a choice, while the second-language learner may not have the lexical or grammatical resources and may thus be forced to switch. In practice, on the other hand, the boundary is more fluid because most bilinguals are not fully balanced, so that it is hard to determine whether a specific switch is the result of a choice or not. In ancient texts, often short compositions by people not otherwise known, we must needs remain agnostic on such issues. In fact, the presence of non-Latin words in an otherwise Latin text does not necessarily point to a bilingual individual; we may be dealing with established loanwords that started as code-switches, but have been taken on by monolingual speakers as well. New and fashionable concepts can be borrowed in different ways. The most obvious is through loanwords; Latin popīna ‘street kitchen’ and rūfus ‘red-haired’ come from a Sabellic language, and since Latin already had words for ‘kitchen’ (coquīna) and ‘red’ (ruber), these new words acquired more specialized meanings, referring to a special type of kitchen or a special kind of red. We speak of calques when a morphologically complex word is translated morpheme by morpheme, which we can see in Greek δoτιϰή ‘of giving, dative’ and its Latin rendition datīuus.¹³ Such translations can be very precise, as in English skyscraper and its French calque gratte-ciel, or somewhat loose, as in the German calque Wolkenkratzer, literally

13 A late example is compāniō ‘companion’, from com ‘together’, pānis ‘bread’, and the suffix -iō; it is based on Gothic gahlaiba ‘bread-sharer’.

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’cloud-scraper’. Finally, there are loanshifts, which happen when a word in the borrowing language has a simple meaning, but takes on a second meaning under the influence of another language where the equivalent is ambiguous. This happens with Latin uirtūs, whose original meaning is ‘manliness, valour’, but which takes on a more abstract meaning ‘virtue, goodness’ because Greek ἀρετή has both meanings. A more complex case affects French, English, and German; French réaliser originally meant ‘to make real, to bring about’, and in this meaning it was borrowed by English and German. English realize is attested from the early seventeenth century, but it acquired an additional meaning, ‘to understand’, by the late eighteenth century. Today, French réaliser and German realisieren also have this additional meaning, but this is not an independent development; the new meaning in French and German came about through a loanshift. Loanshifts are often difficult to recognize because in many instances one may be dealing with independent developments. Calques are easier to detect, especially if they involve complex morphology, but sometimes the direction of calquing is unclear because in ancient languages, first attestation need not mean first use. Loanwords are the easiest category to spot. Often, their phonology gives them away: popīna has a clear etymology, from ∗pekw - ‘to cook’, but labiovelars do not turn into bilabials in Latin, which indicates Sabellic origin. Similarly, lupus ‘wolf’ and bōs ‘cow’ must come from Sabellic because the Greek and Sanskrit cognates (λύϰoς and βoυ̃ς, vrkaḥ and gauḥ), when taken together, indicate labiovelar ∗kw and ∗gw .¹⁴ Rūfus is also Sabellic because Latin words should not contain internal -f-. Petorritum ‘four-wheeled chariot’ is from Gaulish, with a first element that corresponds to Latin quattuor ‘four’; Gaulish also changed labiovelars into bilabials. Catamītus can still refer to Ganymede in Plautus (Men. 144), but since Ganymede did not only serve wine, but provided other services as well, the word came to mean ‘catamite’. The origin of the word is Greek Γανυμήδης, which was borrowed into Etruscan as catamite, and from there into Latin, but the development to ‘catamite’ is Latin-internal. It is interesting to see what semantic fields loanwords belong to, which reveals which aspects of foreign cultures were appreciated. However, it is equally interesting to see which concepts enter as loanwords, calques, or loanshifts. Such choices are driven by a multitude of factors: prestige of the source language, but also the morphological means of the borrowing language, and intricate issues like linguistic purism. Thus we can see that Old English borrowed words for food or cooking as loans (kitchen is from coquīna, cheese is from cāseus), but later terminology for Christian concepts was often calqued or rendered in loanshifts. Modern English has in turn replaced many such words with loans, hence, from Latin trīnitās, the Old

14 The native Latin outcomes would have been ∗∗lucus and ∗∗uōs.

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English calque þrīnes, but the modern loan trinity. Loanwords can often be dated by the sound changes which they have failed to undergo in the source language and the ones which they did undergo in the borrowing language. Latin māchina and olīua betray their Doric Greek origin through their vocalism (Doric μᾱχανά rather than Attic μηχανή) and the preservation of a bilabial glide (‘digamma’, ἐλαίFα), but they must be very early loans because they underwent vowel weakening, and olīua also shows the change of ∗e- to o- before what at the time was still a dark l. Finally, I should mention that there is a borrowing hierarchy. Nouns are easier to borrow than verbs, which are in turn easier to borrow than adjectives. Derivational affixes are difficult to borrow, and the most difficult category is inflectional affixes. It is perhaps not surprising that Latin has borrowed nouns from many languages, but verbs and adjectives mostly from Greek, with which the contact was more intense. No Greek inflectional suffixes made it into Latin, but because many Greek verbs in -ίζω were borrowed, this suffix was eventually transferred onto native Latin words as well.

5.2.2 Greek in Plautus Plautine comedy contains a large amount of Greek words and phrases. Many of these, like māchina, underwent sound changes like vowel weakening which prove that the borrowing took place long before Plautus. But in many other cases, it is unclear whether we are dealing with loanwords or on-the-spot code switches. However, none of the Greek in Plautus is simply taken from the Greek originals he adapts. Where the words are not dialectally neutral, they come from the Doric of southern Italy rather than from the Attic of the New Comedy originals. Plautus’ use of Greek is playful and very deliberate (discussion in Shipp 1953, 1955, 1979). Sometimes there are doublets, such as machaera and gladius ‘sword’, or tarpezīta and argentārius ‘banker’. In such cases, the choice is not random. Plautus uses machaera as the sword of the Greek mercenary, but gladius occurs in proverbs or Roman contexts. Incidentally, it is unlikely that μάχαιρα occurred in the Greek originals in this function,¹⁵ because whenever a sword is talked about in the fragments, the word is σπάϑη. Similarly, the tarpezīta occurs whenever Plautus speaks about Greek bankers, but when the topic is Rome, it is argentārius. Again, the form tarpezīta is not a direct adaptation from the Greek originals. In Attic, the word is τραπεζίτης, and although Plautus probably rendered Greek ζ as s or ss, tarp- rather than trap- is metrically secure. The Greek outcome of old syllabic ∗-r- is -ρα- or -αρ-, ˚ 15 It does occur as a cookery knife!

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depending on a number of factors, including dialect, and here we have a non-Attic alternative form. Plautus’ audience is not only expected to understand regular Greek, but also puns involving Greek that only make sense when they are translated back into Latin. In Pseud. 210–11, a pimp demands olīuī δύναμιν ‘a vast amount of olive oil’; but δύναμις does not mean ‘vast amount’ in Greek. The joke makes sense when we translate δύναμις ‘power’ into Latin: its equivalent is uīs ‘power’, which also means ‘vast amount’. Similarly, in Cas. 728–9a, an unruly slave says to his master, πράγματά μoι παρέχεις ‘you are annoying me’, a regular Greek phrase, but the master replies, dabŏ tibī μέγα ϰαϰóν ‘I shall give you a great evil’, with a Greek phrase that is obscure until we translate it into Latin, where magnum malum ‘a big evil’ is the usual phrase for a thorough beating. Incidentally, such Greek words and phrases that would have baffled a real Greek are nothing unusual. In modern European languages, there exist many ‘English’ words that do not have their English meanings, such as German Handy ‘mobile phone’, which is shortened from hand-held device. In Greek, the ἀνδρών refers to ‘men’s quarters’, but in Vitruvius (6.7.5) it is a ‘corridor’. Dickey 2008, 161–62 remarks on Roman amatory phrases, such as μέλι μoυ ‘my honey’, ζωή ‘life’, or ψυχή ‘soul’, that they would be highly unusual in real Greek; however, when translated back into Latin, they yield widely attested endearments: mel meum, uīta, anima (cf. also 7.2.2). Plautus also uses the Greek verbal suffix -ίζω quite freely, but not always in a Greek way. Cyathissāre ‘to ladle out wine’ (Men. 303) could indeed come from an unattested ϰυαϑίζειν (ϰύαϑoς ‘ladle’), but Graecissāre ‘to assume Greek airs’ (Men. 11) is clearly a Plautine coinage because the Greeks did not refer to themselves as Graecī. Greek words in Plautus are most commonly used by slaves; they are not yet considered a sign of education or refinement. As is often the case with low-status loans, they are nativized in pronunciation and morphology. Inscriptions contemporary with Plautus render φ, ϑ, and χ as p, t, and c, without marking aspiration, and ζ and υ as s and u; it seems likely that few, if any, concessions were made to Greek pronunciation. Plautus also Latinizes endings: hence logī ‘witticisms’ (Persa 394), not λóγoι; basilicē ‘completely’ (Epid. 56), not βασιλιϰω̃ ς ‘royally’; or -issāre for verbs, not -ίζειν. Normally, the degree to which loanwords are adapted phonologically and morphologically depends on how prestigious and widely known the source language is as well as on how much time has passed since they were borrowed. British speakers often make some concessions in pronunciation to French words, but rarely to words from languages that have less prestige and are not taught at school. But over time, nativization increases. In Latin, Greek words are fully nativized in the early period,

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but then this nativization is at least partially reversed. This unusual situation comes about because the status of Greek changed: in Terence’s time, Greek culture was favoured by the upper classes and became more popular, and thereafter, poets typically chose Greek endings for Greek words. Plautus uses Greek words for effect and not because he simply took them over from the originals. But on some occasions we can see Greek interference. This is normally at the syntactic level, which should not come as a surprise: an untranslated word would stick out more obviously than a syntactic slip, which could more easily go uncorrected. Lexical slips tend to be unobtrusive; not foreign words, but Latin words with non-Latin meanings taken over from Greek words with more than one meaning: (3) Sibi sua habeant rēgna rēgēs, sibi dīuitiās dīuitēs, sibĭ honōrēs, sibi uirtūtēs, sibi pugnās, sibi proelia. (Curc. 178–9) ‘Let the kings have their kingdoms, the rich their riches; let them have their honours, their feats, their fights, their battles.’ The context makes it clear that uirtūtēs are not abstract ‘virtues’ here, but concrete ‘feats’, a meaning that the word does not normally have in Latin; presumably, this is from ἀρεταί, which had an abstract meaning, ‘virtues’, as well as a concrete one, ‘feats’. A syntactic slip can be seen in this passage: (4) Argentī uīgintī minae mēd ad mortem appulērunt, quās hodie adulēscēns Diabolus ipsī datūrus dīxīt. (Asin. 633–4) ‘Twenty silver minas have driven me to my death; young Diabolus said he’d give them to her today.’ In the accusative and infinitive, the accusative pronoun can be left out, as can esse; but we would still expect the participle to be datūrum, with accusative agreement. Here we have a nominative and infinitive, as in Greek. This looks like an accidental Graecism, while similar phenomena in classical poets are deliberate: (5) Phasēlus ille quem uidētis, hospitēs, ait fuisse nāuium celerrimus. (Catull. 4.1–2) ‘That pinnace you see, my friends, says she was once the fastest of ships.’ Catullus delights in displaying his Greek learning, and such syntactic Graecisms are inserted on purpose.

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5.2.3 Greek in Cicero We know very little about Plautus as a person; on the other hand, Cicero’s life and personality are revealed in his correspondence and many other sources. Cicero liked to think of himself as highly fluent in Greek. He addressed the senate at Syracuse in Greek, for which he was criticized because this was thought to be too deferential (Verr. II.4.147). However, he enjoyed being flattered and complimented on his Greek performance there by Apollonius Molo (Plut. Cic. 4.4–5). Normally, people are notoriously unreliable when assessing their own performance in a second language, being either too self-critical or too self-confident, but in Cicero’s case it seems that his positive self-assessment is justified. There is a great deal of Greek in Cicero’s works, but it is not distributed evenly. The speeches are virtually free from Greek other than long-established loans which had been nativized and were used freely even by monolinguals. This is unsurprising: in a Roman law court, one was meant to follow Roman traditions, and codeswitching or displays of Greek learning would have been inappropriate. In Cicero’s philosophical writings, more Greek words occur, but often in terminological discussions in which their optimal translation is dealt with. Cicero’s philosophical project consists in bringing Greek philosophy to the Romans on their own terms, in Latin clothing, and this entails a significant amount of loan translations and calquing. For instance, in fin. 3.15, the Stoic terms πρoηγμένα and ἀπoπρoηγμένα are introduced, but in connection with the question of how they should be rendered in Latin; these are not calqued morpheme by morpheme, as interpretēs indisertī ‘ineloquent translators’ would do, but are translated quite freely as praeposita and reiecta ‘things preferred’ and ‘things rejected’. It is in the letters that Greek words and phrases abound. However, again they are not used indiscriminately. When Cicero writes to Atticus, Greek is extremely common, but he avoids it when writing to his wife, who presumably knew less Greek, or to certain characters who were reserved towards Greek culture. Some of the Greek is contemporary, but many phrases and tags are from earlier, classical literature, stressing a shared educational background rather than being naturalistic switches. Plautus happily nativizes Greek words. For Cicero, on the other hand, part of the game is displaying one’s competence in Greek, so nativization is out of the question. But how are words integrated into difficult syntactic contexts? For example, what does Cicero do when he has to use ab or ex with Greek words, which do not have an ablative? Adams 2003, 498–500 shows that in such contexts, Cicero is willing to use Greek datives in -ᾳ and -ῳ, but avoids those in -ι. After ἀπó and ἐϰ, Greek requires a genitive, but Cicero’s choice of the dative is sensible: the first two endings had become homophonous with the Latin ablative in -ā or -ō. For nouns with a dative in

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-ι, there is no good solution: one could nativize, which Cicero does not want to do, but one could not use a Greek ending that resembles a Latin ablative. Hence, Cicero avoids such combinations altogether. Young men belonging to the educational elite were regularly sent to Greece to get a broader education. At home, however, the focus on Greek education would have been on the classics, Homer, Menander, tragedy, Plato. It is quite possible that some Romans had a better knowledge of the classical language than of contemporary, Hellenistic Greek (even if Menander already has certain features of the Koiné). This may even have been the case for Cicero’s older contemporary, the polymath Varro. In the etymological part of his De lingua Latina, he derives about 10% of the Latin words from Greek ones.¹⁶ Of course many of these etymologies do not stand up to modern scrutiny: thus, we say that ouis and ὄις ‘sheep’ are cognates, going back to Indo-European, and not that the Latin word is a loan from Greek (ling. 5.96); in this case Varro even says that the modern word is πρóβατoν. In other instances, Varro derives words from Greek which are neither loans nor cognates, as is the case with puteus ‘well’ and Aeolic πύτεoς ‘drinkable’¹⁷ (ling. 5.25). However, while Varro makes some connections with Greek which do not stand up to scrutiny, he rarely fails to recognize genuine loans. But this does happen with magida ‘type of bowl’ and cilliba ‘dining table’, which he derives from magnitūdō ‘large size’ (ling. 5.120) and cibus ‘food’ (ling. 5.118). In reality, they are from μαγίς ‘bowl’, or rather, its Hellenistic form μαγίδα, and from ϰιλλίβας ‘donkey’ (classical ὄνoς). It seems likely that Varro failed to recognize these loans because he was less familiar with the Hellenistic form of Greek than with the classical texts.

5.2.4 Non-Elite Monolingual Texts with Interference In present-day Europe, second-language learners typically acquire literacy in the second language along with speaking skills. In many cases, they will have a better command of the written language than of the spoken variety. In antiquity, literacy was far less universal than it is today, and many second-language learners would not have been able to use the script or the spelling conventions of this second language. An obvious example can be seen in a receipt from the second century AD, discussed in Adams 2003, 53–63:

16 Details in de Melo 2019.i, 43–45. 17 Attic πoτέoς; an alternative, purely Latin derivation from pote ‘be able’ (sc. to draw water) is also proposed, but this is absurd even by ancient standards.

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(6) Γαιω Koυρτιω Ιoυστω Πoυπλιω Ιoυλιω Ναυτωνε ϰωνσoυλιβoυς σεξστoυμ νωνας oϰτωβρης. Αἰσχίνης Αἰσχίνoυ Φλαoυιανòς Μιλήσιoς σϰριψι μη αϰϰηπισσε α Tιτω Μεμμιω Μoντανω μιλιτε πεντηρω Αυγιστι δηναριoυς σεσϰεντoυς βιγεντι ϰινϰυε πρετιoυμ πoυελλαι Mαρμαριαι βετρανε, ϰoυαμ ει δoυπλα oπτιμις ϰoνδιϰιωνιβoυς βενδιδιτ ετ τραδιδι εξ εντερρoγατιωνε φαϰτα ταβελλαρoυν σιγναταρoυμ. αϰτoυμ ϰαστρις ϰλασσης πραιτωριαι Ραβεννατoυς. ‘In the consulship of Gaius Curtius Iustus and Publius Iulius Nauto, on the sixth day before the Nones of October (i.e. 2 October). I, Aeschines Flavianus, son of Aeschines, a Milesian, have written that I have received from Titus Memmius Montanus, soldier of the quinquereme “Augustus”, 625 denarii as payment for the Marmarian girl, a veteran [i.e. slave for more than a year], whom I sold to him, with a liability to double repayment, on excellent conditions, and handed over after an inspection had been made of the signed tablets. Transacted at the camp of the praetorian fleet of Ravenna.’ Aeschines from Miletus may or may not have been a Roman citizen, but he was clearly competent enough in Latin to conduct business with speakers of Latin. However, he is not capable of writing Latin letters, hence the use of the Greek script. That said, some of the spelling conventions point to either an exemplar written in the Latin alphabet or close supervision by someone used to writing Latin: final -m would not have been pronounced, but is rendered consistently, and the spelling -ξσis untypical of Greek, whereas Latin -xs- is common.¹⁸ Latin ē and ō are consistently rendered as η and ω, while Romans writing in Greek sometimes render them as ε and o, like the short vowels, because Latin does not mark vowel length with separate letters. Latin ŭ is rendered as oυ because it is a good match for the vowel quality, whereas υ would actually have been short, but would have been pronounced y at the time. Elsewhere, more modern Latin pronunciation is rendered phonetically: next to the dative πoυελλαι Μαρμαριαι, transliterated traditionally, we find the dative βετρανε (= ueterānae), written phonetically; β would have been pronounced /v/ at the time, just as Latin u-, and we see this also in βενδιδιτ (which should have been first person βενδιδι). Incidentally, βιγεντι shows the same phenomenon, but also reflects the later development of Latin ĭ > e. In ϰινϰυε, we see a dissimilation foreshadowing Italian cinque. 18 Note also ϰινϰυε with -ν- rather than - γ-.

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Occasionally, Aeschines slips into Greek morphology. Twice we find an accusative plural ending -oυς instead of -ōs / -ως, and in ταβελλαρoυν, he follows the Greek rule that the only final nasal that is allowed is -ν. Latin classis ‘fleet’ becomes ϰλάσσα in Greek papyri, so that again we can see a slip into Greek. And finally, there are also some random errors that cannot be explained by interference. The ending of πεντηρω remains unexplained, and while Ραβεννατoυς reflects the adjective Rauennās, genitive Rauennātis, reasonably well, the ending is bizarre. A Latin text written in the Greek script would show without doubt that the writer’s first language was not Latin, even if the Latin were spotless. But we also find Latin texts written by people whose command of the alphabet was competent, and here other instances of interference give away the writer’s origin. Adams 2003, 71 presents an inscription with the spelling prigceps for prīnceps: here the writer knew the Latin alphabet, but not its spelling conventions, rendering the velar nasal according to Greek conventions rather than Latin ones. In later Latin, the case system is eroded, and when western inscriptions mess up cōnsule and cōnsulem after prepositions, this is simply because the two cases have merged phonologically. In the east, however, we sometimes find unusual, unexpected cases, such as the genitive after ab or ex. Since these can often not be explained phonologically, we must assume that we are dealing with interference from Greek ἀπó and ἐϰ. In a moment we will encounter the Latin phrase dīs mānibus sacrum ‘sacred to the gods of the underworld’. This is a common formula introducing funerary inscriptions, but it has no true Greek equivalent. However, in bilingual communities in Italy and Sicily, we do find ϑεoῖς ϰαταχϑoνίoις ‘to the gods of the underworld’ (Adams 2003, 78); Latin influence is obvious even if not a single Latin word is used. Similarly, in Latin inscriptions filiation is given via genitive + fīlius / fīlia ‘son / daughter of X’, while in pure Greek texts the genitive of the father is not combined with a word for son or daughter. Again, in bilingual communities we do find genitive + υἱóς, calqued on Latin. In Latin texts we can also sometimes detect interference from Greek: Adams 2003, 510 quotes a receipt dating to AD 167 in which we find nōnārum Octōbrium ‘on the nones of October’, with a genitive of time that betrays the writer’s Greek origin.

5.2.5 A Typology of Bilingual Inscriptions When we think of bilingual texts, we tend to think of a primary version translated fully into another language. Many bilingual inscriptions are indeed of this type, but a large number do not conform. For example, it is not always obvious which version

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should count as the primary one. If the translation is idiomatic rather than purely literal, linguistic criteria may not be helpful, but sometimes the layout of the inscription can help: is one text written in bigger letters or with greater care? However, sometimes it does not even make sense to speak of a primary and a secondary version because the overlap between the two is minuscule. It is not uncommon for an inscription to be written in a non-local prestige language, with some warnings not to violate the place added on in the vernacular. An example of two only partially overlapping versions can be seen in this Aramaic-Latin bilingual text from Algeria (CIL 8.3917, Adams 2003, 257–58): (7) D. M. S. MOCIMVS S VMONIS FIL(ius) PALMVRENVS VIXIT ANNIS XXX H(eres) P(osuit) npš’ dnh mqymw br šm‘wn ḥbl šnt 4.100 + 60 + 1 Latin with quantities: Dīs mānibus sacrum. Mocīmus Sumōnis fīlius Palmūrēnus uīxit annīs trīgintā. Hērēs posuit. Translation of the Latin: ‘Sacred to the gods of the underworld. Mocimus, son of Sumo, a Palmyrene. He lived for thirty years. His heir set up (the monument).’ Translation of the Aramaic: ‘This (is) the memorial for Moqimu, son of Simeon. Alas. Year 461.’ Here we can see that the two cultures follow different rules of composing epitaphs, but also that they consider different things relevant. Modern European texts on tombs tell us the dates of birth and death of the deceased, which also allows us to calculate the lifespan. For Romans, it was only the lifespan that mattered, here given in its most basic form (often months and days are added, and in extreme cases even hours). Romans also cared about who set up the monument. In Aramaic and Punic, on the other hand, this last piece of information is often considered irrelevant, and instead of the lifespan we are told the year in which the person died (and the tomb was erected). In terms of composition, the phrase dīs mānibus sacrum ‘sacred to the gods of the underworld’ is the Latin way of telling the reader that this is a funerary inscription. There is no corresponding expression in Aramaic, but the

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first word, npš’, refers to a memorial for the soul of the deceased and thus also tells us what kind of text is to follow. The word ḥbl ‘alas’ is also obligatory in funerary inscriptions. This inscription very nicely shows grammatical and cultural competence in two languages. The picture that emerges from Jewish funerary inscriptions in Italy is rather different. These are mostly written in Latin (or Greek), with very simple Hebrew tags, such as ‫( ָ͏שׁל͏וֹם‬šālōm) ‘peace’ or ‫( יִ ְ͏שׂ ָר ֵאל‬jisrā’ēl) ‘Israel’. Of course there were Jewish scholars who would have been competent in Hebrew, but the majority of the community would have known little more than such words or phrases. These tags, then, do not fulfil any informative function; rather, they are there in order to mark cultural and religious identity.

5.3 Sondersprachen Just as regions can have local dialects and bilinguals can have speech styles that differ from those of monolinguals, specific communities can also have their own language varieties. A term commonly used for such a variety is Sondersprache, a ‘language apart’. The Latin of the early Christians differed from that of their pagan contemporaries; soldiers had their own jargon; and grammarians also developed their own terminology. In this section, I want to focus on Christian Latin because it has been argued that it is a variety that differs not only in its vocabulary, but also in its syntax; much work in this area goes back to Josef Schrijnen and Christine Mohrmann, on whom I rely quite heavily.¹⁹ But I shall also add a short excursus on the Latin of the grammarians, especially Varro.

5.3.1 The Diversity of Christian Latin Some scholars have treated Christian Latin as if it were one variety. But while all Christians shared common beliefs and values, their Latin was extremely diverse. It is important that we make a distinction between texts translated from Greek, Hebrew, or other languages, and texts composed purely in Latin. Much of the early Christian literature in Rome was untranslated Greek, as the faith spread among the immigrant classes and slaves; when St Paul wrote his Epistle to the Romans, he could do so in Greek, although I would assume that some of the faithful needed

19 Mohrmann’s articles are conveniently collected in Mohrmann 1958, 1961, 1965, 1977; I quote them from there.

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a translation. As time progressed, the Bible and many other works were translated into Latin, but there was also a burgeoning native tradition, and as we shall see, the language of translation texts often stands in stark contrast to that of texts composed directly in Latin. Naturally, there is also diachronic variation. Among the earlier authors we find Tertullian (ca 155–220), while Boethius (ca 477–524) marks the beginning of the Middle Ages. Some scholars compare Christian Latin with classical prose and classify the differences as Christianisms; but that is bad methodology: we should compare Christian authors with their non-Christian contemporaries, and Christian prose writers with pagan prose writers, and poets with poets. Only then can we hope to find specifically Christian elements rather than diachronic or genre-related differences. Mohrmann 1958, 11–12 distinguishes between various types of Christian elements. Thus, ‘integral’ Christianisms are found exclusively in Christian authors (and are often lexical), whereas ‘partial’ Christianisms occur in pagan authors as well, but are more common in Christian ones. Among the integral Christianisms, we can further distinguish between ‘direct’ Christianisms, which were developed for religious reasons and include technical terms, and ‘indirect’ Christianisms, where it is more difficult to find a rationale for their restriction to Christian authors; for example, beātificāre ‘to make happy’ only occurs in Christian writers, but there is no a priori reason why this should be the case. There is also a vast geographical spread. Boethius was from Rome, but many Christian writers hailed from the provinces, Spain, the East, and especially North Africa, which gave us Tertullian, Lactantius, Augustine, and many others. Regionalisms are to be expected, especially in the less educated writers, and need to be kept separate from Christianisms.²⁰ Education is in fact the biggest source of variation, apart from the distinction between translated and native texts. The early Bible translations, collectively known as Vetus Latina, show many vulgarisms that set them apart from the purist form of Latin that Lactantius, the ‘Christian Cicero’, wrote. In Augustine of Hippo (354–430), we have a stylistic chamaeleon: his City of God is written for an educated pagan audience and hence indebted to classical stylistic models, while his Confessions are more modern in style, as befits an autobiography, and his sermons are written for an audience without the trappings of refined education.

20 That is not to say that specifically Christian terminology cannot differ according to regions; Mohrmann 1961, 27 shows that λóγoς ‘(God’s) word’ and δóξα ‘glory’ were originally rendered as uerbum and glōria in Europe, but as sermō and clāritās in Africa; only later did the European terminology win the day.

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The attitudes to traditional grammatical and rhetorical education in the Christian west were quite different from and more varied than those in the Christian east. Kaster 1988, 78–95 contrasts Basil of Caesarea (330–79), Augustine of Hippo (354–430), Sidonius Apollinaris (430–85), and Caesarius of Arles (468/70–542). For Basil, as for many Greek-speaking Christians of the east, there never was a true opposition between secular and religious learning; traditional training and Christian instruction were considered distinct and unequal, each with a function and value in its own sphere, but within that hierarchy, Christian instruction was considered the higher force, not threatened by secular grammar. In the African west, Augustine, highly educated, struggles with this background, which is seen as standing in opposition to the simplicity of the Christian idiom; traditional education must be put in its place, or, as Kaster 1988, 88 puts it, ‘rigorous and direct subordination is the only alternative to the rejection of the literary culture or surrender to it.’ In the Gaulish bishop Sidonius Apollinaris, we have an approach to traditional learning that comes quite close to that of eastern Christianity; he was fully trained in the classical pagan authors and was entirely comfortable with that background. A generation later, however, we can hear the voice of the new elite in Caesarius of Arles, a monastically trained bishop without the literary education in classical authors that Sidonius had enjoyed, and he deliberately sets himself apart from that education and despises it with an aggression that is remarkable. Kaster 1988, 95 puts it most elegantly: ‘Where Augustine had needed to think and feel his way to a resolution of his own experience, Sidonius never fully knew the need, and Caesarius never had such experience.’ These attitudes towards pagan literature are reflected in the authors’ language.

5.3.2 Creating a Christian Vocabulary New concepts require new words. When speakers of Latin became Christian, they needed Christian terminology in Latin. As we saw earlier, such terminology can be created through loanwords, calques, and loanshifts. Which of these options is chosen does not only depend on the morphological means available in a language, but also on cultural factors. For example, Old English creates a large amount of its Christian vocabulary by calquing, hence trīnitās ‘Trinity’ is rendered as þrīnes, which follows the Latin pattern of numeral + abstract suffix. But in the course of Middle English, Latinate or French terminology replaced the inherited words, hence modern Trinity. This was not done out of morphological necessity, since threeness is as easy to understand now as it was back then, but for cultural reasons, namely the value ascribed to French and Latin.

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Mohrmann 1958, 117–21 argues convincingly that loanwords, such as apostolus (ἀπóστoλoς) ‘apostle’, diaconus (διάϰoνoς) ‘deacon’, ecclēsia (ἐϰϰλησία) ‘church’, euangelium (εὐαγγέλιoν) ‘gospel’, or baptisma²¹ (βάπτισμα) ‘baptism’, were preferred for offices or concrete entities. Loanshifts are rarer, for instance fidēs ‘good faith / Christian faith’ and crēdere ‘to believe someone / to believe in God’ based on the corresponding Greek words πίστις and πιστεύειν.²² Neologisms were commonly created through productive morphological means, such as carnāliter ‘in the ways of the flesh’ from carō ‘flesh’ (itself calqued on σάρξ ‘meat / (worldly) flesh’). Pagan terminology was at first avoided, but later admitted more freely because paganism was already in decline and did not pose a threat any longer. It has been argued that Latin adopted presbyterus ‘elder, priest’ and prophēta ‘prophet’ from Greek πρεσβύτερoς and πρoφήτης not because there were no native words available, but because the native words were tainted by pagan connotations.²³ But that is only partly correct. It is true that flāmen and uātēs were not usable. A flāmen is not just any priest, but the priest of a specific deity, such as the flāmen Diālis for Jupiter, and a uātēs was originally a prophet speaking in a trance, unlike the prophets of the Old Testament. But other Latin words were perfectly acceptable; the Latin liturgy uses sacerdōs for the Christian priest as well as for Melchisedek from the Old Testament. While words for ‘priest’ were already in the language, even though they did not specifically refer to Christian priests, there was a new need for terms referring to non-Christians. Since Judaism was the religion of the Jews, with a fairly neat overlap between religion and ethnicity, non-Jews in the Old Testament are referred to as ‫( ַה͏גּ͏וֹיִ ם‬haggōyīm) ‘the (other) nations’. In the Septuagint translation, this is rendered as τὰ ἔϑνη, with an adjective ἐϑνιϰóς. In the early Church, ethnicus is simply borrowed from Greek, as an adjective and as a noun, and depending on context it can refer to non-Jews or non-Christians. But this word was not successful for long; Augustine already needs to explain it to his audience (serm. 17.6.6). A loan translation, nātiōnēs, persisted in use for longer, not least because it is used in the Psalms. Gentīlēs was even more successful. But the word that had the greatest success was pāgānus, originally ‘inhabitant of a country district’. Two traditional explanations exist for this term. On the one hand, it is said that this word is partly a reflection of

21 Either as a neuter, as in Greek, or as a feminine; the by-forms baptismus and baptismum are also found. 22 Mohrmann 1961, 16 makes an interesting point in this connection; when a specific word, such as ϰαλεῖν, acquires a new, Christian meaning (‘call’ becomes ‘call to service’), it becomes semantically isolated, since its cognates are not affected in this way; συγϰαλεῖν continues to mean ‘call together’. 23 For prophēta see Mohrmann 1958, 42.

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early missionary practices because the great missionaries like St Paul would go from metropolis to metropolis to reach the biggest audiences, leaving the hinterland to later missionaries; and on the other, it is argued that this word succeeded because it also expressed a certain contempt for the boorish rustics who stuck to the old religions. Mohrmann 1965, 281–89 shows that neither explanation works. The first inscriptional attestations of pāgānus in the meaning ‘non-Christian’ are fairly late, and Augustine himself describes the word as new (epist. 184);²⁴ at this point in time, resistance to Christianity did not come from the countryside, but from the nobility in the cities. Mohrmann convincingly derives the new meaning ‘non-Christian’ from the meaning ‘private, not member of a group’. For instance, gladiators have a stage name and a private name, in Greek called the ὄνoμα παγανóν ‘private, nongladiatorial name’, with an adjective borrowed from our Latin word; this meaning, ‘private, not part of an in-group’, came to mean ‘not part of the Christian group, worldly’. Traditional English terminology for non-Christians has been largely abandoned for reasons of political correctness; but it is based on Latin words. The nations are still found in the Psalms. The heathens, inhabitants of the heath, are a calque of pāgānī. And the pagans are a direct loan. One word with a particularly interesting history is cōnfitērī ‘to confess’. In classical authors it means ‘to admit something that one does not want to admit’, and this non-Christian meaning is the basis for the early Christian meaning ‘to confess one’s faith’, since in the early period, Christians could be condemned to death for their faith. When Christianity became widespread and legal, the most common meaning was ‘to confess one’s sins in order to get absolution’. Again, the act of confession can be difficult, although its consequences are positive. However, there is also a third meaning which cannot be derived from native Latin meanings: ‘to praise God’. This meaning occurs in Bible translations, and Jerome feels the need to explain the Latin word in his commentary on Isaiah (2.38) because it made little sense to those who knew no Hebrew. At its core is Hebrew ‫ה͏וֹדה‬ ‫( ׇ‬hōdāh), a noun meaning ‘confession, admission’ as well as ‘praise’. Greek ἐξoμoλóγησις ‘confession’ acquired the secondary meaning ‘praise’ in the Septuagint under Hebrew influence, and from there cōnfessiō received its further, Biblical meaning.²⁵

24 On the other hand, Macrobius, Augustine’s contemporary, already needs to explain the older meaning of pāgānus and glosses it with rūsticus ‘man of the countryside’ (Sat. 1.16.6), which indicates that his readers would otherwise interpret the word as ‘non-Christian’; see also Heberlein 2019, 376. 25 This Biblical meaning was not widely understood; like Jerome, Augustine (serm. 29.2.2) needs to explain it and adds that when the uneducated hear the term in the readings of Scripture, they beat

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Earlier in this chapter we saw that when there are doublets, they tend to go their own ways; thus, ruber, the native word for ‘red’, remained a general term, while the Osco-Umbrian loan rūfus came to be used for red hair. The same happens with Christian words: baptista ‘baptist’ is a straightforward loan from Greek βαπτιστής, with a regular adaptation of the ending; but baptizātor is a Latin agent noun in -tor, based on the verb baptizāre, itself an adaptation of βαπτίζειν. Over time, baptista came to be used only of John the Baptist, while baptizātor was used for other people. Similarly, ἀπoϰάλυψις ‘revelation’ was borrowed as apocalypsis and also calqued as reuēlātiō; the loanword came to be used for the Biblical book, while the Latin term was employed for individual visions. On the other hand, we can also observe a partial merger of words as the result of sound change (Mohrmann 1961, 32): ministērium ‘ministry, service’ lost the vowel in the second syllable by syncope, and nasals dropped out before fricatives; and in mystērium ‘mystery’, the front rounded vowel -y- became unrounded -i-. In the Easter Exultet, the dīuīna mystēria ‘divine mysteries’ are mentioned, but these should really be ministēria, the heavenly powers serving God, in reference to the λειτoυργoί of the Septuagint and the Letter to the Hebrews.²⁶

5.3.3 Christian Syntax? Several scholars discussing Christian Latin fail to make a distinction between translation texts and texts written in Latin from scratch. Nowhere is this distinction more vital than in the realm of syntax. The Bible as a sacred text was translated into many ancient languages, always relatively literally. The Gothic Bible, being our main source of Gothic, was translated so literally that it is virtually useless for the study of Gothic word order; we may assume that the word order of the Greek Bible, which is imitated with very few minor exceptions, was possible in Gothic, but it is unlikely that it was the natural, unmarked order. The Latin Bible translations may not be quite as extreme, but there is little point in pretending that this kind of Latin is an accurate reflection of the speech of Christians at the time.

their chests because they believe that the church service has moved on to the confession of sins rather than the Bible readings. 26 Meanings can also change as the result of folk etymologies; Mohrmann 1958, 47–48 mentions the case of πάσχα ‘Passover’, a loan from Hebrew ‫פ ַסח‬,ֶ which was popularly derived from πάσχειν ‘to suffer’ because Jesus celebrated the feast with his disciples before his Passion, even though the feast had already existed for centuries before. This etymology was already criticized by Augustine (in psalm. 140.25).

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Hebrew differs from both Latin and Greek in several important morphosyntactic ways. There is no morphological adjective gradation. Comparisons are made with the adjective and a preposition ‫( ִמן‬min) ‘from’, introducing the standard of comparison;²⁷ and the highest degree can be expressed by similar expressions or by using an etymological figure, as in ‫( ִ͏שׁיר ַה ִ͏שּׁ ִירים‬šīr haššīrīm) ‘Song of Songs’ (Canticum canticōrum), that is, ‘the best song’. The verb system is very different from what we find in Latin; suffice it to say for our purposes that ְ‫( ו‬wə) ‘and’ was at some point reinterpreted in some contexts and grammaticalized as part of verbal morphology (waw cōnsecūtīuum). All of these features are reflected in Bible translations. Some of them do not always mark the comparative or superlative in Latin. All of them imitate Hebrew etymological figures, although of course etymological figures were not unknown in native Latin either; this is not unidiomatic Latin, but there are frequency differences. And et ‘and’, seemingly overused in Biblical Latin, is simply in place to render the Hebrew morpheme, which in other contexts would still mean ‘and’. Some Christian authors imitate Biblical style, but features that go against Latin, such as not using a comparative or superlative for gradation, do not occur in native texts. Some do affect a simple style, perhaps in imitation of the Bible, but often for ideological reasons; the pagans are said to use rhetoric for lies, while Christians speak the truth in simple language. That, of course, is in itself a rhetorical commonplace.²⁸ Other native Christian features are more complicated. Christian authors use quod / quia more commonly than others to introduce subordination that would traditionally have been expressed in the accusative and infinitive. However, this phenomenon begins in more literary authors, often in complex subordination, and should not be considered a vulgarism.²⁹ A more complicated issue is the distribution of the dative versus ad (Adams and de Melo 2016). In classical Latin, the constructions overlap, but are semantically distinct in their core uses. In Romance, ad replaces the dative for nouns, but not for pronouns, which retain a marginal case system. Hebrew did not preserve the Proto-Semitic case system; recipients and directions could be expressed with prepositions, ‫( ְל‬lə) and ‫’( ֶאל‬el), which overlapped in meaning, but the former was closer to the Latin dative in function and the latter to Latin ad. In Hebrew, both prepositions occur with verbs of giving and speaking. In the Septuagint, with verbs

27 On the subject of prepositions, Hebrew ‫( ְ͏בּ‬bə) ‘in’ also expresses instruments, ‘with’; in Bible translations, Latin often uses in for such instruments, a usage alien to native Latin. 28 Cf. also Augustine’s statement melius est reprehendant nōs grammaticī quam nōn intelligant populī ‘it is better that the grammarians should scold us than that the people should fail to understand us’ (in psalm. 138.20). 29 For more details see the discussion in 4.5.1.

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of giving, only the dative is used, but with verbs of speaking, ‫ ְל‬is mostly rendered by the dative and ‫ ֶאל‬by πρóς. The Latin Bible follows Greek usage here, rendering the dative as a dative and πρóς as ad. For verbs of speaking, this is not always idiomatic; Latin normally takes the dative here, unless the voice is raised and one speaks ‘at’ an audience. In Biblical Latin, this pre-existing use of ad is extended to contexts where it is unidiomatic. The distribution here has nothing to do with what we find in Romance; ad can be used freely with pronouns even when the voice is not raised. Jerome, the great Bible translator, also follows Biblical usage in his letters when he speaks about Biblical passages or saints. Clearly, the difference between Biblical and non-Biblical usage was obvious to speakers of Latin, and they could imitate Biblical style when they felt like it. Given that the Bible became an important stylistic model, it should perhaps not come as a surprise that this kind of idiom was later imitated also by non-Christian authors like the author of the Historia Apollonii. Finally, there is the issue of pronoun resumption in relative clauses. One way to introduce Hebrew relative clauses is via the subordinator ‫’( ֲא ֶ͏שׁר‬əšer); since this subordinator does not inflect for case, there is sometimes pronoun resumption, of the type the man that I got the book from him.³⁰ In Latin, this occasionally happens in Biblical texts, as a translationism (Adams 2016, 452–53), but at a later period it also occurs elsewhere; Väänänen 1967, 173 quotes hominem quem ego beneficium eī fēcī ‘the man that I did a good deed to him’ and argues that in such instances there is a different rationale for the usage, the increasing fossilization of relative pronouns.

5.3.4 Excursus: Varro’s Grammatical Terminology Now that we have seen how Christian terminology was created, it might be interesting to have the briefest of looks at the creation of grammatical terminology. Already in the second century BC, Lucilius and Accius had a keen interest in orthography and other grammatical issues, but our earliest scholar of grammar of whom we have more than fragments is Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC). Later grammarians have very standardized terminology, discussed in Schad 2007; much of this terminology consists of Greek loans and calques from Greek. Varro is not a straightforward predecessor of these later scholars: much of his terminology does not live on. There are different reasons for this. One is the fact that Varro writes in a deliberately non-technical style, using relatively little terminology. Thus, participium / participāle ‘participle’ is already attested (8.58, 9.110, 10.34), a calque on Greek μετoχή ‘sharing’, since participles share case with nouns and tense with verbs; but

30 Overheard in the library of All Souls College, Oxford.

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Varro ascribes the term to ‘others’. Another reason is that some of his terminology is unwieldy: dandī ‘of giving’ is used alongside datīuus ‘of giving, dative’, and the latter lives on, but the former does not because we have to understand cāsus ‘case’ with it, whichever case cāsus would be in; this leads to awkward ellipses like in dandī ‘in (the case) of giving’. And finally, some of Varro’s terminology disappears because the concepts discussed are unique. Varro speaks of figūra and māteria, referring to the outward, phonological shape of a word and to its substance of content and grammatical features, and this distinction, so close to Saussure’s signifiant and signifié, is not a topic that interests later grammarians, who are more concerned with technical aspects. But what should count as terminology? The verb exterere is attested four times in the meaning ‘to rub out, lose’ (a sound or syllable). Is this meant to be nontechnical? Or technical? In this case it is impossible to say, but in general we can count as technical those terms which are clearly loans or calques, even if attested only once; and those which are native Latin words used in a consistent technical meaning and attested frequently enough. We argue in de Melo and Filos 2019 that Varro follows specific principles: for highly technical concepts he uses Greek loans (syllaba ‘syllable’ from συλλαβή); for very general concepts he also uses Greek loans (analogia ‘regularity’ and anōmalia ‘irregularity’ from ἀναλoγία and ἀνωμαλία). For everything in between, he prefers calques, such as cāsus ‘case’ from πτω̃ σις ‘falling down’ (from the upright nominative, originally not considered a case) or accūsātīuus ‘accusative, case of accusing’ from αἰτιατιϰή ‘accusative, case of causation’.³¹ And for the overarching principles, which are Varro’s own creation, such as figūra and māteria, his terminology is purely Latin; here his thoughts are as independent as his words.

5.4 Conclusions We have now had a first glimpse of the variability of Latin. Regional variation existed at all periods, but there are significant differences between the Republic and the Empire: the micro-variation of the Republic eventually gave way to the supraregional varieties of the Empire, which in turn broke down into smaller dialects again during the Middle Ages. Sadly, the nature of our sources means that the study of regional variation is largely restricted to phonology (with a bit of morphology) and the lexicon.

31 A charming mistranslation of the Greek word, showing the Roman legal mindset, since the ambiguous Greek term was to be interpreted as ‘causing’ rather than ‘accusing’.

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One source of regional variation is continued substrate influence, the result of earlier bilingualism. We briefly examined bilingualism in Plautus and Cicero, noticing significant differences in their use of Greek, differences which are best explained by changing societal attitudes to the Greek language and its speakers. We also contrasted this elite bilingualism with some humbler inscriptional evidence. And finally, we turned to special language varieties, in particular Christian Latin. Christian Latin is not one single entity, but a hugely diverse corpus of texts whose main divergences are driven by the dichotomy between translation and native composition, by educational level and time period, and to a lesser extent also by geographical provenance.

5.5 Further Reading The best discussion of regional variation in Latin is Adams 2007, a monumental work with a great deal of fine detail, but also a sensible treatment of theoretical problems. Wachter 1987 is an excellent introduction to early inscriptions, with a focus on their linguistic diversity. For those interested in bilingualism, an equally large and learned volume exists by the same author, Adams 2003. For Greek in Plautus one should consult Shipp 1953 and 1955. For Christian Latin, there are four volumes by Mohrmann 1958, 1961, 1965, 1977, a collection of her articles dedicated to the subject. Mohrmann’s studies are thorough and always illuminating, but she occasionally over-states a point, perhaps unsurprisingly for a scholar who dedicated her entire life to the field. Adams and de Melo 2016 provide a detailed discussion of a smaller topic, the distribution of the dative and of ad-phrases, with a focus on Christian Latin as well as diachronic developments. For Varro’s grammatical terminology, one may compare de Melo and Filos 2020.

Chapter 6 Pragmatics Pragmatics is the field within linguistics which, using the title of the classic by J.L. Austin 1962, tells us ‘how to do things with words’. A more prosaic description is given by Levinson 1983, 12, who defines pragmatics as meaning minus truthconditions. Truth-conditions help us to compute the literal meaning of a statement. For example, Mary is clever holds true if there is a person called Mary and if she is clever. If Mary has passed her exam, she is cleverer than I thought presupposes that Mary has taken an exam and that I thought she was not clever enough to pass it; the statement that Mary’s intelligence surpasses my previous expectations is true under a condition, namely that she should have passed her exam. Questions and commands have no truth-conditions because they cannot be true or false. Pragmatics, then, describes meaning that arises from putting an utterance into a wider context. For example, in terms of truth-conditions, and simply combines two elements; I’m buying food and cleaning my bike does not tell us which of these actions happens first. However, pragmatically, and can imply temporal sequence, so that we can say Getting married and having a child is better than having a child and getting married (example from Levinson 1983, 35).¹ The field of pragmatics is large, and one chapter cannot do it justice. Here, I wish to devote three sections to the field in order to show just how wide-ranging pragmatics is: I will first present a basic overview of issues commonly discussed in pragmatics, namely the Gricean maxims, implicature, and presupposition. I will then elaborate on the concept of explicitness and its stylistic implications for Latin. And finally, we will look at politeness phenomena in Latin and beyond.

6.1 Common Topics One area of pragmatics that we can only touch upon here is deixis. Deixis, literally ‘pointing’, comes in several types and is always context-dependent. Personal deixis draws a distinction between speaker, addressee, and other, and always makes 1 Similar considerations apply when there is no connective. In the common expression no pain, no gain, the first half is interpreted as a conditional: ‘if there is no pain, there won’t be any gain’. However, this interpretation arises purely from the lexical constellations, not from the syntactic construction. In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, there is an advertisement for Mrs Skower’s All-Purpose Magical Mess Remover, using the slogan no pain, no stain. Since gains are desirable, but stains are not, the advertisement slogan receives a different interpretation: ‘(if you use this,) there will be no pain and no stain’. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111172002-006

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reference to the extra-linguistic situation; if I say that I am tired, I make a statement about the author of this book, while if you utter that same sentence, it refers to a different person. Spatial deixis in Latin comes in three degrees of distance, hic for what is near the speaker, iste for what is near the addressee, and ille for what is further away. As in English, there are added complications: speakers can say hic liber ‘this book’ if it belongs to them, even if the addressee is currently holding that book; and pronouns can have a distancing function, as when I am holding a dirty piece of clothing in my hands and refer to it as that shirt, because I feel disgusted and want to dissociate myself from it. Similar phenomena occur in Latin as well, as when Cicero constantly refers to Verres as iste in his court speech against him.² Temporal deixis can be expressed through tense or adverbials. Discourse deixis points to entities in a stretch of text that were mentioned previously or are about to be mentioned; in Latin, is is used exclusively for discourse deixis, but hic and ille can be used for spatial deixis as well as discourse deixis. And finally, social deixis has to do with status; French tu and vous can be used to address one and the same person, but the choice depends on the speaker’s relationship with the addressee, on familiarity and respect.³ Speech act theory, developed by Austin 1962, deals with the functions of different sentence types. For instance, a declarative clause like I hereby declare you man and wife normally has a ‘performative’ function: it brings about that which it states, if uttered under the appropriate circumstances. Again, I will not go into this large field. Instead, I will take Grice’s maxims of conversation, implicature, and presupposition as my starting-point.

6.1.1 Grice’s ‘Maxims of Conversation’ In an essay entitled Logic and Conversation (1975), and then further in his book Studies in the Way of Words (1989), Paul Grice outlined his ‘maxims of conversation’. Underlying these maxims is the ‘cooperative principle’, the principle that speakers try to be helpful and clear. Thus, speakers are expected to follow four maxims:

2 Over time, such usages can lead to reanalysis. Latin iste, for second-person deixis, yields Spanish este, for near-deixis; and in many Romance languages, ille, originally for distal deixis, has been weakened to a definite article. Already in Plaut. Mil. 21–2, hōc ‘this man’ (ablative) is picked up by illic, without distal meaning. 3 In classical Latin, social deixis can be expressed through other means; for instance, diminutives of personal names are mostly affectionate, but when speakers use them for people they are not particularly close to, it can feel a little forward (details in Adams 2016, 157–59).

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Maxim of quality: do not say that which you believe to be false or that for which you lack evidence. Maxim of quantity: do not make your contribution to the conversation less, or more, informative than required. Maxim of relevance: make sure that the information you convey is relevant and omit irrelevant information. Maxim of manner: be perspicuous, for example by avoiding obscure terminology and ambiguity, and by presenting facts in an orderly fashion.

Various criticisms have been levelled against the maxims of conversation, for instance that they do not take cultural differences into account; and some scholars, notably Sperber and Wilson 1986, have tried to subsume the original maxims under a single one, the maxim of relevance. However, the original maxims have stood the test of time. That said, they are more honoured in the breach than in the observance; Grice speaks of ‘flouting’ the maxims, which is normally done for special effect, such as rhetorical figures of speech. Let us now look at some examples.

6.1.2 Flouting the Maxims The most obvious flouting of the maxim of quality occurs when we utter a blatant falsehood, a falsehood that the addressee can recognize as such. Flouting the maxim of quality in this way results in irony. In Latin, it is often accompanied by quippe ‘of course’ or parenthetic crēdō ‘I believe’, which heighten the irony. We can observe this when Cicero accuses Clodia of incest: (1) Ex hīs igitur tuīs sūmam aliquem ac potissimum minimum frātrem, quī est in istō genere urbānissimus; quī tē amat plūrimum, quī propter nescioquam, crēdō, timiditātem et nocturnōs quōsdam inānēs metūs tēcum semper pūsiō cum maiōre sorōre cubitāuit. (Cic. Cael. 36) ‘Among these relatives of yours I shall take someone, and in particular your youngest brother, who is most charming in this kind of thing; who loves you the most, who as a boy always used to sleep with his bigger sister, out of some timidity, I believe, and certain empty fears at night.’ There is of course no doubt that Cicero did not believe Clodius to have been scared at night. Nor is there any doubt that urbānissimus ‘most charming’ is not how Cicero would describe Clodius truthfully. And finally, the love that is spoken about is also deliberately left vague, with Cicero flouting the maxim of manner; but given the

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obvious irony, it is clear that the love referred to is not the chaste love of siblings, but a more carnal passion. A different violation of the maxim of quality occurs in our next passage taken from Plautus: (2) Quid ais tū? Quid ais, inquam. Satin hoc quod uidēs tribus uōbīs opsōnātum est, an ŏpsōno amplius tibi et parasīto et mulierī? – Quās mulierēs, quōs tū parasītōs loquere? (Plaut. Men. 319–22) ‘What do you say? What do you say, I ask. Is what you can see enough shopping for the three of you, or should I buy more for you, the hanger-on, and the lady? – What ladies, what hangers-on are you talking about?’ In this passage, a prostitute’s cook approaches Menaechmus to ask him whether the food on display is enough for their dinner party; but he does not realize that the person he is speaking to is the twin brother – also called Menaechmus –, who has arrived from abroad and has no idea of what is going on. The cook mentions Menaechmus’ hanger-on and the prostitute, and the twin brother, who considers this absurd, emphasizes the absurdity of the situation by turning the one hanger-on and the one prostitute into several.⁴ The maxim of quantity can be violated if we suddenly break off a sentence, leaving it to the listener to figure out what we intended. The most famous passage including an aposiopesis is in Virgil, where Neptune rebukes the winds: (3) Iam caelum terramque meō sine nūmine, Ventī, miscēre et tantās audētis tollere mōlēs? Quōs ego… Sed mōtōs praestat compōnere flūctūs. (Verg. Aen. 1.133–5) ‘You now dare to embroil the sky and earth without my approval, Winds, and to set such masses in motion? You I shall… But it is better to settle the agitated waves.’ Not actually completing the threat makes it more rhetorically effective, as the listener will imagine the worst. The maxim of relevance is flouted in a dialogue between an old man and one of his daughters; he claims that he wants to find a new wife since he has been a

4 Such exaggerating plurals are quite common; see also Adams 2016, 548 for the plural barbae used for a single, but long or unkempt beard.

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widower for too long, and asks her what a woman should be like. Her response is empty waffle: (4) Edepol, patēr scio ut oportēt esse; sī sint ita ut ego aequom censeō. – Volŏ scīre ergo ut aequom cēnsēs. (Plaut. Stich. 111–13) ‘Goodness, father, I know what they should be like; if they are the way I believe they ought to be. – I want to know then how you believe they ought to be.’ The father’s original question was meant as veiled criticism; he is not really looking for a new wife, but believes that his daughters are not behaving the way they should. The daughter is perfectly aware of this and gives this irrelevant response, which leads her father to continue prodding. The maxim of relevance can thus be violated in order to stall a conversation, to have more time to think. In English, statements are sometimes accompanied by a relevance hedge, often in the form of a conditional clause, as in If you are thirsty, there is beer in the fridge. This type of conditional clause is not a genuine condition that tells us under what circumstances the main clause is true; the beer is there whether you are thirsty or not. We speak of a pseudo-conditional clause because it provides us with a condition under which the main clause is relevant. Similar phenomena occur in Latin as well, although they seem to be rarer: (5) Quodsi egō rescīssem id prius, quid facerem sĭquĭs nunc mē rogēt: aliquid facerem ut hoc nē facerem. (Ter. Andr. 258–9) ‘If anyone were to ask me now what I would have done if I had found out about this in advance: I would have done something so that I would not do this.’ In the first line, quid facerem siquis nunc mē rogēt provides a condition under which the statement in the second line is relevant. My final example shows how the maxim of manner can be flouted. The prostitute Erotium meets one of the Menaechmus twins, but she only knows the other one and is confused when this one states that he has come by ship: (6) Periī misera! Quam tū mihi nunc nāuem narrās? – Ligneam, saepe trītam, saepe fīxam, saepe excussam malleō; quasi supellex Pelliōnis, pālus pālō proxumust. – Iăm, amābō, dēsiste lūdōs facere. (Plaut. Men. 402–5) ‘Dear me, I’m ruined! What ship are you telling me about now? – A wooden one, often battered, often pierced, often shaken by the mallet; just like the stage material of Pellio, stake next to stake. – Please, stop playing the clown now.’

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Menaechmus is being prolix and explains what a ship is, in a rhetorically exuberant manner that parodies more formal genres like epic and tragedy. Erotium naturally interprets this flouting as a joke.

6.1.3 Implicatures and Presupposition Every time a maxim is seemingly violated, we immediately search for an explanation, for something that this seeming violation is intended to communicate; this is because of the cooperative principle. The breaking of a maxim is in itself meaningful, and scholars of pragmatics speak of implicatures. Thus, if I write a letter of reference for a Classics colleague and merely state in it that H is a good scholar of Virgil, I flout the maxim of quantity; the genre of the reference letter demands not only that I should be positive, but also that I should say more than one sentence, so my reticence must have the implicature that there is nothing else that I can say which is positive. Implicatures are ‘defeasible’ or cancellable. Assertions, by contrast, cannot be cancelled. Let me illustrate this with ‘scalar’ implicatures: boiling, hot, and warm form a scale of the kind whereby a higher member, hot, entails a lower one, warm, whereas warm merely implicates not hot and does not entail it. Hence, if my coffee is hot, it is also warm, and I cannot meaningfully say that ∗my coffee is hot, in fact, it is warm; however, if I say that my coffee is warm, I implicate that it is not hot, yet this is only an implicature, and it can be cancelled by saying, my coffee is warm, in fact, it is hot. Similar scales exist for many other adjectives and also for numbers, so that four entails three, but three merely implicates no more than three. Thus, if Mary and Tom are applying for benefits that are given to families with at least three children, they could say, we have three children; in fact, we have four. But it would be odd if they said, ∗we have four children, in fact, we have three. Another type is clausal implicature, where one clause or at least verb phrase implicates another: I know entails I believe, but I believe merely implicates that I do not know. However, perhaps the most commonly drawn distinctions among implicatures are those between conversational and conventional ones, and among conversational ones, between generalized and particularized ones. A generalized conversational implicature is one which does not need any larger context. For example, a implicates not my, so that if I say, I am feeding a cat, the normal assumption is that the cat is not mine. A particularized conversational implicature requires some context. The usual example for this type is a dialogue along these lines: Where is our goldfish? – The cat is looking happy. The implicature of the response is that the cat has eaten the goldfish, but such an implicature can only arise after such a very specific question.

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Conventional implicatures, by contrast, have a lexical element. In terms of truth conditions, but is no different from and, but it implicates a contrast, a contrast which is defeasible. If someone is happy, but poor, that person is happy and poor, but we implicate that the two things do not normally go hand in hand. This implicature is defeasible: Miles is happy, but poor; in fact, for Miles money has never been important. Presupposition is in some ways the opposite of implicature. Presupposition means that something is taken for granted and normally survives negation. For instance, I am happy that Hannah finished her dissertation presupposes that Hannah finished her dissertation, and if I negate, I am not happy that Hannah finished her dissertation, she still finished it. Presupposition occurs in a wide range of contexts: some verbs presuppose other verbs, for example to manage presupposes to try; factive verbs, like to be happy and to regret, presuppose the truth of their subordinate clauses; counterfactual conditionals presuppose a state of affairs, for example if he had helped me, I would have succeeded presupposes that he did not help me and that I did not succeed. The list could continue. What this diverse group of examples has in common is that the presupposed element is in some way background information.⁵

6.1.4 Syntactic Consequences Pragmatics can have syntactic consequences.⁶ Rhetorical questions are a case in point. Genuine questions are a request for information; rhetorical questions are really statements in question form. In Latin, the difference has syntactic consequences in indirect speech: genuine questions become indirect questions in the subjunctive, while rhetorical questions are turned into accusative-and-infinitive clauses, just like regular statements. The difference between assertion and presupposition is also reflected in syntax. Verbs like dīcō ‘I say’ are combined with an accusative and infinitive in classical Latin, not with a quod-clause; verbs like gaudeō ‘I am happy’ can take either construction. The difference is that verbs of speech are followed by assertions; if the

5 I have found an interesting pair of examples in two British newspapers. On 5 January 2023, the BBC as well as the Guardian reported claims by Prince Harry that Prince William had hit him. The BBC headline used an assertive verb: Harry accuses William of physical attack. This was neutral reporting; the BBC had not been able to verify the claim and did not want to accept or dismiss it without further investigation. The Guardian, as so often, was more partisan: Prince Harry details physical attack by brother William in new book; this verb presupposes the truth of the claim. 6 I discuss these in more detail in 4.3.

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verb of speech is negated, the subordinate statement becomes untrue. On the other hand, gaudeō is factive and is followed by a presupposition which survives negation. The moods in classical quom-clauses are also dependent on pragmatics. In early Latin, quom-clauses normally stand in the indicative, unless the clause is inserted into another subjunctival clause, in which case we may have modal attraction. In classical Latin, on the other hand, quom-clauses stand in the indicative if they are purely temporal (‘when’), but in the subjunctive if the listener should look for a further nuance of meaning (‘because’, ‘even though’, and so on). It is quite common across languages that temporal subordinators acquire further meanings because listeners look for connections beyond the purely temporal; thus, while was originally purely temporal, but in modern English it can be temporal or concessive, whereas its German cognate weil has lost the temporal meaning altogether and is now causal. Quom started as a temporal subordinator, but the subjunctive became a pragmatic tool to indicate that further interpretation is required.

6.1.5 The Pervasive Nature of Pragmatics Pragmatics governs every aspect of speech and writing. Here is not the place to discuss humour at any length, but it should be pointed out that a large part of humour has at least a pragmatic component. Cicero (de orat. 2.216–90) has a detailed discussion of humour, within which we find the following joke:⁷ (7) Rīdiculē etiam illud L. Nāsīca cēnsōrī Catōnī, cum ille ‘ex tuī animī sententiā tū uxōrem habēs?’; ‘nōn herculē’, inquit, ‘ex meī animī sententiā.’ (Cic. de orat. 2.260) ‘Lucius Nasica also gave a funny reply to the censor Cato when he asked, “On your conscience, are you satisfied that you are married?” Nasica said, “On my conscience, yes, I am married, but certainly not satisfied.”’ The joke consists of a deliberate violation of the maxim of manner. Cato is taking the census and is using a standard formula, ex tuī animī sententiā, to elicit a response in good faith. Nasica, however, takes this formula literally, as an enquiry into whether he is enjoying himself. Pragmatics affects every linguistic behaviour. However, the more oral a genre is and the more there is genuine dialogue, the greater is the importance

7 For a more detailed linguistic discussion of ancient jokes see Adams (2016), 146–63.

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of extra-linguistic context and implicatures. Compare two versions of the same mini-dialogue: (8) I think this is a good essay, I would give it a 67. – Yes. Let’s give it a mark around 67. (9) I think this is a good essay, I would give it a 67. – Let’s give it a mark around 67. Yes. In terms of truth-conditions, both responses are identical. However, they are structured differently: the first has the agreement indicator yes in first position, followed by a statement that is similar to the original one; and the second postpones the agreement indicator to the end. Such seemingly insignificant structural differences can be used to indicate power differentials: the first response is keen to agree before expanding, indicating perhaps that the speaker has a lower status, while the second one presents an expanded response first, and only then agrees, indicating that the speaker considers his or her response as independent and his or her agreement as an afterthought from someone who does not need to be a team player. Structure matters; and on this note, let us move on to stylistic choices.

6.2 Explicitness and Stylistic Choices Certain elements of Latin stylistics are closely tied up with Grice’s maxims. In this section, we shall first look at some ellipsis phenomena which are connected with the maxim of quantity. We will then move on to classical periodic style, much of which can be explained through the maxim of quality. Other types of style will be discussed in the following section, again with reference to the maxims.

6.2.1 Ellipsis and Anaphora In English, the subject slot needs to be filled for finite verbs. Even verbs like to rain take a dummy subject it, although this it does not refer to anything because to rain is a zero-place predicate and does not have an agent or a patient (for the concept of valency see 4.1.1). The Latin equivalent, pluit, never takes a dummy subject, but even here the ending is marked for third person singular as a default ending. However, whether predicates with a valency greater than zero take a nominal subject or a pronominal one, or whether there is subject ellipsis, depends on how recoverable the subject is from context. Authors follow the maxim of quantity: they do not want

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to give us more information than necessary to understand what is going on, but at the same time they do not want to be ambiguous or vague. The choices that authors make depend on their judgments of their readers’ background knowledge and attention; thus, there is some flexibility, and an author may prefer to be more explicit or less so, but while there is usually a choice between a noun and a pronoun, or a pronoun and complete ellipsis, typically there is no real choice between a full noun and ellipsis. Looking at larger chunks of discourse, and beyond subjects, Spevak 2010, 61–79 introduces the concept of the ‘referential chain’. The first reference to a new entity is always through a full noun or noun phrase. The second time this entity is referred to, we find is, hic, or quī as a relative connection; connective relative pronouns always stand in initial position, but is and hic typically do the same when used for a second reference, because this initial position indicates continuation of a topic.⁸ The third time this entity comes up, there is usually ellipsis of the subject pronoun, unless a contrast with another entity is intended, in which case ille is the normal choice. In de Melo 2006, I examine ellipsis of subject accusatives in the accusative-andinfinitive construction in Plautus and Terence. This kind of ellipsis had long been considered colloquial, but such an interpretation seems unlikely because it happens quite commonly in authors of any genre and in any period. Moreover, Sjögren 1906, 57 showed convincingly that this ellipsis is more common with future infinitives than those of the present. But why should this be? In my article, I collect the data for all combinations of tense and voice and note that while ellipsis is attested in any combination, it is significantly more common if the infinitive is future active or perfect passive. These two infinitive types have nothing in common semantically, but they share one morphological trait: they consist of a copula and a participle. Participles are marked for gender and number, which makes it easier to recover a subject accusative if there is ellipsis, and this explains why these two combinations of tense and voice allow for ellipsis so easily.

6.2.2 Periodic Style The style used by Cicero in his oratorical works and by Caesar in his commentāriī, and later on treated as a model to be imitated by Quintilian, is called periodic.⁹

8 Spevak 2010, 79 notes that Caesar usually prefers is if there is coordination, as in eumque, and hic if there is no coordination; I suspect that this has euphonic reasons, since -c followed by -que is generally avoided. 9 Nägelsbach’s treatment of the subject (1865) is extremely detailed and still recommended.

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A περίoδoς or circuitus (Cic. de orat. 3.191) follows the Gricean maxims neatly, especially the maxim of manner. As the name suggests, a sentence of this type comprises one main event and all accompanying subordinate events or situations; this can lead to quite long sentences, but only as a side effect. This period is structured according to the principle of iconicity, whereby linguistic structure mirrors extra-linguistic reality: typically, the main event goes into the main clause,¹⁰ and the backgrounded or less important ones into subordinate clauses. In order not to make such long sentences hard to follow, authors try to maintain the same subject throughout. The increased frequency of the passive in such formal registers is little more than a side effect of subject maintenance; comedy with its short sentences uses passives mostly to remove the subject of an active clause because it is unknown or irrelevant, and while this is also a concern in periodic sentences, it is only here that the passive is also used regularly to promote the object of an active clause to subject status so as to be able to maintain the same subject in main and subordinate clause.¹¹ If main and subordinate clause contain the same subject, and if it is expressed, it will be placed before the subordinate and main clauses. The principle of iconicity is also observed with regard to the position of subordinate clauses. Background information that precedes the main event on the time axis is normally placed in subordinate clauses that precede the main clause; but consecutive and final clauses most commonly follow the main clause, since the events expressed in them happen at a later time. Periodic sentences also spell out the logical connections with previous sentences; this is done through dedicated particles like nam, enim, sed, autem, and so on, but also through relative connections that serve as linking bridges. Further ornamentation through various lūmina or ‘stylistic highlights’ is used sparingly, like icing on a cake. The periodic style, of which I have presented no more than an idealization, is thus in line with Grice’s maxim of manner: the iconic ordering of elements, subject maintenance, and the explicitness of logical connectors all help to make Ciceronian language easy to follow. Stylistic devices such as metaphors are also relatively rare, again in accordance with the maxim of manner. Cicero’s clarity gives way to a periodic style in Livy that has elements of chancery language and becomes almost clumsy (Madvig 1875). For instance, in 1.7 Cacus wants to steal the oxen of Hercules:

10 The cum inuersum got its name because this ‘natural’ state of affairs is reversed and the main action is put into a subordinate clause. 11 Details in de Melo 2007e.

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(10) Ibi cum eum cibō uīnōque grauātum sopor oppressisset, pāstor accola eius locī, nōmine Cacus, ferōx uīribus, captus pulchritūdine boum cum āuertere eam praedam uellet, quia sī agendō armentum in spēluncam compulisset ipsa uestīgia quaerentem dominum eō dēductūra erant, āuersōs bouēs exīmium quemque pulchritūdine caudīs in spēluncam trāxit. ‘When sleep had overpowered him (i.e. Hercules) there, heavy with food and wine, and when a shepherd of the place, Cacus by name, fearsome because of his strength, charmed with the beauty of the oxen, wanted to drive away this booty, knowing that if he had driven the cattle forward into the cave, their hoof-prints themselves were going to lead their owner there in his search, he pulled all the beautiful oxen, one by one, backwards into the cave by their tails.’ In natural speech, the first subordinate elements should tell us that Hercules falls asleep and that Cacus sees the beautiful oxen of Hercules, and that is indeed how Livy presents the event. The main clause should then state that he wants to steal them, but Livy puts this main element into another cum-clause and instead presents the trick as the main clause. This violates the principle of iconicity and leads to a heavy style.

6.2.3 Other Types of Style The prose of Seneca and Tacitus is markedly different from Ciceronian periods. Sentences are much shorter and the neat parallelism often sought out in Ciceronian subordinate clauses is deliberately avoided, a phenomenon often referred to as inconcinnitās. Sentence connectives are rarer and there is a tendency to increase metaphors and rhetorical devices beyond what could be the icing on a cake; sometimes it feels as if these authors are making their entire cake out of icing. This style is more intense and strives for sententiae or memorable aphorisms. However, this stylistic change is not real language change; Quintilian persists in the old style, and Tacitus, in his Dialogus, follows a more Ciceronian model. Then how does this style of sententiae fit with the maxims of conversation? The maxims of manner and quantity are flouted, as the style is more obscure and difficult to follow, and often less is said than would be helpful. However, such deliberate flouting of maxims can be regarded as artistic choice, as a means to keep the readers’ attention and to entertain them by making them work hard. Here is an example from Tacitus’ description of the Germans:

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(11) Vnde habitus quoque corporum, tamquam in tantō hominum numerō, īdem omnibus: trucēs et caeruleī oculī, rutilae comae, magna corpora et tantum ad impetum ualida; labōris atque operum nōn eadem patientia, minimēque sitim aestumque tolerāre, frīgora atque inediam caelō solōue adsuēuērunt. (Tac. Germ. 4) ‘Hence the condition of their bodies, as happens in such a great number of people, is also the same for all: wild and blue eyes, reddish-blond hair, bodies that are large and only strong for the onslaught; for sustained labour and works there is not the same tolerance, and they are not at all used to coping with thirst and heat, but they are accustomed to handling cold spells and lack of food because of the climate and the soil.’ There is only one finite verb in all this, at the end, and it goes with everything from minimē onwards; for the rest, one has to supply a form of ‘to be’ from context several times. Similarly, while tolerāre clearly has sitim and aestum as its objects, it is not immediately obvious that one has to supply it again with frīgora atque inediam, but this time without negation. This is highly artistic prose, but it requires constant vigilance. Plautus and Terence write in verse, but their comedies were meant for performance and reflect, to some extent, features of normal speech. Again, their sentences are shorter, but in this case with an overall simpler structure: subordinate clauses are much less common than in formal prose, and where the passive is used, it is not used to maintain the same subject, since the sentences are too short to make this necessary, but in order to demote an active subject that is unknown or vague (details in de Melo 2007e). As Deufert 2007 has shown, Plautus lets clause end and verse end coincide much more often than Terence does; this makes Terence’s verse sound less obviously like verse, and more in tune with real speech. Ovidian elegiacs are one of the most artificial genres of composition. Platnauer 1951 may be somewhat outdated, but his main findings remain correct and clear. There is a very strong tendency to have a major syntactic break at the end of the pentameter, and a less strong tendency to have one at the end of the hexameter. Metrical incisions are strict.¹² This formal rigidity creates an easy rhythm and

12 The penthemimeres is almost obligatory; where it is replaced by an incision ϰατὰ τέταρτoν τρoχαῖoν, it is often accompanied by a trithemimeres and a hephthemimeres, which are not uncommonly combined with the penthemimeres as well. The hexameter ends in a trisyllable or a disyllable. The pentameter almost always ends in a disyllable with a heavy final syllable, or in a disyllable followed by prodelided est.

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clear expectations that are rarely violated.¹³ This enables readers to focus on the elaborate rhetorical structure which contains artificial hyperbaton patterns rare in prose, such as adjective 1 - adjective 2 - noun 1 - noun 2, often with deliberate contrasts. Here is an example from Virgil: (12) Aurea purpuream subnectit fībula uestem. (Verg. Aen. 4.139) ‘The golden clap fastens the purple cloak.’ Aurea goes with fībula, and purpuream with uestem. This line consists of only five words, the two adjectives and the two nouns, with a verb in the middle; this pattern is often referred to as the ‘golden line’ by modern scholars.

6.2.4 What Can We Learn from this? Stylistic fashions come and go, but they are rarely at random; rather, they are always connected with the maxims in some way, either following them closely or playing with them. Traditional rhetoric has described these stylistic fashions very well, but in order to understand the underlying principles, a knowledge of pragmatics is paramount. Let us now turn to the last theme of the chapter, politeness.

6.3 Politeness In formal writing aimed at a larger readership rather than any particular individual, the Gricean maxims hold up rather well. However, in letters or emails directed at individuals, and even more so in conversation, the maxims are constantly flouted. When making a burdensome request, we rarely ask directly and bluntly; instead, we tend to violate various maxims at once by making some small talk first and by being indirect. Many apparent violations of the maxims can be explained as politeness strategies, and it is these that we shall turn to now. I want to start this section with an introduction to the model proposed by Brown and Levinson 1987, which has stood the test of time, despite minor modifications. Next, I shall present some Plautine examples and explain why the situation in Roman comedy is not straightforward. And finally, I will give a brief overview of Latin forms of address.

13 For example, lines rarely end in adjectives that are mere epithets.

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6.3.1 The Brown-Levinson Model Brown and Levinson 1987 make a distinction between ‘positive face’ and ‘negative face’. People’s positive face depends on acceptance and approval by others; negative face, on the other hand, amounts to not being imposed upon, to being free to do as one pleases. Any request is, to some extent, a ‘face-threatening action’. Requests are therefore regularly accompanied by means to minimize such threats. The seriousness of a face-threatening action depends on three factors: the social distance between speaker and addressee; the relative power of speaker and addressee; and how a specific culture assesses a specific imposition. If a speaker chooses to carry out a face-threatening action, there are various options, here listed from most threatening to least: it can be done without any redressive action; with positive politeness; with negative politeness; and off the record. The direct route, with no redressive action, is appropriate if the loss of face would be very small, as in Have another slice of cake, where the addressee rather than the speaker is a beneficiary. Adding politeness markers to this kind of request could actually be interpreted as impolite, as if the addressee were considered a complicated person. The direct route is also common if the speaker has vastly more power than the addressee; again, adding politeness markers could be interpreted in a negative way in such a case. And finally, in emergencies (Help me!), the urgency of the situation overrides the need for politeness. The means for positive politeness are varied, ranging from stressing that speaker and addressee form part of the same group to flattery. In-group membership can be stressed through forms of address like mate,¹⁴ or through switching to a low variety of the language if there is a diglossic situation, or through nonthreatening topics like the weather, which are bound to result in agreement. Some strategies are quite subtle, as in So when are you coming to see us then?, where so presents the visit as the conclusion of an imaginary discussion, as if agreement on such a visit had actually been reached. Just as familiar and joking behaviours are at the heart of positive politeness, respectful behaviour is the kernel of negative politeness. Negative politeness strategies involve minimizing the imposition, as when a beggar asks for a penny but expects at least a pound; impersonalization, for instance through passivization; apologies; deferential behaviour, whether through increasing the addressee’s status or through lowering one’s own; hedging; and being conventionally indirect,

14 In Latin, a similar effect can be achieved with the diminutive of personal names; see Adams 2016, 157–59 for examples where the speakers are not close friends and where this behaviour is considered inappropriate.

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as in could you pass the salt?, which is formally a question, but can no longer be interpreted as such. Since negative politeness creates a certain distance through respect, exaggerated negative politeness can be interpreted as hurtful distancing behaviour; that explains why German speakers often switch to the formal pronoun Sie instead of the informal Du when they are hurling insults. The off-the-record strategy is appropriate for the biggest impositions; a Latin instance will be discussed after example (16). If we go off the record, we violate the maxim of relevance by merely hinting or presupposing; the maxim of quantity, by understating; the maxim of manner, by being ambiguous or vague; and the maxim of quality, by using irony, metaphor, or rhetorical questions. Many fine details of politeness strategies may be culture-specific, but there are some universals or at least broad generalizations. For example, in no society will people use positive politeness for big requests and negative politeness for small ones. However, some cultures focus more on positive politeness, and others more on negative politeness; and within one culture, the higher ranks will tend more towards negative politeness than the lower ones. People from cultures in which positive politeness predominates often accidentally offend those from cultures which focus on negative politeness because positive politeness can be misinterpreted as over-familiarity. Other cultural differences come about because different societies assess the factors involved in threats to face differently. As Brown and Levinson 1987, 249 point out, in India social distance seems to be less of a factor than power differentials in assessing how threatening a request can be; whereas in the United States, power differentials matter less in this regard than social distance. But what is the situation in Roman comedy?

6.3.2 Plautine Examples Roman comedy is a rich resource for politeness and impoliteness phenomena. Here I can give no more than a handful of examples. My first one is from Plautus’ Menaechmi; the prostitute Erotium has been given a mantle by her lover Menaechmus, but now she wants an additional favour: (13) Sed scīn quid te amābo ut faciās? – Imperā quid uīs modo. – Pallam illam quam dūdum dederās, ad phrygiōnem ut dēferās, ut reconcinnētur atque ūna opera addantur quae uolō. (Plaut. Men. 425–7) ‘But do you know what I’d love you to do? – Just command me whatever you want. – Take that mantle you gave me earlier to the embroiderer so that it can be repaired and so that at the same time the additions that I want can be made.’

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Since Erotium has just received this expensive mantle, asking Menaechmus for more is rather demanding. She initiates her request cleverly: she asks him whether he knows what she would love, thereby making him initiate an offer; this indirect strategy counts as negative politeness. At the same time, she uses positive politeness, amābō ‘I will love you / please’, here construed like a verb of asking. I presented positive and negative politeness as rather distinct, but in real speech they are often combined. Negative politeness is the appropriate choice when strangers meet. We can see this in the Asinaria: (14) Sed sī domī est, Dēmaenetum uolēbam. (Plaut. Asin. 452) ‘But if he’s at home, I’d like a word with Demaenetus.’ The speaker is a stranger, sent to speak to Demaenetus, and is encountering an unknown servant. Note the pseudo-conditional clause used as a relevance hedge; and note also the polite past uolēbam: presenting a wish as past rather than present makes it less direct and less threatening. We do the same in English: I wonder if you can help me is rather blunt; I wondered is already more polite; and I was wondering, in the past progressive, as an indication of the fleetingness of the wish, is the most polite version. Another strategy mentioned earlier is the minimization of an imposition, as when a beggar asks for a penny rather than a pound. In the Bacchides, the slave Chrysalus asks his enraged master to come and see something; he does so by minimizing the imposition, claiming that he only has to go three steps. Note also ūnōs ‘merely’, emphasizing how small the inconvenience is: (15) Sequere hāc mē, faxō iam sciēs. – Quō gentium? – Trīs ūnōs passūs. – Vel decem. (Plaut. Bacch. 831–2) ‘Follow me this way, I’ll make sure that you know. – Where on earth? – Only three steps. – Ten if you want.’ The first request is followed by a rather unwilling response, a question that makes it clear that the master is not keen to oblige. But when the imposition is minimized, he shows willingness to carry out the request and offers to go beyond what was asked for. A common negative politeness strategy in English is negative raising. I think that you should not do this is blunt, stating an opinion directly; I don’t think you should do this states what one does not think, making it less direct and thus more polite. In Latin this type is rarer than in English. The following passage presents a dialogue between Theopropides, who has just come home from abroad and

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discovered that his son has wasted huge sums of money on a girl and on parties, and Phaniscus, a young slave who is presented as well-spoken and polite, but does not know Theopropides. The old man begins with a shocked question, and the boy affirms his worst fears: (16) Ain minīs trīginta amīcam dēstinātam Philolachī? – Aio. – Atque eam manu ēmīsisse? – Aio. – Et, postquam eius hinc patēr sīt profectus peregrē, perpōtāsse assiduō, ac simul tuō cum domino? – Aiō. – Quid? Is aedīs ēmīt hās hinc proxumās? – Nōn aiō. – Quadrāginta etiam dedit huic quae essent pignorī? – Neque ĭstuc aio. – Ei! Perdis. – Immō suom patrem illic perdidit. – Vēra cantās. – Vāna uellem. Patris amīcu’s uidelicēt. (Plaut. Most. 974–80). ‘Do you say that Philolaches’ girlfriend was bought for thirty minas? – I do. – And that he freed her? – I do. – And that after his father went abroad, he drank nonstop, and that together with your master? – I do. – Tell me, has he bought that house next to this one? – No, I don’t say that! – Has he also given forty as deposit to the owner? – I’m not saying that either. – Oh! You’re killing me. – No, that chap killed his father. – Your tale is true. – I wish it weren’t. You’re obviously a friend of the father.’ There are two instances of negative raising here, nōn aiō and neque istuc aiō, and although the response is playfully modelled on oracles and building on the earlier instances of positive aiō, the negative raising makes the statement more polite than it would otherwise be. Note also how friendly the young man is when he says uāna uellem ‘I wish (the bad news) were not true.’ Going off-record and merely hinting at a request is a rare strategy in comedy, reserved, as in real life, for major impositions. In the Stichus, the old man Antipho, a widower who had advised his daughters to divorce their poor husbands, changes his tune when these husbands have become wealthy. Now he would like to receive a concubine from the two men, but instead of asking, he wants to apologum agere ūnum ‘tell one story’ (538). This story goes on for quite some time and is about a man in a similar position to Antipho, who would like a concubine and is offered two or, if that is not enough, four. The husbands know perfectly well that this is not a random story, but an off-the-record request, and teasingly ask for details, referring to the old man in the story as ille quasi tū ‘that one the same as you’ (549). Polite words and formulae are often subject to semantic attrition. Sī uīs / sī uultis ‘if you wish’ must have started as a negative politeness hedge, but was soon

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contracted to sīs / sultis and could be combined with unfriendly requests, as in this passage from the Stichus: (17) Iam quidem ĭn suŏ quicque locō nisi erit mihi situm supĕllectilis, quom ego reuortār, uōs monumentīs commonefaciam būbulīs. Nōn hominēs habitāre mēcum mi hīc uidentur, sed suēs. Facite sultis nitidae ut aedēs meae sint, quom redeam domum. (Plaut. Stich. 62–65) ‘Now unless every piece of household equipment is put in its proper place when I return, I’ll remind you with reminders of cowhide.¹⁵ Not humans, but pigs seem to live here with me. Do make sure that my house is spick and span when I return home.’ Here the old man Antipho is ordering his slaves around, threatening them with a beating, so that sultis cannot be considered as a respectful hedge of politeness any more. Similar phenomena of diachronic attrition also occur with prohibitions (see also 4.3.3). Cauē ‘be careful not to’ is often combined with nē and the present subjunctive. However, by analogy to fac ut ueniās / fac ueniās ‘see to it that you come’, where ut is often absent, nē came to be non-obligatory, and by analogy with the prohibitive main clause type nē + perfect subjunctive, we also find fully grammaticalized cauē + perfect subjunctive, against the sequence rules.¹⁶ We have only had time to see a snapshot, but it appears that the Plautine situation fits very well with the Brown-Levinson model. However, we need to be careful not to think of Plautus and Terence as samples of realistic speech. Above, I quoted a passage from the Bacchides in which the slave Chrysalus asks his master to take ‘only three steps’. This negative politeness is deferential and appropriate for a slave speaking to a master, especially one who is enraged. But just a few lines earlier, Chrysalus was a slave making his master angry through sheer impudence (816–21), hardly a realistic portrayal. We can still use data from comedy, but we need to be aware of comedic distortions. These are particularly noticeable for the role of the clever slave, Plautus’ favourite stock character, who often behaves with a liberty that he would not have had in real life. We can now examine how people address each other.

15 I.e. whips. 16 Note also caue dirrumpātis (Plaut. Poen. 117) ‘make sure that you don’t break it’, with number disagreement, a clear sign that cauē has lost its verbal status. Further details in 4.3.3. and in de Melo 2007c, 119–29.

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6.3.3 Forms of Address Forms of address are included in the section on politeness because there is often a marked difference between address and reference. If we address a woman as Madam, it is a polite way of speaking to her; but if we say that she is a madam, it means that she runs a brothel.¹⁷ Diachronically, new terms of address normally start out with the same meaning as in reference. Then in address, where we are often more polite than in reference, there is a certain inflation, and very polite terms become more and more unmarked, as with sir, a term which in reference indicates a knighthood, but in address can now be used for any man. There is thus an increasing divergence between reference and address. Yet sometimes, address usage can influence referential usage, as in French monsieur, originally ‘my lord’, but now equivalent in address to sir; we can now refer to a man as ce monsieur ‘that gentleman’. Before we can turn to address, though, we should look at reference. Schmitt 1992 gives a very useful outline of the Latin situation. The Latin naming system is very different from the Indo-European one. Systems similar to the Latin one can be found in Faliscan, Oscan and Umbrian, but also in Etruscan. We are dealing with a regional phenomenon. The full form of a Roman name can be seen in CIL 12 .827: M(ārcus) Herennius M(ārcī) f(īlius) Mae(ciā tribū) Rūfus. This consists of a praenōmen, nōmen (= nōmen gentīle / nōmen gentīlicium), the genitive of the father’s name + ‘son’, the name of the tribe in the ablative, and a cognōmen. Cicero uses the combination praenōmen + nōmen + cognōmen only in highly official contexts; praenōmen + nōmen or praenōmen + cognōmen is used in formal contexts; and a single name is informal. How did the Latin naming system arise? Latin originally had the single-name system of Indo-European, as in Mānios and Numasios in CIL 12 .3, Duenos in CIL 12 .4, or Loucīlios in CIL 12 .2437. To this was first added a nōmen gentīle for distinguishing between people of the same name; when this became insufficient, the filiation was added, then the tribe name, and at last the cognōmen. Cognōmina do not appear in administrative documents until the Sullan period, but are attested from the beginning of the third century (compare Scīpiō in CIL 12 .6); cognōmina began among the nobility. Among male praenōmina, we find native names, like the ordinals Quīntus ‘Fifth’ or Sextus ‘Sixth’, referring to the birth month. A number of names come from

17 Another remarkable difference between reference and address can be seen with the word guy. The common noun guy goes back to the male proper name Guy. In reference, guy and guys can only be used for males; but in address, the plural guys has, among younger generations, become gender-neutral and can also be used for mixed groups and even all-female ones.

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Etruscan, such as Aulus (Etruscan Avile, later Avle). Nōmina gentīlia are mostly formed with -ius < ∗- ̯io-s. They are patronymic adjectives in origin, and the underlying father’s name is a praenōmen (Tullius from Tullus, Postumius from Postumus) or a cognōmen (Flāuius from Flāuus ‘Blond’, Claudius from Claudus ‘Limping’). Since many praenōmina also end in -ius, an alternative suffix for gentīlicia, -ilius, is frequent. The scansion is -īlius if the base form is a stem in -io- (Lūcius, Lūcīlius), but elsewhere the scansion is -ĭlius (Mārcus, Mārcĭlius). The fact that nōmina gentīlia started as adjectives is still obvious from their adjectival usages with common nouns (gēns Cornēlia ‘Cornelian family’, uia Appia ‘Appian Road’). When these patronymic adjectives came to be used not only for sons, but also for grandsons, they were reinterpreted as adjectives denoting the gēns,¹⁸ and from there it is only a small step towards the reanalysis as nouns; this then shows in new ways of expressing concepts (forum Cornēlī ‘market of Cornelius’ with a genitive of the family name of a member of the clan, theātrum Pompeiānum ‘Pompeian theatre’ with an adjective in -ānus built on the family name). After nōmina gentīlia became standard, they were the best means of identifying a person; as a consequence, the praenōmina became fewer and fewer. At the end of the Republic, only the following male names were in regular use: Aulus, Decimus, Gaius, Gnaeus, Lūcius, Mārcus, Pūblius, Quīntus, Sextus, Tiberius, Titus. In addition, there were a handful of praenōmina used almost exclusively in certain Patrician families: Appius, Kaesō, Māmercus, Mānius, Numerius, Seruius, Spurius. For women the situation was somewhat different. Female praenōmina survived dialectally, but in Roman Latin they disappeared by the third century BC. In the Republic, women had only one official name, the nōmen gentīle in the feminine gender. When nōmina gentīlia became insufficient to identify people, cognōmina became more widespread. Cognōmina can denote physical defects or other notable features (Caluus ‘Bald’, Crassus ‘Fat’, Flaccus ‘Limp’, Flāuus ‘Blond’, Rūfus ‘Redhaired’), age (Maximus ‘Eldest’, Paullus ‘Younger’), a wish (Fēlīx ‘Happy’, Cārus ‘Beloved’), a profession (Figulus ‘Potter’, Pictor ‘Painter’), ridicule (Lupus ‘Wolf’, Catilīna ‘dogmeat’), origin (Sabīnus, Āfer ‘Berber’), or victories (Āfricānus, Germānicus). A few remarks about the morphology of cognōmina are in order.

18 We can see the same process in Germanic languages. In English, Johnson and Stevenson started out with the meanings ‘son of John’ and ‘son of Steven’, but today they are simply surnames; Samantha Stevenson is someone’s daughter rather than someone’s son, and that someone need not even be called Steven. Icelandic has remained more conservative. Surnames are based on the father’s first name and thus change from generation to generation; and if a man has Gunnar as his first name, the surnames of his children will be Gunnarsson ‘Gunnar’s son’ and Gunnarsdóttir ‘Gunnar’s daughter’.

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Sometimes they are oldfashioned praenōmina which have gone out of use and are revived as cognōmina (Agrippa). The suffix -ōn- is individualizing (catus ‘clever’, Catō ‘clever man’). Cognōmina based on other cognōmina are formed with -īnus (Rūfus, Rūfīnus); -ānus is added to the original father’s nōmen gentīle in the case of an adoption (Pūblius Cornēlius Scīpiō Āfricānus Aemiliānus was the son of Lūcius Aemilius Paullus, but was adopted by one Cornēlius Scīpiō). Eventually, cognōmina are no longer given to individuals, but are passed on from father to son; in that case a second, semantically more appropriate cognōmen can be added (Cornēliī Scīpiōnēs = group among the large gēns Cornēlia, cognōmen Scīpiō; among the Cornēliī Scīpiōnēs was Scīpiō Barbātus ‘Bearded’). The classic study of address in Latin is Dickey 2008; my brief remarks about address are based on her work. In general, she notes (2008, 250) that address is much more common than in English, and expected as normal, even if someone’s name is unknown. In such cases, one would use terms such as adulēscēns ‘young man’ or the like; whereas for readers of literature, the term of address is conventially lēctor ‘reader’, and on inscriptions, uiātor ‘traveller’. One factor in the choice of address is the presence or absence of an audience. Sallust has an envoy address his father as Micipsa pater ‘father Micipsa’ (Iug. 14.9), although addressing a parent by name would be highly unusual in a Latin context; this strategy is used so that the audience can learn the person’s name (2008, 35). Similarly, Cicero uses mostly one name in address; two names occur in 16% of his addresses, while Livy employs two names in 84% of all instances, which is again driven by a need for identifiability (2008, 50). Where Cicero does use two names, it is usually the first name in combination with a cognōmen where one is available, otherwise first name and nōmen gentīle. Again the rationale is clear: cognōmina originally belonged to the nobility, so their use is a sign of respect. Not much later, in the first century AD, names ceased to be the primary form of address between unrelated adults, who would instead use domine ‘master’, frāter ‘brother’, cārissime ‘dearest’, or magister ‘teacher’. Some of these forms deserve further comments. Dickey 2008, 77–100 notes that erus and era are used for slave owners both in reference and in address, including by slaves; the term was thus quite neutral. Dominus and domina, on the other hand, could be used in reference to slave owners (‘owner, master/mistress’), but would not be used by slaves when addressing them, presumably because this was too close to the bone. Domine and domina then spread to amatory language, and from there to familial, respectful use, before becoming so generalized that various Romance address forms continue them.¹⁹ Pater ‘father’ and frāter ‘brother’ are polite or affectionate, but the latter can be flattering, especially if used towards an older man

19 Cf. Spanish Don for men and Doña for women.

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who would look more like a pater; the parameters of vanity have not changed much over the millennia. The use of mī or mea ‘my dear’ is common in comedy as a feature of positive politeness. However, while outside erotic contexts, women may use it freely, men do not use it towards women, presumably because it could be misconstrued as expressing a romantic interest.²⁰ Given that in Roman society, men on average had more power than women, and given what we saw about positive and negative politeness having a clear association with lower and higher societal status, this distribution is perhaps unsurprising. The use of positive and superlative adjectives also holds some surprises (2008: 134–40). In Plautus and Terence, the superlative is still stronger in address than the positive is. However, like many politeness markers, it loses its force, so that in reference a superlative does remain stronger, but in late Republican address the superlative is actually weaker than the positive. The positive is in fact being reintroduced in poetry in the late Republic, having more or less fallen out of use. But what does a prose writer do when the superlative is too weak and the positive is too poetic and archaic? Cicero combines superlatives (mī optime et optātissime frāter ‘my best and most desired brother’, fam. 2.7.2); but when this strategy also loses its force, Fronto and his correspondents occasionally have to triple superlatives!²¹ Superlatives like dulcissimus ‘sweetest’ are merely polite, but an abstract noun like dulcēdō ‘sweetness’ is often more emotional or part of amatory language. With insults, there are several important differences from English (2008: 177–83). Insults referring to sexual deviations and criminal activity were highly offensive, as they are today, but those referring to ignorance and stupidity were not, unlike in English. Insults to do with punishments (uerberō ‘someone to be beaten’ or mastīgia ‘whipping-stock’²²) and animals (asinus ‘ass’ or excetra ‘snake’) were of a lower register; those to do with laziness and slowness (ignāuus ‘lazy’ or piger ‘slow, tardy’) were of neutral register; and those referring to the addressee’s fear or impending death (timidus ‘frightened’ or peritūrus ‘about to die’) were

20 In Roman society, the expectation was that men would initiate relationships; this means that a woman’s mī would be harder to construe as making an erotic pass than a man’s mea. In Latin literature, women do make romantic advances, but this is not common enough to make a woman’s mī towards a stranger risqué. 21 An extreme example, with six superlatives, can be found in a letter by Marcus Aurelius to Fronto (MC 1.6, p. 13 v.d.H.): disertissime, doctissime, mihi cārissime, dulcissime, magister optātissime, amīce dēsīderantissime ‘most eloquent, most learned, most dear to me, most delightful, most longed-for teacher, most desired friend’. 22 From Greek μαστιγίας ‘someone who requires the whip’.

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of high register. Lower registers preferred nouns as insults, while higher ones preferred adjectives. It is time to conclude.

6.4 Pragmatics as Language in Action In this chapter we have examined vastly different topics: after an overview of the main issues in pragmatics, we focused on stylistics, politeness, and forms of address. However, this array of phenomena is always, in one way or another, connected with the Gricean maxims, whether they are being observed or flouted. What was notable was that the more oral genres of literature tend to flout the maxims more easily, partly because there is a greater reliance on extra-linguistic context and a reduced need for explicitness, but also partly because dialogue has a greater need for politeness than descriptive texts; politeness is intricately connected with the flouting of various maxims.

6.5 Further Reading Austin 1962 and Grice 1975 and 1989 are classics of pragmatics. However, as a first introduction, Levinson 1983 is probably an easier read, while being very informative at the same time. There is a great abundance of stylistic manuals, but the majority of them are descriptive, without explaining the reasons for stylistic choices. Nägelsbach 1865, despite its age, is still one of the best manuals for periodic style. Madvig 1875 is a delightful treatment of Livy’s style. Platnauer 1951 is my go-to treatment of elegiac couplets. For politeness, I highly recommend Brown and Levinson 1987, a true classic. Politeness in Latin, as well as directives, are also discussed in Barrios-Lech 2016. Schmitt 1992 is a concise introduction to Latin onomastics, and the best work on Latin address is Dickey 2008.

Chapter 7 Sociolinguistics Sociolinguistics is the study of language in its societal context. Sociolinguists ask how societal norms and expectations shape linguistic expression. As such, sociolinguistics is not ontologically distinct from phonetics and phonology, morphology, or syntax in the same way that these areas are distinct from each other; rather, while all of these fields can be studied in their own right, they can also be approached sociolinguistically. Modern sociolinguistics was pioneered especially by William Labov at the University of Pennsylvania, whose sociophonetic work on New York City (1966) was groundbreaking. One of Labov’s many findings concerns rhoticity: the dialect of New York is non-rhotic, meaning that pre-consonantal r is not pronounced, as in British Received Pronunciation, whereas General American English does pronounce r in this position. Labov noticed that in informal settings, New Yorkers would use relatively few rhotic forms, but in formal ones, they would adapt their speech and use far more of them. This self-correction was particularly pronounced among women. Sociolinguists regularly rely on statistical analysis of oral or written data collections and warn us not to see linguistic features in black-and-white terms: informal New York speech is not entirely non-rhotic, and in highly formal contexts there are still some non-rhotic tokens. Sociolinguistics overlaps with all areas of linguistics; however, the biggest overlap is with pragmatics. Brown and Levinson go so far as to call sociolinguistics ‘applied pragmatics’ (1987, 56). The boundaries between the two are indeed fluid and much of what I discussed in the preceeding chapter would also fit here. In this chapter, I wish to look at three topics to show how wide-ranging sociolinguistics can be. First, I want to examine ancient attitudes to accents, whether they were native, but regional, or non-native and foreign. Next, I shall turn to female speech and how it differs from male speech. This topic is more complicated for antiquity than for our age because most Latin texts were written by men; that includes the female roles in Roman comedy, which therefore may not be an accurate representation of how women actually spoke. And finally, I want to shine a light on the rise of the grammarian and of prescriptive grammar in the post-classical period. What can such texts tell us about attitudes to earlier and current language? Let us begin with ancient attitudes to accents.

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7.1 Attitudes to Accents In chapter 5, I discussed regional variation; regions can have their own accents, but in this section I am not interested in the actual variation as such, but rather, in people’s attitudes towards different accents, be they regional and native, or foreign and the result of interference from a first language.¹ Let us begin with the question why people aiming for a standard often fail to adjust their pronunciation fully and why they thus retain an accent.

7.1.1 Why Do People Have Accents? First-language acquisition follows a number of universal patterns. Babies and toddlers begin with consonant-vowel sequences, and these consonants tend to be stops, p, t, k, and vowels like a. All languages have at least some of these sounds as well as the most basic syllable template, consonant + vowel. Intonational contours are also acquired early. Other sounds are invariably acquired late, as Czech ř, a raised alveolar non-sonorant trill. However, even though articulation of such sounds may come late, babies already begin to understand which sounds matter in their parents’ language and which ones do not; as soon as they have realized that, they stop paying equal attention to all sounds and focus on those which are contrastive in the language or languages they hear. There is a window for first-language acquisition which ends when children reach a certain stage of development; for some, this can be as early as eight years old, for others, as late as fifteen or sixteen. After this age, language acquisition normally requires more structured input to be successful. In terms of pronunciation, habits have set in: we can still hear all the sounds of any language, but our brains tend to filter out what is not distinctive in our native languages; and our brains drive the muscles responsible for articulation in ways that take our native patterns as default. Second-language learners, then, have to learn to actively listen to new contrasts and to overcome ingrained patterns of articulation. This requires much more effort than one might think. We can actually see this in images of the brain produced in electro-encephalograms. Here, the difference between a first language and a second

1 This section is essentially a shortened and adapted version of de Melo 2022a.

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one shows up very clearly: for the first language, relatively little of the brain lights up, and processing and production is highly efficient, but for a second language, there is a veritable explosion of lights. Second-language learners can still acquire a very high degree of proficiency in pronunciation, and some particularly talented ones may even become indistinguishable from natives, but the time and effort required is considerable, and many learners will not have the leisure or indeed the need to reach these highest levels. We can compare the situation of learning a foreign language to learning a musical instrument. Those who pick it up at a young age and are talented can go really far. Those who learn it in adulthood will make slower progress, not only because they have less time to dedicate to it, but also because their brains are more averse to acquiring and maintaining the neural pathways for new motor skills. This may seem strange from an evolutionary perspective because it would be an advantage to retain the skill to acquire new languages and motor skills with ease and speed. However, retaining such abilities would also come with problems. Filtering out variations in sound that are not contrastive in our native languages and having routine articulations set in our neural pathways saves a great deal of brain energy. Let us return to Latin.

7.1.2 Aspiration and the au / ō Distinction Dialects are regional varieties. When varieties are determined by social class rather than locality, we speak of sociolects. These are often marked by features of pronunciation. In the first century BC, Greek had become a prestige language, and the Roman upper classes would pronounce and inflect Greek loans according to Greek conventions. One problem area for native Latin speakers consisted in the Greek aspirated stops. Those who wanted to sound educated had to learn to aspirate, and aspirate in the right places. Catullus, in poem 84, mocks a certain Arrius, who knew how to aspirate, but not where: (1) Chommoda dīcēbat, sī quandō commoda uellet dīcere, et īnsidiās Arrius hīnsidiās. (84. 1–2) ‘Arrius used to say chommoda when he wanted to say commoda “advantages”, and hīnsidiae when he intended īnsidiae “ambush”.’

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Finally, Arrius goes to Syria, and people’s ears get a rest, until news arrives: (2)

… affertur nūntius horribilis, Īoniōs flūctūs, postquam illūc Arrius īsset, iam non Īoniōs esse, sed Hīoniōs. (84. 10–12) ‘… the horrifying message is brought that the Ionian waves, after Arrius had gone there, were now no longer Ionian, but Hionian.’

Arrius was a man who could pronounce aspiration, but clearly did not know where to do so, and so he hypercorrected and used this feature where it was not appropriate. Hypercorrection of this sort had some medium-term effects in Latin: certain Latin words began to be pronounced with aspiration, probably because they were considered to come from Greek in some form, but the Romance languages preserve no traces of this marginal phenomenon.² Cicero mentions it (orat. 160): he tells us that he used to say pulcer ‘beautiful’, Cetēgus (personal name), triumpus ‘triumph’, and Cartāgō ‘Carthage’, and rightly so, but that later he gave in to common practice and began to say pulcher, Cethēgus, triumphus, and Carthāgō. The first two are Latin in origin; triumphus is ultimately from Greek ϑρίαμβoς, but made it into Latin through Etruscan; and Carthāgō is derived from Punic, but with major changes. This is quite a mix of words, and rather than assuming that the Romans aspirated because Punic qart ‘city’ had an aspirated final consonant, we should think that the modern Latin forms are the result of hypercorrection. Another sociolectal distinction in Cicero’s time concerned au and ō. Old au had become a monophthong in some lower-class varieties in Rome, but not yet in the speech of the upper classes. Those who wanted to sound posh would try to keep au and ō distinct, but there were cases of hypercorrection. For plaudere / plōdere ‘to clap’, one’s first intuition might be that plōdere is a vulgar form, but it is in fact the older one, with plaudere being hypercorrect. I present more details in 2.2.5; here I simply want to ask why Cicero’s contemporary Publius Clodius Pulcher, a member of the gēns Claudia, one of the most ancient and distinguished families in Rome, changed his name from Claudius to Clōdius; or why Vespasian (Suet. Vesp. 22) would say plōstra rather than plaustra and mock those who insisted on the older forms. It is unlikely that such high-ranking figures did not care about the way they

2 French has a so-called h aspiré, where the grapheme h indicates a hiatus marked by a glottal stop; at some point, an h was pronounced in such positions, but we are mostly dealing with loans from Germanic.

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spoke; rather, these were deliberate attempts to show how down to earth the speakers were. In some ways, this deliberately casual style of speech is also a display of power: social upstarts like Arrius and even Cicero had to prove that they fitted in; but members of the traditional elite wanted to show that they could afford not to care.

7.1.3 The City and the Countryside Cicero praises the sounds of the city, of Roman speech (Brut. 171): (3) Id tū, Brūte, iam intelligēs, cum in Galliam uēneris. Audiēs tum quidem etiam uerba quaedam nōn trīta Rōmae, sed haec mūtārī dēdiscīque possunt; illud est maius, quod in uōcibus nostrōrum ōrātōrum retinnit quiddam et resonat urbānius. Nec hoc in ōrātōribus modo appāret, sed etiam in cēterīs. ‘You will understand that immediately, Brutus, when you have arrived in Gaul. Then you will hear certain words not current in Rome, but these can be changed and unlearned; what is more important is that there is a certain ring and more refined sound in the voices of our orators. And this does not only appear in the orators, but also in the others.’ In other passages, too, Cicero emphasizes the purity of the Roman accent. Of course Cicero himself came from Arpinum, a little outside, and he was mocked as not being a proper Roman by his opponents (Sall. Cat. 31.7). But nowhere is he mocked for a non-urban accent. Clearly, Cicero had obliterated any such traces. As a social newcomer, he strove for standard speech. However, some non-Roman accents could also be perceived as positive. In Brut. 259, Cicero describes Cotta as ‘broadening his letters’ (dīlātandīs litterīs).³ From other pieces of evidence (de orat. 3.46, Varro rust. 1.2.14), we can deduce that this refers to a variant pronunciation of the ī that goes back to earlier ei. In the speech of Rome, ei yielded ī, but in the countryside the corresponding outcome was ẹ̄ . This affected words like spīca (Rome) / spēca (countryside), ‘ear of corn’. Cicero (de orat. 3.42) tells us very clearly that for Cotta, this pronunciation was a deliberate affectation, an imitation of country speech, because it was considered more archaic; and for many Romans, more archaic meant better, purer, in accordance with the customs of the ancestors.

3 For discussion of this passage see Adams 2007, 139 and 143–45.

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7.1.4 Ancient Accentism When Cicero talks about Cotta’s affectation of a country accent, he is quite restrained because Cotta is a friend. But it is obvious that he thought that this artificial accent was a bit much. Elsewhere, Cicero felt entitled to mock a foreign accent if he thought it would help his cause: Quintilian (inst. 1.1.14) tells us that when he was defending Fundanius in court, a Greek witness on the opposing side struggled with Latin pronunciation and could not pronounce f- in the name Fundānius, for which he substituted h-. At the time, Greek φ was still pronounced as ph , not yet as f, and the Greek sound closest to f was h.⁴ Such sound substitutions are common: we can think of German or French speakers struggling with θ in thing or ð in this and substituting s or z. Quintilian tells us that Cicero ‘mocked’ or ‘laughed at’ this witness (irrīdet). Interestingly, we also have evidence for highly educated foreigners mocking local Latin accents. Gellius (19.9) has an illuminating passage.⁵ At a dinner party, presumably in Rome, Antonius Julianus made an appearance. He was a teacher of rhetoric and Hispānō ōre ‘of Hispanic speech’; at this point in time any Spaniard would have been a native speaker of Latin, with the kind of supra-regional accent that I discussed in 5.1.4. A group of Greek scholars, highly educated in Latin literature, but presumably not native speakers of the language, started to mock him as barbarous and agrestis ‘rustic’, and as a clāmātor ‘shouter’. I would suspect that this group of Greeks wanted to show off their Latin competence, but also felt somewhat insecure about their own accents.

7.1.5 Ancient Descriptions of Accents People not trained in linguistics normally struggle to describe a different accent, even if they hear all of its features clearly and can imitate it convincingly. Roman authors had similar problems. They could easily say that someone sounded different, but how would they describe such differences? In non-technical contexts, descriptions tend to be very vague and unhelpful. What did Antonius Julianus’ Hispānum ōs actually sound like? Presumably Gellius’ readers would know what a Spanish accent was and could imagine his way of speaking. Cicero tells us (Arch. 26) that young Archias lent his ears etiam Cordubae nātīs

4 This similarity is also seen in diachronic changes such as Latin faba ‘bean’ or facere ‘to make’ > Spanish haba, hacer (although by now h has become a silent letter). 5 Discussion in Adams 2003, 16–17.

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poētīs pingue quiddam sonantibus atque peregrīnum ‘even to poets born in Corduba, sounding somewhat fat and foreign’. An interesting description, but in practical terms entirely useless (but see also 5.1.1). Of course a court speech is not the ideal environment to talk about phonetic details, but even the ancient language professionals are not overly helpful. Cicero, in his treatises on oratory, does mention issues of aspiration and the like. Varro (ling. 5.97) tells us that where Romans say haedus ‘goat’, people from outside say hēdus. And later grammarians treat divergent accents under the uitia ōrātiōnis ‘faults of speech’; in the fifth century, Pompeius,⁶ himself from North Africa, says that it is a vice of the Africans to use only the ‘fat’ (= dark) l and not the clear one (15.6-8). Judgmental attitudes are the norm, but if we combine such statements with inscriptional data, we can get a little closer to what local accents sounded like.

7.1.6 Accent Anxiety When people respect or mock specific accents, and when they describe some as correct and others as having uitia ‘faults’, this can lead to confidence or anxiety in people whose speech deviates from what is deemed the norm. We can observe such anxieties in the emperor Lucius Septimius Severus, born in 145 in Leptis Magna, a city located in present-day Libya. His father was Phoenician, speaking Punic, while his mother was Italian, and when he became ruler in 193, he made history by being the first provincial to occupy this position: provincial not just by place of birth, but also by his paternal ancestry. Septimius Severus had native fluency in Punic, but he was also educated in Latin and Greek. His sister, on the other hand, had not received the same degree of education, and when she came to visit her brother, the emperor, in Rome, her lack of language skills caused him severe embarrassment, as the Historia Augusta reports (Sept. Sev. 15.7): (4) Cum soror sua Leptitāna ad eum uēnisset uix Latīnē loquēns ac dē illā multum imperātor ērubēsceret … redīre mulierem in patriam praecēpit. ‘When his sister from Leptis had come to him, barely speaking any Latin, and the emperor was deeply embarrassed about her … he ordered the woman to return to her country’. We do not know much about what Septimius Severus sounded like himself, but for an emperor it must have been awkward to have a sister around who could not communicate in the language of the ruling classes.

6 We now have an excellent new edition by Zago 2017.

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More directly related to accent rather than general linguistic competence are some telling remarks by St Augustine. Unlike Septimius Severus, Augustine merely had some kind of passive knowledge of Punic; Latin was his first and dominant language, but of course he had the local accent. In a remarkable passage (ord. 2.17.45), he says to his mother Monica: (5) Sī enim dīcam tē facile ad eum sermōnem peruentūram, quī locūtiōnis et linguae uitiō careat, profectō mentiar. Mē enim ipsum, cuī magna necessitās fuit ista perdiscere, adhūc in multīs uerbōrum sonīs Italī exagitant et ā mē uicissim, quod ad ipsum sonum attinet, reprehenduntur. Aliud est enim esse arte, aliud gente sēcūrum. ‘For if I said that you would easily attain a state of language which is free from fault in expression and speech, I would indeed be lying. For I myself had a great need to learn these things thoroughly, and yet the Italians still rebuke me on the issue of many sounds in words, and they are in turn criticized by me as far as sound itself is concerned. For it is one thing to be confident in one’s training, and another to be so in one’s birth.’ Here we can see Augustine admitting that he is insecure about his pronunciation; not because he has a non-native accent, but because he has a native, but provincial, accent. What I find charming is that when he realizes just how arbitrary such value judgments about native accents are, he has enough self-confidence to criticize the Italians in turn! One unusual passage remains. The poet Martial (born between AD 38 and 41, died between 102 and 104) was a native Latin speaker from Spain, as was Marcella, probably his patroness. In one poem (12.21), he praises her exquisite way of speaking: (6) Mūnicipem rigidī quis tē, Marcella, Salōnis et genitam nostrīs quis putet esse locīs? Tam rārum, tam dulce sapis. Pālātia dīcent, audierint sī tē uel semel, esse suam. Nūlla nec in mediā certābit nāta Subūrā nec Capitōlīnī collis alumna tibī; nec cito prōdībit peregrīnī glōria partūs, Rōmānam deceat quam magis esse nurum. Tū dēsīderium dominae mihi mītius urbis esse iubēs: Rōmam tū mihi sōla facis. ‘Who would think that you, Marcella, are a native of stiff Salo and born in the same place as me? So exceptional and sweet is your taste. The Palatine will say,

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if it hears you just once, that you belong there. No woman born in the middle of the Subura, no nursling of the Capitoline Hill will compete with you. Nor will there appear a glorious foreign offspring quickly who would be more fit to be a Roman bride. You bid my desire for my mistress the city be milder: you alone bring Rome before me.’ This sentiment is entirely alien to us. We have all heard non-native speakers being praised for their excellent pronunciation; it is a great compliment for secondlanguage learners to be told that they sound native. However, it is unimaginable today for an American or an Australian to be complimented on their beautiful British pronunciation. It would not just be a little off, it would be downright offensive, as if their native varieties were second-rate types of English. On this note, let us turn to female speech.

7.2 Female Speech A study of female speech would ideally be based on a corpus of which half consisted of texts written by women and half of texts written by men. The proportions of different genres, such as letters or poetry, should also be the same in these two halves. We could then examine systematic differences between how women and men express themselves. Unfortunately, for ancient corpora we cannot even come close to this ideal. Our evidence for female speech is so thin that we have to use whatever material we can get hold of, even though much of it is problematic. This scarcity of evidence also means that we inevitably end up treating female speech as a deviation from a male norm, simply because we have a comparative abundance of male-authored documents; but of course in reality, female speech was no more a deviation from a male norm than male speech was a deviation from a female norm. Our evidence for female speech begins with the comedies of Plautus and Terence, which contain a moderately large number of female stock characters. Such stock characters exhibit relatively little individuality, but they can still show us how female speech was perceived by male authors. In the second century, not much after Terence’s time, Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, wrote letters; two excerpts of a letter to her younger son, Gaius (killed in 121), are transmitted in Cornelius Nepos, but it is uncertain whether these were written by Cornelia herself or whether they constituted propaganda by the political opposition.⁷ In the first century BC, Cicero wrote letters to his wife Terentia, but unfortunately her replies have not come

7 Cf. Dixon 2007, 27; the excerpts present Cornelia as critical of her sons’ political reforms.

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down to us. In the Corpus Tibullianum, six short poems amounting to forty lines were written by Sulpicia, a poetess born around 40 BC (3.13-18).⁸ There was another Sulpicia, a satirist, known to us mostly through Martial and active under Domitian (emperor 81–96). Two iambic trimeters and seventy lines of hexameter poetry are transmitted under her name; the trimeters, transmitted in a now lost scholion to Juvenal, are likely to be genuine (Parker 1992), but the hexameters are now believed to be a late-antique imitation (details in Butrica 2006). Next we have a famous letter written around AD 100, by Claudia Severa, a military commander’s wife in Roman Britain; the document, found in Vindolanda, is a birthday invitation to a female friend.⁹ The Passio sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis dates to the early 200s; it is an account of the martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity and was supposedly written by Perpetua until her death.¹⁰ The final parts were added afterwards, but the problem is that the person who added them also redacted the work as a whole. It is only in the fourth century that we get more substantial texts written by women. In the first half of the fourth century, Faltonia Betitia Proba wrote a Cento Vergilianus de laudibus Christi, but since this is entirely composed of Virgilian phrases, it cannot fully count as a female voice. St Jerome (epist. 23.3) tells us of an epitaph composed by Aconia Fabia Paulina for her husband Praetextatus; she died shortly after him, in 384. Jerome’s words about this husband, a well-known dignitary, are disparaging, and all he transmits of the epitaph are the words in lacteō caelī pālātiō ‘in the heavenly palace of the Milky Way’, where Paulina believes her husband to be, but where according to Jerome he cannot be. Also from the early 380s dates the Itinerarium Egeriae, a travel diary written in letter form by a wealthy woman visiting the Holy Land (edition by Prinz 1960, linguistic study by Löfstedt 1911). This is addressed to a group of women at home, in the western part of the Empire. Much of this material is difficult to assess. For example, are the excerpts of Cornelia genuine? How heavily edited was Perpetua’s narrative? Is Sulpicia’s love poetry different from Tibullus and others because she was a woman, or because she was an amateur writer? Egeria’s long letter is not a dialogue; to what extent can we even detect female features of speech in such travel diaries?

8 In this chronological list, I ignore CIL 4.5296, an inscriptional love poem from Pompeii, from one woman to another; given the faulty copying, it is unlikely to have been inscribed by the original writer, and it is unclear whether the author really was a woman or just pretended to be one. Other Pompeian graffiti can reasonably be assigned to women – for instance the complaint that ‘Atimetus got me pregnant’ (grauido mē tene(t) At(i)mē[tus, CIL 4.10231); but these are short. 9 There are further short letters written by women in Vindolanda, of which at least one more also belongs to Claudia Severa. 10 For a critical assessment see Adams 2016, 342–51, especially 350–51.

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Ultimately, then, Plautus and Terence are our most detailed source for women having conversations with men and women. We will therefore start with comedy, yet we must not lose sight of the fact that Plautus and Terence may not give us an accurate picture, but an impressionistic one which may at times verge on caricature. Next, we will examine what ancient authors say about female speech, and finally we will look at Claudia Severa, Cornelia, Sulpicia, and Egeria.

7.2.1 Women in Roman Comedy Women in Roman comedy fit into a limited number of stock roles: prostitutes (meretrīcēs), marriageable young women (uirginēs), married women (mātrōnae), and slave girls (ancillae). The prostitutes tend to flatter, while the married women are normally unpleasant battle-axes. However, despite these obvious differences, there is much that unites the speech of different women in comedy. Oaths are discussed in Adams 1984, 47–54. The traditional term ‘oath’ is perhaps something of a misnomer: hercle, for example, did indeed start as an invocation of Hercules, but in comedy these ‘oaths’ do not have any strong religious function; rather, they often attach enclitically to an emphatic term, giving it even greater prominence. Gellius (11.6) states that only men swear by Hercules, whereas only women swear by Castor; swearing by Pollux is not restricted to one sex. That is essentially correct, but not the whole story. In both Plautus and Terence, women swear more than men, but the tendency is much more pronounced in Terence. In Plautus, women swear around 50% more than men, whereas in Terence, they swear four times as much. In Plautus, women use ēcastōr and mēcastōr more than pol and edepol, while in Terence that situation is reversed. Politeness markers are also discussed in Adams 1984. Here we can only look at three of them. Opsecrō ‘I entreat’, without an expressed object, is preferred by women; but this tendency is stronger in questions than in commands. For example, only 12% of all lines in Plautus are spoken by women, but 58% of all instances of opsecrō with questions occur in the mouths of women. Quaesō ‘I ask’, on the other hand, is more closely associated with men than with women, perhaps because it is less entreating. The most interesting word in this connection is amābō, originally ‘I will love (you)’.¹¹ In Terence, it is only used by women, while in Plautus, both women and men use it, albeit in different ways: women employ it towards men and women alike, whereas men only ever use it towards women. These usage patterns change by the end of the Republic. Cicero uses amābō in letters to Atticus, something which

11 The fuller amābō tē, with the object expressed, is less common, but can be seen in (7).

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would have been unheard of in comedy. Cic. Att. 16.2.2 shows that the word was still very flattering: (7) Sed amābō tē, mī Attice (uidēsne quam blandē?), omnia nostra … ita geritō. ‘But please, my dear Atticus (can you see how flatteringly I’m entreating?), take care of all our things like this.’ Here we can also observe the modification of the imperative with mī, considered flattering. In comedy, women use mī / mea more than men do, and this tendency is particularly noticeable if the vocative consists of a personal name (Dutsch 2008, 55; see also 6.3.3). The big question, of course, is to what extent Plautus and Terence reflect female speech accurately. After all, for linguistic characterization, one does not need a sociolinguistically correct representation of features; it suffices to throw in a handful of prominent ones. Just as a man in drag may exaggerate obvious features of female dress and make-up, while overlooking the more subtle ones, a Roman writer of comedy may exaggerate some aspects and ignore others. We cannot know for certain how realistic Plautus and Terence were, but it seems likely that they were accurate when it came to sex-exclusive usages, such as the restriction of hercle to men and of ēcastōr to women. Elsewhere we cannot be so sure; since women swear more than men do in both Plautus and Terence, this may well reflect reality, but it is quite possible that Terence exaggerated. Sex-preferential usages, where we are dealing with statistical tendencies rather than absolutes, are likely to be distorted by our authors, who may have exaggerated the obvious and neglected the subtle. Thus, I would not be surprised if the female preference for mī and mea with vocatives was exaggerated, but we cannot prove this. On the other hand, some subtleties of usage give me hope: the fact that in all sentence types, Plautine women use opsecrō more than men could, at first sight, be a distortion of reality; however, when we observe how the female preference for opsecrō is so much stronger in questions than in commands, we can tell that Plautus did not simply pepper female speech with opsecrō indiscriminately, but rather, that he had a keen ear for actual usage.¹² Plautus and Terence may not reflect female speech entirely accurately, but the overall picture is less gloomy than one might think at first. Let us now look at what ancient writers had to say about female language.

12 On the issue of combining imperatives with softeners, Barrios-Lech (2016: 54–5) notes that in Plautus and Terence, women use more positive politeness than men, while men use more negative politeness than women; this fits nicely with findings in modern languages.

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7.2.2 Ancient Writers on Female Language If we ask the man or woman in the street about how female speech differs from male, we can learn a great deal about attitudes to female speech and to women more generally, but we are unlikely to be presented with findings that stand up to scientific scrutiny; interestingly, many of the comments will concern phonetic features, such as ‘vocal fry’ (creaky voice), which is commonly associated with American females.¹³ Several ancient writers commented on female speech in general terms, but their statements are very impressionistic, too. Some of these comments are collected in Gilleland 1980 and Adams 1984. Thus, in Cic. de orat. 3.45, Crassus says that women facilius … incorruptam antīquitātem cōnseruant ‘preserve uncorrupted ancient usage more easily’, and he goes on to compare the speech of his mother-in-law Laelia with Plautus and Naevius. It is extremely unlikely that Laelia’s speech was close to the language used by the ancient playwrights, and much of what would have struck Crassus as incorrupta antīquitās would have been colloquial in Plautus’ time. However, there may still be something to Crassus’ comments. Labov, whose study I referred to earlier, noted that in formal contexts, women adapted their speech more to the recognized standard than men did. It is unclear how universal this phenomenon is and whether it is driven by relative power, since on average women have less personal power and social standing; however, it is quite possible that Roman women, when observed, also strove for ‘correct’ speech to a higher degree than men did. Yet women are not by nature more conservative in their linguistic customs; Milroy 1992 shows how female networks can spread linguistic innovations. Willi 2007, 163–5 and 193–5 examines conservative speech and innovations with regard to female characters in Aristophanes; on this evidence, one could argue that this contradiction may be no more than an apparent one: women can be conservative in features that are noticed easily, but innovative in those that are not normally noticed by non-linguists. Donatus’ remarks are quite offensive by modern standards: (8) Proprium est mulierum, cum loquuntur, aut aliīs blandīrī … aut sē commiserārī… Nam haec omnia muliebria sunt, quibus prō malīs ingentibus quasi in aceruum rediguntur et ēnumerantur nūllīus mōmentī querēlae. (Don. ad Ad. 291.4) ‘It is typical of women, when they speak, to flatter others or to pity themselves… For all these issues are normal for women in which, instead of great hardships, complaints of no substance are heaped up and listed.’

13 This feature does indeed seem to have increased in frequency among younger American women since the start of the twenty-first century, but it has never been rare among their male counterparts.

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Whether or not Donatus believed this to be true of women in general is uncertain; the statements are taken from his commentary on Terence, and female characters in Terence are indeed prone to flattery and self-pity. But of course Terence’s women are stock characters rather than a straightforward reflection of reality. One phenomenon that ancient authors engage in or remark on is codeswitching to Greek. Wenskus 2001 examines various letters and notes that Cicero does not use Greek when writing to his wife, Terentia; the exception is in fam. 14.7.1, χoλὴν ἄϰρατoν ēiēcī ‘I threw up pure bile’, where Greek spares him from expressing uncomfortable bodily functions in Latin. Augustus, on the other hand, code-switches into Greek when writing to his wife Livia about their grandson, the future emperor Claudius, in order to discuss his physical and mental infirmities (Suet. Claud. 4.1–4); this was clearly a sensitive issue. And Fronto writes two letters entirely in Atticizing Greek to Domitia Lucilla, the mother of his pupil Marcus Aurelius; in one of them (MC 2.3, p. 21–4 v.d.H.), he discusses the theory of metaphor, and for a technical subject like this, Greek may be appropriate, but the other (MC 2.15, p. 32–3 v.d.H.) is more difficult to explain. It is possible that Augustus used Greek because for a delicate topic like disability, plain Latin would have offended female sensibilities; Cicero, on the other hand, had few occasions to use Greek towards Terentia because no such topics came up. The use of fairly stilted Greek by Fronto towards a patroness and friend is remarkable. How would the women in question have replied to such letters? Not directly related to this is the use of Greek as part of amatory language (cf. also 5.2.2). Dickey 2008, 161–62 examines expressions like μέλι μoυ ‘my honey’, ζωή ‘life’, and ψυχή ‘soul’; these are highly unusual as address terms in Greek, but translate into idiomatic Latin (mel meum, mea uīta, anima)! Ultimately, it is hard to know what to make of this evidence; some of it is impressionistic, some of it concerns men speaking to women rather than the other way round. This evidence can add to the overall picture and enrich it, but not fundamentally change it. We can now turn to some text samples.

7.2.3 Four Text Samples Our first text, Tibull. 3.13, is the first of the poems by Sulpicia: (9) Tandem uēnit amor, quālem tēxisse pudōrī quam nūdāsse alicui sit mihi fāma magis. Exōrāta meīs illum Cytherēa Camēnīs adtulit in nostrum dēposuitque sinum. Exsoluit prōmissa Venus: mea gaudia narret,

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dīcētur sī quis nōn habuisse sua. Nōn ego signātīs quicquam mandāre tabellīs, nē legat id nēmō quam meus ante, uelim; sed peccāsse iuuat, uultūs conpōnere fāmae taedet: cum dignō digna fuisse ferar. ‘Love has come at last, such a love that the reputation of having concealed it would be more to my shame than that of having laid it bare to someone. Persuaded by my Muses, Venus of Cythera has brought him and placed him in our embrace. Venus has kept her promise: if anyone is said not to have joys of his own, let him tell of mine. I would not want to entrust anything to sealed letters, so that no one can read it earlier than my man; rather, I delight in having gone astray, it is tedious to compose my outward appearance for the sake of public opinion: may I be said to have been with him, each worthy of the other.’ This is elegant love poetry, not substantially different from that of Sulpicia’s male counterparts. Metrically, the lines are closer to Ovid than to Catullus: four of the hexameters have a penthemimeres, and the one that does not (l. 5) combines the incision after the third trochee with trithemimeres and hephthemimeres; the final words of the hexameters are trisyllabic or disyllabic, and each pentameter ends in a disyllable. Ovid avoids ending a pentameter with a word ending in a short vowel (as here in l. 6), but there are exceptions; and while it is a little clumsy to have a major syntactic break coinciding with an initial spondee (l. 10), again this is not unheard of. The perfect infinitives tēxisse and nūdāsse (l. 1-2) may have anterior time reference rather than being temporally equivalent to present infinitives.¹⁴ The poetic plural nostrum (l. 4) is unremarkable, but does not quite fit with the singular meīs in the preceding line. Cytherēa ‘Cytherean goddess’ for ‘Venus’ and Camēnīs ‘Muses’ for ‘poetic entreaty’ are pleasant metonymies with an equally pleasant alliteration. Placing dignō next to digna also creates a good sound effect. Altogether, then, this poem fits nicely with the love elegies composed by men; but there are no features that are distinctively female. Our next sample concludes the first part of Egeria’s account of her pilgrimage (1.23.8-10):

14 Perfect infinitives without anterior time reference sometimes occur in poetry in imitation of Greek aorist infinitives, which are aspectual rather than expressing relative tense.

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(10) 8. Ac sīc ergō aliā diē trānsiēns mare peruēnī Cōnstantīnopolim, agēns Chrīstō Deō nostrō grātiās, quod mihi indignae et nōn merentī praestāre dignātus est tantam grātiam, id est, ut nōn sōlum uoluntātem eundī, sed et facultātem perambulandī, quae dēsīderābam, dignātus fuerat praestāre et reuertendī dēnuō Cōnstantīnopolim. 9. Vbi cum uēnissem, per singulās ecclēsiās uel apostolōs nec nōn et per singula martyria, quae ibi plūrima sunt, nōn cessābam Deō nostrō Iēsū grātiās agere, quī ita super mē misericordiam suam praestāre dignātus fuerat. 10. Dē quō locō, dominae, lūmen meum, cum haec ad uestram affectiōnem darem, iam prōpositī erat in nōmine Chrīstī Deī nostrī ad Asiam accēdendī, id est Ephesum, propter martyrium sānctī et beātī apostolī Iohannis grātiā ōrātiōnis. Sī autem et post hoc in corpore fuerō, sī qua praetereā loca cognōscere potuerō, aut ipsa praesēns, sī Deus fuerit praestāre dignātus, uestrae affectiōnī referam aut certē, sī aliud animō sēderit, scrīptīs nūntiābō. Vōs tantum, dominae, lūmen meum, memorēs meī esse dignāminī, sīue in corpore sīue iam extrā corpus fuerō. ‘8. And in this way, then, crossing the sea the next day, I arrived in Constantinople, thanking Christ, our God, for having seen fit to bestow upon me, an unworthy and undeserving woman, such a great grace, that is, that he not only saw fit to give me the will to go, but also the opportunity to pass through the places I desired and to return again to Constantinople. 9. When I had got there, I did not cease, through the individual churches or apostles’ tombs and through the individual martyrs’ tombs, which are there in plenty, to thank our God Jesus, who had seen fit to bestow his mercy on me in this way. 10. From this place, ladies, my light, when I was sending this to your kindness, I had already planned, in the name of Christ, our God, to go to Asia, that is, to Ephesus, because of the martyr’s tomb of the holy and blessed apostle John, for the sake of prayer. But if after this I am still in my body, if I am able to see some places in addition, I shall, either in person, if God has seen fit to bestow it, report to your kindness, or certainly, if my plans change, I shall tell you through my writings. At any rate, you, ladies, my light, see [imperative] fit to remember me, whether I will be in my body or already outside my body.’ Egeria’s style is simple and rather repetitive, with predominantly late features such as feminine diēs or grātiā followed by the genitive rather than preceded by it; but given that Egeria could undertake a pilgrimage of this length, and that she was given hospitality by men of great status, she was clearly wealthy and esteemed, and not without education. Her simple style may in part be an affectation connected with her Christian ethos (on this, see 7.3.2). Egeria puts her humility on display, with phrases such as mihi indignae et nōn merentī ‘me, an unworthy and undeserving woman’, but again this is a feature of many Christian writers and has little to do

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with female language. I have translated dignārī literally, as ‘to see fit’, but in later Latin its force is severely weakened. What stands out in Egeria’s writing is the way she addresses the women at home: dominae ‘ladies’ is unremarkable, but lūmen meum ‘my light’ is quite intense when it is not used romantically or for beloved family members. Vestra affectiō ‘your kindness’, referring to the same women, also shows positive rather than negative politeness. We will return to this point below. By contrast, the letter by Cornelia is not very polite. Here is the first extract (epist. frg. 1): (11) Dīcēs pulchrum esse inimīcōs ulcīscī. Id neque maius neque pulchrius cuiquam atque mihi esse uidētur, sed sī liceat rē pūblicā saluā ea persequī. Sed quātenus id fierī nōn potest, multō tempore multīsque partibus inimīcī nostrī nōn perībunt atque, uti nunc sunt, erunt potius quam rēs pūblica prōflīgētur atque pereat. ‘You will say that it is beautiful to exact vengeance on one’s enemies. That does not appear to be more important or more beautiful to anyone than to me, but only if it is possible to achieve it with the state unharmed. But seeing that this cannot be done, for a long time and for many reasons our enemies will not perish and they shall be as they are now rather than that the state should be destroyed and perish.’ This is polished writing. We notice the preferred coordinative atque, particularly at home in more elevated styles (see 8.3.5), and the neat doubles (neque maius neque pulchrius; multō tempore multīsque partibus; prōflīgētur atque pereat). The second excerpt is even more polished (epist. frg. 2): (12) Verbīs conceptīs dēierāre ausim, praeterquam quī Tiberium Gracchum necārunt, nēminem inimīcum tantum molestiae tantumque labōris, quantum tē ob hās rēs, mihi trādidisse: quem oportēbat omnium eōrum, quōs antehāc habuī līberōs, partīs tolerāre atque cūrāre, ut quam minimum sollicitūdinis in senectā habērem, utique, quaecumque agerēs, ea uellēs maximē mihi placēre, atque uti nefās habērēs rērum maiōrum aduersum meam sententiam quicquam facere, praesertim mihi, cui parua pars uītae superest. Nē id quidem tam breue spatium potest opitulārī, quīn et mihi aduersēre et rem pūblicam prōflīgēs? Dēnique quae pausa erit? Ecquandō dēsinet familia nostra īnsānīre? Ecquandō modus eī reī habērī poterit? Ecquandō dēsinēmus et habentēs et praebentēs molestiīs īnsistere? Ecquandō perpudēscet miscendā atque perturbandā rē pūblicā? Sed sī omnīnō id fierī nōn potest, ubi ego mortua erō, petitō tribūnātum: per mē facitō quod lubēbit, cum ego nōn sentiam. Vbi mortua erō, parentābis mihi et inuocābis

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deum parentem. In eō tempore nōn pudet tē eōrum deum precēs expetere, quōs uīuōs atque praesentēs relictōs atque dēsertōs habuerīs? Nē ille sīrit Iuppiter tē ea perseuērāre nec tibi tantam dēmentiam uenīre in animum! Et sī perseuērās, uereor nē in omnem uītam tantum labōris culpā tuā recipiās, uti in nūllō tempore tūte tibi placēre possīs. ‘I would dare to swear solemnly that, apart from those who have murdered Tiberius Gracchus, no enemy has passed on to me such great difficulty and such great distress as you have on account of these matters: you, who ought to have taken on the roles of all the children that I had before and to take care that I should have as little worry in my old age as possible, that, whatever you did, you would want to please me most of all, and that you would consider it a sacrilege to do anything of major import against my wishes, especially towards me, to whom but a short part of life remains. Can not even this time span, brief as it is, help to keep you from opposing me and destroying the state? In short, what stop will there be? Will our family ever cease being insane? Will it ever be possible to put an end to this matter? Will we ever stop insisting on troubles, both suffering and causing them? Will we ever begin to feel shame for disturbing and disrupting the state? But if this is absolutely impossible, then seek the office of tribune when I have died: as far as I am concerned, do what pleases you, when I shall not feel it. When I have died, you will make the sacrifices for a parent for me and you will call upon your parent as a god. In that time does it not make you feel shame to pray to those gods whom you treated as abandoned and deserted when they were alive and on hand? May Jupiter above not let you continue with these matters, and may he not let such madness enter your mind! And if you do continue, I fear that through your own fault you may incur so much trouble for your entire life that at no time would you be able to be satisfied with yourself.’ The same features recur as in the passage above, but here we also find rhetorical questions, introduced by the same ecquandō, making them particularly intense. Ausim ‘I wold dare’ and second-person aduersēre (rather than aduersēris) were still unmarked forms at the time, but opitulārī ‘to bring help’ and sīrit ‘may he let’ were already distinctly oldfashioned. Senecta as a substantivized adjective and nēmō in adjectival function occasionally survive into the classical period, but are more commonly associated with early Latin. In with eō tempore and nūllō tempore is redundant, but not uncommon. The register of the Greek loan pausa is hard to determine; it is found especially in Plautus and then the archaists, and it is possible that in Cornelia’s time it was already falling out of regular use.

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Again there are no features that one could describe as specifically female. Given the highly critical attitude Cornelia exhibits towards her son, the suspicion is justified that this is a forgery circulated by the opposition. If the forgers had attitudes similar to those Crassus had in Cicero’s time, we could explain some old-fashioned features as presumed female conservatism, although they could equally well be part of deliberate stylization if the letter is genuine. If the forgers had attitudes similar to Donatus, the complaining tone could also be meant as a female feature. Our final sample is Claudia Severa’s birthday invitation:¹⁵ (13) i Cl. Seuerá Lepidinae [suae] [sa]ḷ[u]ṭẹm. iii Idus Septembṛeṣ, soror, ad dieṃ sollemnem nạtalem meum rogó libenter fạ ciás ut uenias ad nos, iụcundiorem mihi ii [diem] interuentú tuo facturá si [.].[c. 3]ṣ. uacat Cerial[em t]ụum salutá. Aelius meus [ et filioḷụs ṣalutant. uacat m2 uacat sperabo te, soror, uale, soroṛ, anima mea – ita ụạleam – karissima ẹt haue. Back m1 Sulpiciae Lepidinaẹ Ceriaḷịṣ a Ṣ[e]ụerạ. With quantities marked: Cl. Seuēra Lepidīnae suae salūtem. iii Īdūs Septembrēs, soror, ad diem sollemnem nātālem meum rogō libenter faciās ut ueniās ad nōs, iūcundiōrem mihi diem interuentū tuō factūra sī … Ceriālem tuum salūtā. Aelius meus et fīliolus salūtant. … Spērābō tē, soror, ualē, soror, anima mea – ita ualeam – kārissima et hauē. Sulpiciae Lepidīnae Ceriālis ā Seuērā. ‘Claudia Severa to her Lepidina, greetings. On 11 September, sister, for the day of celebration for my birthday, I ask warmly that you set about coming to us,

15 Text and translation from Adams 2016, 256–57; detailed commentary in Adams 2016, 257–64.

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sure to make (the day) more delightful to me by your coming, if you (are here). Greet your Cerialis. My Aelius and our little son send greetings. I will long for you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest – so help me – soul, and hail. To Sulpicia Lepidina, wife of Cerialis, from Severa.’ Vindolanda letters are often classified as Vulgar Latin, but this letter, along with many others, shows classical orthography¹⁶ and morphosyntax.¹⁷ The letter is interesting not because of any individual ‘female’ feature, but because of the accumulation of emotive features that are significant when taken together. The diminutive fīliolus ‘little son’ is normal for a small child and easily paralleled in Cicero. The superlative kārissima is unremarkable in this period;¹⁸ an adjective in the positive would be unusual and literary (see 6.3.3). However, it is noticeable that Lepidina is addressed as soror ‘sister’ three times; unrelated men can flatteringly be addressed as frāter ‘brother’ if they are similar in age, but doing so three times in such a short space is exceptional, especially since there is another endearment, anima mea … kārissima ‘my dearest soul’. Iūcundus ‘delightful’ is an emotive adjective, and the double farewell, ualē … et hauē ‘farewell … and hail’ is also highly marked (and reminiscent of Catull. 101.10). Severa is pretending that her own wellbeing depends on Lepidina’s coming, yet another strategy associated with positive politeness.

7.2.4 Where Does This Leave Us? Of the four texts discussed in the last section, the one by Severa is the most interesting. The poetess Sulpicia follows the conventions of love elegy so closely that we cannot catch her off guard, speaking in a natural way with traits that are sexspecific. Egeria, writing centuries later, also sticks to literary conventions, but when the narrative gives way to address, we can perhaps detect a higher degree of positive politeness than her male counterparts would use. By contrast, Cornelia’s letter fragments are not warm and endearing, but then she has to scold her son; besides, it is not even clear whether the letter is genuine or not. On the other hand, Severa’s letter

16 Kārissima with k is in fact archaizing. The apex is not always used correctly; sometimes it marks vowel length on final vowels, but in the first lines of (i) and (ii) it is used on nominatives with ă. 17 On future participles like factūra combined with conditional clauses see now Adams 2016, 259– 60, who argues that this construction need not be considered a highly literary feature. 18 Note, however, that wishes like ita ualeam breaking up a phrase are often used to give particular emphasis to the following element.

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brims with positive politeness. The use of positive politeness is of course contextdependent, but from these documents one gets the impression that women are more likely to use it than men. If this is correct, it fits with the cross-cultural observation in Brown and Levinson 1987, 246 that on average, women are more prone to positive politeness than men, presumably because of the average power differential between the sexes. These observations based on texts written by women fit nicely with the data we could get from Plautus and Terence. While writers of comedy are bound to exaggerate some features and overlook others, the overall picture they present is not far off. At any rate it seems closer to reality than the disjointed observations made by other male authors. On this note, we will move on to the grammarians.

7.3 The Rise of the Grammarians The first larger grammatical treatises in Latin date back to the first century BC. Some of Varro’s enormous œuvre was dedicated to various aspects of grammar, and of his main work in this arena, the De lingua Latina ‘On the Latin Language’, originally in twenty-five volumes, we still have six books and some fragments, discussing etymology and morphology.¹⁹ Caesar, too, had an interest in grammar, especially in morphology.²⁰ These scholars of the late Republic were men of high status, involved in politics and business, so grammar was little more than a hobby for them. The big interests of the period lay in lexicography, specifically the study of obsolete words from earlier literature; etymology, again with an antiquarian bent; and morphology, with a focus on the question to what extent it was regular. The first century AD saw major changes. Nettleship 1895, 171 describes them in unflattering, but ultimately accurate terms: ‘The grammatical studies of the first century A.D., when compared with those of the last century of the republic, exhibit, in some respects, the same character as the other literary work of the same period. There is more system, more effort after compilation and arrangement, but less freedom, less grasp, and altogether a narrower sphere of ideas.’ While I agree that more system as well as a narrower sphere of ideas can be found in the other literary output of the period as well, the phenomenon is particularly noticeable in grammar, for several reasons. Most grammatical treatises written during the Empire were not compiled by famous amateurs, but by lowly professionals, the grammaticī or grammarians. These systematized the existing doctrines, but since they were first

19 For an edition with commentary see de Melo 2019. 20 For an edition of the fragments see Garcea 2012.

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and foremost teachers, they had to make grammar accessible to young students who would learn the basics before moving on to the more prestigious rhetorical studies. Thus, research and independent enquiry had to take a back seat, and proven and tested doctrines were given canonical shapes. As time progressed, the spoken language also diverged more and more from the written standard, still largely based on the Latin of the late Republic; this diglossic situation meant that grammar teaching became more and more prescriptive. A contributing factor was perhaps also the status of the grammarian: situated at the lower end of the upper echelons, his social standing was never secure, and as we saw with accents above, such unstable ground is often associated with a desire to stabilize one’s position through ‘correct’ speech. In what follows, I shall give a brief overview of the different branches of ancient grammar. We can then look at the social milieu of the grammarian and its implications. I shall conclude this section with a tale of two Servii: the grammarian Servius as we know him from his writings, and the same Servius as we encounter him in Macrobius.

7.3.1 The Different Branches of Ancient Grammar Just as we divide modern linguistics into a number of subdisciplines, the ancients had different branches of grammar which overlapped in part, but also had their own rules and traditions. One major branch was lexicography. The three largest dictionaries that have come down to us are those by Nonius, Festus, and Isidore. Nonius Marcellus, a scholar from North Africa, was active in the fourth or fifth century; his De compendiosa doctrina in twenty volumes collects material from Plautus to Apuleius. Sextus Pompeius Festus, from Gaul, was active in the second century; his De uerborum significatione, in twenty volumes, is an epitome of the late Republican scholar Verrius Flaccus, but part of Festus is lost, and here we rely on an epitome by Paulus Diaconus, created in the eighth century. Both Nonius and Festus are invaluable to modern scholarship, not because of any particularly deep insights, but because their lexical material was collected through reading ancient texts, and these sources are quoted. Isidore of Seville (560-636) wrote an etymological dictionary, also in twenty volumes, based on material from Varro, Pliny the Elder, and many others. These lexicographers stand apart from other grammarians insofar as their work has no truly didactic function. It is meant as a collection of ancient material, glossing and explaining it in various ways, but not as something to be read from cover to cover. To the modern scholar not interested in ancient grammar, these lexicographers are still important because they preserve fragments of works

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otherwise lost. However, we need to be careful: when men of letters quote ancient passages, they tend to quote longer ones, without regard for grammatical peculiarities, and paradoxically, they thereby give us a more accurate picture of the regular usage of an ancient author than lexicographers do; lexicographers are not interested in regular usage, but in unusual features, showing us what was possible rather than what was normal (de Melo 2010b). It is particularly instructive to compare the Plautus we have in direct transmission with the Plautus we have in indirect transmission (de Melo 2011): the indirect transmission consists mostly of fragments preserved in grammarians, and if we did not have Plautus in direct transmission and were to reconstruct our author solely from the fragments, we would get a very skewed picture of his language. This means that we need to be particularly cautious when making linguistic statements about authors like Ennius, of whom we only have fragments. Another popular category was the commentary, either of secular texts that had become school texts, such as Virgil or Terence, or of Holy Scripture. We still have Donatus’ commentary on Terence or Servius’ commentary on Virgil (cf. 7.3.3), as well as many others. These commentaries are quite distinct from modern ones: like today’s commentaries, they explain grammar and literary topics, but in contrast to today’s works, they also have a prescriptive element, telling aspiring students what to imitate and what to admire from a distance. Again we need to be cautious; ancient writers of commentaries preserve a wealth of material, but their stylistic judgments are often off because they rely on their native intuitions, sometimes not realizing how linguistic usages have changed. As quantities became non-distinctive, classical metres became harder to grasp for students. Consequently, treatises on metre became common. Mallius Theodorus’ De metris, written by a distinguished politician (consul in 399) rather than a regular grammarian, is one of the best treatises of the kind (edition by Romanini 2007); the De ratione metrorum, ascribed to a non-existent ‘Maximus Victorinus’, is situated at the lower end of the educational spectrum (edition by Corazza 2011). Ancient metrical theories fall into two broad groups: those which derive all metres from the dactylic hexameter and the iambic trimeter through various permutations, and those which posit a number of basic feet and assemble the metres from there. Mallius Theodorus stands between these extremes. Treatises on orthography, such as those by Velius Longus or Terentius Scaurus (both second century), are less common. I discuss Scaurus in 2.1.8. An important question here is whether their recommendations are based on their own ideas of what an ideal orthography should look like, or on the educated usages of the time. Given the overall prescriptive streak of ancient grammarians, I incline towards the second direction.

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The most common type of ancient grammar is a basic outline of morphology, often combined with a treatise on barbarisms and metaplasms. Consentius (see Mari 2021), a fifth-century grammarian, discusses barbarisms and metaplasms in particular detail. The terminology again reveals prescriptivism: a barbarism is a mistake in a single word, to be avoided; however, many classical poets deviate in their morphology from current educated usage, and in such cases we do not speak of barbarisms, but of metaplasms. Metaplasms are also to be avoided by current writers, but excused for the ancient authorities. A mistake concerning a phrase rather than an individual word is a soloecism; but when a poet deviates in his phraseology, we speak of a figūra instead. Syntax was rarely discussed by Roman grammarians. The exception is Priscian of Caesarea (around AD 500), next to Donatus the most famous grammarian of antiquity. Born in Caesarea in present-day Algeria, he made his career in Constantinople, where the language of government was Latin, and where there was thus a need to teach second-language learners. The average Roman schoolboy coming from a good family would only need basic morphology and stylistics in order to discuss literature with his peers, but Greek-speaking learners of Latin required syntax as well. Of the eighteen volumes of Priscian’s Institutiones grammaticae, the last two are dedicated to syntax.

7.3.2 The Status of the Grammarians and Their Art The best account of the social standing of grammarians in later antiquity is provided by Kaster 1988. Kaster points out the ‘massive illiteracy’ (1988, 35) in society and suggests that Diocletian’s ruling of 293, that illiteracy should not be a bar to curial status, probably did not mark a sudden shift, but merely clarified and legitimized a situation that had existed for some time (1988: 39). More often than not, the schools run by grammarians would not increase social mobility for the masses, but would simply confirm and strengthen the status already held by wealthy families which could afford such an education. Against this backdrop, the grammaticus had an intrinsic, natural high status in society. However, this high status was relative and not uncontested. From around 100 BC, grammarians gradually severed their ties with the noble families on which they were dependent, either as freedmen or as freeborn men of humble origins. By the turn of the millennium, this emancipation was complete. Given the cultural norms of the Empire, training in grammar was a must for the elite, and hence the grammarian, who controlled access to it, was unavoidable. Financially, the average grammarian stood at the lower end of polite society: his position was secure, even if it

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did not earn him great riches and even if he was constantly overshadowed by the rhetorician. The typical grammarian was of humble origin, but required by the upper classes. Needless to say, some members of the upper classes resented this situation. We can see this very clearly in Gellius, who idolizes Sulpicius Apollinaris, the gentleman-scholar who taught him, but who produces diatribes against upstart grammarians from humble backgrounds, who were perceived as a double threat: a threat because of their expertise, however much Gellius caricatured it, and a threat because these lowly men clearly did not know their place. The status of the grammarian, fragile as it was throughout late antiquity, became even more complex and complicated with the rise of the early Church. Diglossia was now firmly in place and the speech of the elite differed markedly from that of the common people. However, Christianity promised salvation regardless of social status, which led to an ideological opposition to polished speech, as evidenced for example in the works of Tertullian (see 5.3.1 for further discussion). That said, we should be careful not to oversimplify. The Christian East never regarded classical education as divisive in the same way the West did; as Kaster 1988, 74 puts it: ‘To an educated Christian in the East, the stringent puritanism of Tertullian would have seemed strangely backward.’ And in the Christian West, the late third century saw a steady increase in upper-class Christians, which meant a gradual breakdown of the division between the lower classes speaking the Christian truth in uneducated language and the upper classes following pagan falsehoods in classicizing speech. It is only at the beginning of the sixth century that the new ecclesiastical elite is trained purely monastically, without literary education in the pagan classics; thus, Caesarius of Arles (died 542) aggressively attacks and despises the type of education he never had. The grammarians’ fortunes varied accordingly. They gained whatever stability they had through the continued needs of the elite for basic training in the traditional discipline. As such, they never became purely descriptive, but remained prescriptive and cared comparatively little for describing current speech habits. Insecurity and instability breed prescriptivism.

7.3.3 A Tale of Two Servii I began the section on grammarians with a quote from Nettleship, who criticized the lack of originality that crept into the study of language in the first century AD. This lack of originality is well known, and a scholar like Biddau, who edited Terentius Scaurus (2008), noted all the similarities between Scaurus and Velius Longus, trying

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to figure out which grammarian copied from the other. These two authors were active in the second century, but similar observations about grammarians doubling as copyists can be made down to the fifth century, when Pompeius borrowed freely from Servius as well as Donatus. However, we should not judge ancient grammarians too harshly; as Kaster 1988, 196 rightly says, ‘in the eyes of the grammarian, that stagnation was nothing other than the stability of lasting achievement; the failure to evolve, a satisfaction with what was already effective.’ In this connection, it is instructive to compare Servius with Servius: the grammarian Servius (turn of the fourth and fifth centuries) as known to us through his commentary on Virgil, with the grammarian Servius as presented to us in Macrobius’ Saturnalia. The latter makes several appearances, especially in book 6, where he explains figures of speech in Virgil. Macrobius characterizes him as extremely learned, but also as a man who knows his place; in 1.2.15, he is loveable because of his uerēcundia ‘modesty’, and this modesty makes him fall silent in 2.2.12 and blush in 7.11.1. Servius clearly belongs to the lower end of the upper echelons. The Macrobian Servius encourages the imitation of archaic usages and even their expansion; in 1.4, where Avienus presents him with the expressions noctū futūrā ‘the following night’²¹ and diē crāstinī ‘the next day’,²² Macrobius not only explains these usages grammatically, he also encourages their imitation and expansion. The Servius we know from his commentary is quite different. His Virgil commentary owes a great deal to a commentary by Donatus, now lost; but we still have significant extracts of the commentary by Donatus thanks to a diligent reader of the seventh century, who added them to his copy of Servius.²³ This commentary does indeed explain Virgilian figures of speech and other phenomena, but Servius, writing for an audience that has to learn to write appropriate Latin, is rather prescriptive. The figures are to be enjoyed, not to be imitated. If I may quote Kaster once more, ‘In Macrobius, figurae represent a free channel of communication between past and present that the grammarian has modestly and reverently opened;

21 Noctū ‘at night’ probably started as an analogical formation, based on diū ‘long’ (but originally ‘by day’). It most commonly stands on its own, but the combination with adjectives is attested for early Latin, as in noctū multā ‘late at night’ (Quad. hist. 45). 22 In early Latin, as in classical Latin, distinct locative forms exist only for the first and second declensions, but the usage is broader insofar as the forms can also be used for temporal expressions and not only for place names as in the late Republic. This phrase combines an ablative of the fifth declension with a locative adjective; there are parallels for this, such as diē septumī ‘on the seventh day’ (Plaut. Men. 1156). See also 3.3.1 and 4.1.1. 23 This expanded version is known as Servius auctus or Servius Danielis, after Pierre Daniel, who discovered the text.

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in Servius’ commentary, figurae represent a nearly closed door over which he stands guard’ (1988, 175).

7.4 Some Final Thoughts In this chapter we have looked at three sociolinguistic topics, attitudes to accents, female language, and grammarians and prescriptive grammar. These three topics show how wide-ranging a field sociolinguistics is; in fact, any area of language can be approached sociolinguistically. When looking at ancient attitudes to accents, we could see many views that still exist today, although the final passage from Martial should serve as a warning not to project modern attitudes back onto antiquity too readily. The section on female language, on the other hand, had to be based on limited and often problematic evidence; even in a well-attested language like Latin, there are gaps that are hard to fill, but some tentative conclusions could be reached even though some of our ‘female’ texts were written by men and even though Roman men gave mostly crudely impressionistic descriptions of female speech. Finally, the rise of the grammarian went hand in hand with the rise of diglossia; we could observe how diglossia, along with the socially insecure standing of the grammarian, furthered prescriptive grammar.

7.5 Further Reading As general introductions to sociolinguistics, I recommend Trudgill 2000 or Meyerhoff 2011; both are excellent. Those interested in attitudes to accents in antiquity can use my article in Antigone Journal (2022a) as a starting-point. Adams 2003 and Adams 2007 are less focused on attitudes to accents than on the nature of the accents themselves, but both contain a large amount of useful sociolinguistic information as well. Coates 1996 takes a look at female conversations in English and reaches interesting conclusions; however, this topic is very much in vogue and dozens of others books exist on the subject. Female speech in Roman comedy is covered by Adams 1984. For an introduction to ancient grammarians, the first sections of Robins 1997 are very useful. Kaster 1998 provides a brilliant sociological study. Law 1997 goes beyond antiquity and covers the Middle Ages.

Chapter 8 Three Texts We have now been through six major topics: sounds and spelling; morphology; syntax; regional and sociolectal variation; pragmatics; and sociolinguistics. Some themes, outlined in the introduction, came up again and again. However, the topics covered in this book are too disparate to allow us to reach some grand, overarching conclusion. In its stead, we will be looking at three texts in order to see how linguistic insights can be applied to further our understanding of them. The first text is an early one, an intriguing inscription in Faliscan, a dialect or language so close to Latin that we normally have no problems understanding it; however, this particular inscription remains puzzling. Sadly, I cannot offer a definitive solution, so what I propose here is no more than an attempt to show how one can approach such a text. Like many early inscriptions, the text is on the short side, so our focus will be on phonology and orthography as well as on morphology. Our second passage comes from the Bellum Hispaniense. It thus belongs to the classical period, but the language is quite distinct from Ciceronian or Caesarian prose. Here our insights can help us to assess this variation in morphology and syntax; did readers in the first century BC perceive such a text as substandard or less educated? In our third text, we move on to the second century AD. Gellius, as an archaist, has the educated usage of his own day as his literary basis, but embellishes his prose with elements drawn from pre-classical authors. Why does he adopt some elements and shun others? His choices have pragmatic and sociolinguistic repercussions. So now, without further ado, let us begin with the Faliscan inscription.

8.1 An Early Faliscan Inscription Bakkum 2009, 406–11 describes two impasto pitchers possibly dating back to the seventh century BC; one of them is inscribed with two separate texts, which could thus be either the second-oldest or the oldest Faliscan texts we know of. Here we are interested in the mysterious primary text, but the secondary inscription near the foot of the vessel deserves a brief mention, if only to show that its meaning is relatively straightforward.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111172002-008

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8.1.1 The Secondary Inscription (BA 3) Bakkum presents the text of the secondary inscription as follows: ecoquto∗euotenosiotitiasduenomduenassalue[to]duoltene: The most likely word division is as follows: eco quton euotenosio titias duenom duenas saluetod uoltene Early orthography lacks a separate letter for /g/, so the first word is to be interpreted as egō ‘I’. Quton, if the final letter is restored correctly, is a Greek loan; ϰώϑων refers to a type of pitcher just like ours. The word entered Faliscan via Etruscan, which had no vowel /o/, hence Etruscan qutun. In Faliscan, the Greek masculine seems to have been integrated as a neuter, as can be seen from the neuter adjective duenom ‘good’. Early Latin also has such a form, which by regular sound change became bonum: first /e/ became /o/ after bilabial glide, and then /du/ ̯ became /b/. Latin duenos is still 2 found in the Duenos inscription (CIL 1 .4, first half of the sixth century), and archaic or archaizing forms like duonos survive down to the third century. Our inscription also shows archaic genitives of the first and second declensions: -ās, as in Livius Andronicus’ epic and in fossilized pater familiās ‘father of the household’, and -osio, cognate with Homeric -oιo and also still found in the Latin lapis Satricanus, in the form Popliosio Valesiosio ‘of Poplios Valesios’ (CIL 12 .2832a, around 500). The future imperative ending in -tōd is richly paralleled in Latin. If we assume that euotenos and uoltenos are variants of the same name, we could translate as follows: Egō cūton Euotenosio. Titiās duenom duenās. Saluētōd, Voltene! ‘I am the pitcher of Evotenos. A good thing of good Titia. Greetings, Voltenos!’ On this interpretation, Evotenos would be the owner, and Titia would be the person who presented him with the vessel. Onwards to the problematic text!

8.1.2 The Problematic Text The problematic text (BA 2) looks like this: propramom⋮prameḍ[u]mompramodpramedumom⋮pramodpropramọḍ⋮ pramodumọ[m]

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Although some letters are damaged or not legible at all, their restoration is as unproblematic as is word separation, given the repetitive nature of the text, which must be some sort of jingle or incantation. This leaves us with the following elements: pro, pramom, pramod, pramed, and umom. The Latin preposition prō ‘in front of, before’ (local or temporal) is combined with the ablative. Whatever pramom is, it cannot be an ablative. In principle it is conceivable that at an early stage of the language, an alternative case was allowed, as we can see with Latin praeter ‘besides’, which takes the accusative in classical Latin, but coexists with fossilized praetereā, with an ablative pronoun. However, the early distinction is expected to be one of location (ablative) versus motion towards (accusative). Is motion towards likely here? Perhaps, perhaps not. At any rate prō can also be a prefix combining with nouns and verbs, and we should keep that possibility in mind. Let us now turn to umom, then to previous interpretations, and then to the question of how to proceed with a text like this.

8.1.3 Vmom The word umom had received various interpretations, but a convincing solution arrived when a connection was made between this form and Hernician udmom (He 2). Hernician is part of the Osco-Umbrian dialect group, and the inscription in question contains the words udmom ni hvidas ‘do not break the udmom’. This must refer to the type of vessel the text is inscribed on. Rix 1998 convincingly derived udmom from the root ∗ued̯ ‘water’, with cognates in Latin unda ‘wave’ from zero-grade ∗ud-neH2 (with regular metathesis), Greek ὕδωρ ‘water’, and English water. The suffix ∗-mo- is common in Italic, as in animus and anima ‘spirit’, both from a verbal root ∗H2 enH1 ‘to breathe’.¹ Vessel names from the root ∗ued̯ are also attested: Latin uter ‘water vessel made of skin’ (with -t- again the result of regular sound change) and Greek ὑδρία ‘water vessel’. Our word umom would contain a zero-grade root and show an unproblematic assimilation of ∗-d-m- to -mm-, written with a single consonant, as Faliscan does not write geminates, just like earlier Latin. As Bakkum 2009, 408 points out, an alternative interpretation, connecting our word with ūmidus ‘wet’, appears in the literature from time to time, but is not tenable, because at this early stage this form should still be /∗∗ūksmom/.²

1 The base verb is lost in Latin, but verb formations can still be found in Germanic and elsewhere. 2 This is less of a problem for Weiss 1994, 144, who proposes an alternative derivation from ∗ uH1 mo-.

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8.1.4 Earlier Interpretations Schmitt-Brandt 1989 interprets our text as ‘before lunch (pro pramod³) first of all (pramed) liquid (umom), after lunch (pramod) first of all (pramed) liquid (umom)’. Weiss 1994, 143, footnote 37 describes this interpretation, that is, ‘drink all the time’, as ‘plausible and quite in tune with the Faliscan Weltanschauung’. Personally, I would not want to draw far-reaching conclusions about the ethos of an ancient ethnic group based on the chance survival of a fairly limited amount of inscriptional material, but there are also formal problems with this interpretation. We have already looked at umom; the fact that it cannot mean ‘liquid’, but must mean ‘pitcher’, does not do much damage to Schmitt-Brandt’s interpretation (in that case, ‘before lunch, first of all the pitcher’). However, the rest does not work either. Pramed ‘first of all’ could perhaps be accepted; the adverbial ending -ēd corresponds to what we find in Latin, where -d drops off before Plautus. Latin prīmus ‘first’ is connected with ∗pri- / ∗prei- ‘first’, which we also find in Greek πρίν ‘before’, but a by-form ∗prāmos, from ∗prH-, is needed for prandium ‘first meal of the day’, from ˚ ∗ prām-ed- ̯iom, ‘first eating’ (with a further root ∗H1 ed- ‘to eat’). However, Faliscan does not seem subject to vowel weakening or syncopation, even at a much later stage, so it remains a mystery how one could get from an ablative ∗prām-ed- ̯iōd to pramod. Also, can pro with an ablative mean ‘before’, while the bare ablative is to be interpreted as ‘after’? Bakkum 2009, 408 mentions other attempts to connect pramod, pramed, or both, with Latin prīmus, describing them as ‘not (…) particularly attractive’. I concur. Bakkum also mentions an attempt by Pisani to connect pramom with Latin prōmere ‘to bring forth’. Latin -ō- is the result of a contraction of the prefix pro- ‘forth’ and the verb emere; how Faliscan could contract the two neighbouring vowels to -ā- is unclear. We would apparently be dealing with a first-person singular perfect ending in -om, as in Oscan and Umbrian, but while Oscan and Umbrian continue an old aoristic ending here, Faliscan seems to agree with Latin, which has the ending -ī from -ei, originally ∗-ai.⁴ Perhaps we need to go back to the basics.

8.1.5 Letters and Sounds Again, Plus Some Morphology A good starting-point is the question what pramom, pramod, and pramed could have sounded like. Final -m could only be that, but internal -m- could stand for a geminate.

3 This, rather than propramom, was the earlier accepted reading of the inscription. 4 Faliscan pe⋮para[ ‘I gave birth’ probably had this ending -ai.

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The vowels could be long or short. The letter -r- would not be geminate after an initial consonant. And crucially, that initial consonant, written p-, could stand for either p- or b-, as Faliscan had no way to differentiate these sounds in writing. We saw the form duenas (= duenās) ̯ earlier; this initial consonant cluster became b- in Latin, but also in Faliscan, where later texts have pis ‘twice’, corresponding to Latin bis, both from duis. ̯ ⁵ As far as I am aware, no scholar has even considered the possibility that pramom and the other related forms could begin with anything other than /pr-/. Initial pr- can only really go back to ∗pr-, but br- could go back to ∗br-⁶ or ∗mr-. Medial -mm- would have to go back to the assimilation of some stop and ∗-m-. And -ăcould be original, while -ā- could go back to ∗-eH2 -, or could reflect a syllabic liquid followed by any laryngeal (∗-rH becomes -rā-). ˚ The ending -od can realistically only be a second-declension ablative in -ōd. On the other hand, -om could be one of several second-declension endings: a neuter nominative or a masculine / neuter accusative, or even a masculine / neuter genitive plural. And -ed could be -ed, a third-person perfect ending, or -ēd, an adverbial ending or a third-person subjunctive ending. We can now scour Indo-European dictionaries for roots that could have some semantic connection with ‘water jug’ and begin with ∗pr-, ∗br-, or ∗mr-, or ∗per-, ∗ber-, or ∗mer-, if we can assume a zero-grade. Sadly, not many roots materialize. However, Bezzenberger 1902, 152–53 tentatively suggested a connection between Greek βράσσειν ‘flow forth’ and Latvian murdi ‘flowing forth’ / murdét ‘to flow forth’ as well as Lithuanian murdýnas ‘place in the ground where water comes out’. The Greek form seems to have a long vowel, to judge from Ionic ἐϰβρήσσειν. A root form ∗mrH2 dh ˚ would fit the bill. ∗ In Greek, m- becomes β before liquid; syllabic liquid followed by laryngeal results in non-syllabic liquid plus long vowel with a quality dependent on the laryngeal; and the voiced aspirate would become a voiceless one. Combined with a suffix beginning with ∗- ̯i-, ∗βρᾱϑ- ̯iω ends up as βράσσω. In Baltic, syllabic liquid followed by laryngeal results in -ū- followed by nonsyllabic liquid. With a further consonant following, the vowel would be shortened, leading to contrastive high pitch, but in our forms the accentuation is ambiguous. Voiced aspirates end up as plain voiced stops in Baltic. Thus, the outcome is murd-. In pre-Latin-Faliscan, our root would result in ∗brāð-. With a suffix ∗-mo-, we could get a noun brāmmo- ‘that which flows, liquid’. And just as next to Latin

5 Cic. orat. 153 mentions the ancient form duis for bis. 6 But note that ∗b was a very rare phoneme in Indo-European.

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animus we can create a verb animāre ‘to endow with spirit’, we could create such a first-conjugation verb for our Faliscan noun, brāmmā- ‘to make flow’.

8.1.6 Where Does This Leave Us? If we now take pro- as a prefix and pramed as a present subjunctive, we get the following jingle: propramom⋮prameḍ[u]mompramodpramedumom⋮pramodpropramọḍ⋮ pramodumọ[m] Phonologically written: Probrāmmom brāmmēd ummom, brāmmōd brāmmēd ummom, brāmmōd probrāmmōd brāmmōd ummom. ‘May a flowing forth make the pitcher flow forth. May the pitcher flow forth with flowing liquid. With flowing liquid, with a flowing forth, with flowing liquid, the pitcher.’ Is this at all convincing? I myself would not want to vouch for it. This attempt is merely meant to show how one should tackle a problematic inscription: systematically, starting with phonology and spelling, and moving on to larger units. What I firmly believe is that we have to take seriously the different phonetic values of Faliscan p and that we cannot simply assume that the letter stood for the sound /p/ here. It may have done, but it may have been a /b/. I also hope to have demonstrated that once we have established potential pronunciations as well as the potential morphological values of the endings, we need to be systematic about finding possible Indo-European sources; the regular sound changes have to apply. However, that said, where my analysis falls short is in the actual Indo-European root. Greek and Baltic allow the tentative reconstruction of a relevant root, but ideally there should be a third family pointing in the same direction. The Faliscan inscription is too uncertain to provide such a third foundation. And as such, all this is no more than an educational thought experiment.

8.2 A Passage from the Bellum Hispaniense Our second text is an extract from the Bellum Hispaniense ‘The Spanish War’, one of the works continuing Gaius Julius Caesar’s commentaries. A modicum of background information is required in order to situate this work in its historical and literary context.

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8.2.1 Background There are eight books of De bello Gallico ‘On the Gallic War’; the first seven were written by Caesar himself, while book 8 was composed by Caesar’s general Aulus Hirtius after Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC. Hirtius himself died in battle in 43. The Gallic wars took place between 58 and 50 BC. Caesar, in enormous debt, had been awarded a proconsulship and the provinces of Illyricum and Cisalpine Gaul. When Metellus Celer died unexpectedly, he was also given Transalpine Gaul. He then got involved in tribal conflicts and ended up conquering Gaul. De bello Gallico was written as a justification of his actions. Caesar referred to his work as commentāriī, not as annālēs or historiae. Later, Quintilian defined historia as a carmen solūtum ‘epic poem in prose form’ (inst. 10.1.31), which meant that it was stylistically polished as well as full of non-factual adornments. Commentāriī, on the other hand, were supposed to be rough drafts, stylistically simple as well as factually correct, with complete veracity. This is not the place to assess the accuracy of Caesar’s reporting; in stylistic terms, however, his commentāriī became a model whose appeal has endured to this day, characterized as it is by an elegant and seemingly simple style. De bello Gallico was followed by De bello ciuili ‘On the Civil War’, in three books. These outline the events of 49 and 48: Caesar’s crossing of the river Rubicon, which constituted an invasion of Italy, his fight against Pompey and the senate, and Pompey’s defeat at Pharsalus in Greece. The work was again written as a justification of Caesar’s actions. It shows certain signs of haste and is less polished than his De bello Gallico. The Bellum Alexandrinum, Bellum Africum, and Bellum Hispaniense outline the fights against the remnants of Pompey’s armies in Egypt, North Africa, and Spain, respectively. They must have been written by three different authors; they differ in style from each other and also from Hirtius’ book. All four authors model themselves on Caesar, but with varying success; ultimately, each of them falls short. The Bellum Hispaniense is easy to summarize. Following the battle of Pharsalus and Pompey’s death soon afterwards, the remaining opposition in the east was soon crushed. In the west, however, two legions declared themselves loyal to Pompey’s son, Gnaeus Pompeius. Gnaeus and his brother Sextus relied on support by Titus Labienus, who had been one of Caesar’s most important and talented generals in the Gallic wars, but who had gone over to Pompey’s side when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, which Labienus considered morally wrong. Caesar’s generals Quintus Fabius Maximus and Quintus Pedius did not dare to risk a battle and requested help from Caesar. Caesar and his legions covered the substantial distance of 2,400 km in less than a month, leading to a surprise arrival.

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The final battle at Munda lasted eight hours. 30,000 Pompeians died, among them Titus Labienus, but only 1,000 supporters of Caesar died.

8.2.2 A Passage from Caesar In order to contrast the language of the Bellum Hispaniense with Caesar’s idiom, it makes sense to begin with a sample from Caesar (Gall. 7.1):⁷ 1. Quiētā Galliā Caesar, ut cōnstituerat, in Italiam ad conuentūs agendōs proficīscitur. Ibi cognōscit dē Clōdiī caede senātūsque cōnsultō certior factus, ut omnēs iūniōrēs Italiae coniūrārent, dēlēctum tōtā prōuinciā habēre īnstituit. 2. Eae rēs in Galliam Trānsalpīnam celeriter perferuntur. Addunt ipsī et adfingunt rūmōribus Gallī, quod rēs poscere uidēbātur, retinērī urbānō mōtū Caesarem neque in tantīs dissēnsiōnibus ad exercitum uenīre posse. 3. Hāc impulsī occāsiōne, quī iam ante sē populī Rōmānī imperiō subiectōs dolērent līberius atque audācius dē bellō cōnsilia inīre incipiunt. 4. Indictīs inter sē prīncipēs Galliae conciliīs siluestribus ac remōtīs locīs queruntur dē Accōnis morte; 5. posse hunc cāsum ad ipsōs recidere dēmōnstrant: miserantur commūnem Galliae fortūnam: omnibus pollicitātiōnibus ac praemiīs dēposcunt quī bellī initium faciant et suī capitis perīculō Galliam in lībertātem uindicent. 6. In prīmīs ratiōnem esse habendam dīcunt, priusquam eōrum clandestīna cōnsilia efferantur, ut Caesar ab exercitū interclūdātur. Id esse facile, 7. quod neque legiōnēs audeant absente imperātōre ex hībernīs ēgredī, neque imperātor sine praesidiō ad legiōnēs peruenīre possit. 8. Postrēmō in aciē praestāre interficī quam nōn ueterem bellī glōriam lībertātemque quam ā maiōribus accēperint recuperāre. ‘1. When Gaul was quiet, Caesar sets out for Italy, as he had determined, to hold gatherings. There he hears of the murder of Clodius, and, having been informed of the senate’s decree that all the younger men in Italy should be sworn in, he decides to hold a levy throughout his province. 2. These events are speedily reported to Transalpine Gaul. The Gauls themselves add and invent through rumours that which the circumstance seemed to require, that Caesar was detained by the commotion in the City and, in view of discords so serious, could not come to the army. 3. Driven by this opportunity, the people who even before were chafing that they were subjected to the sovereignty of the Roman people, begin to make plans for a war with greater freedom and audacity. 4. Having summoned conventions among each other in wooded and remote spots, the chiefs of Gaul complain of the death of

7 My translation is based on the online translation provided by Lacus Curtius.

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Acco. 5. They point out that this fate might fall upon themselves next. They express pity for the shared lot of Gaul. With all promises and rewards they call for men who would make a start of the war and who, at risk of their own life, would champion the liberty of Gaul. 6. They say that first and foremost they must devise a means, before their secret plans could leak out, to shut Caesar off from the army. It was an easy task, 7. because the legions would not dare to march out of their winter camp in the absence of their commander, and because the commander could not reach the legions without an escort. 8. Finally, it was better to be killed in battle than not to recover their old renown in war and their liberty, which they had received from their ancestors.’ This is the opening chapter of the seventh book of the Gallic War. Caesar sets the scene with an ablative absolute; the ablative absolute is characteristic of Caesar’s style, as a feature of military language, and as such is much less common in Cicero. In Plautus, it is very rare, but occurs in parodies of battle reports (there are three such constructions in Amph. 188-9, a comedic exaggeration). Caesar, the subject of the main clause and the ut-clause, stands before both of them, and the temporal ut-clause precedes the main clause because the decision described within it is prior to the action in the main clause; Caesar follows the principle of iconicity fairly strictly. The tenses in this chapter are of interest: the finite verbs are in the historic present, with four exceptions, cōnstituerat and coniūrārent in (1), poscēbātur in (2), and dolērent in (3). All four exceptions are in subordinate clauses that give background information, and here it is important that the tenses should situate the action in a way that mirrors reality. Elsewhere, however, the historic present is used, making the narration more lively by presenting it as if it were happening now. The next sentence begins with ibi, which establishes a connection with what precedes, another standard feature of periodic style. Again the presentation follows the principle of temporal iconicity. A short main clause is followed by a conjunct participle with a dependent ut-clause, and the significant main clause expressing Caesar’s decision follows all this preparatory material. Throughout this chapter, Caesar varies the connectives between et, -que, and atque / ac. It is noticeable that Caesar does not employ the full form atque before consonant in this chapter; Cicero also prefers ac in this environment and uses preconsonantal atque mainly in clausulae in order to achieve specific rhythms. Such usage patterns stand in contrast to Cato’s earlier practice, which we will return to in the next section. The first sentence in (2) shows that in the classical periodic style, not every sentence needs to be long. If there are no accompanying circumstances, the sentence may consist of a simple main clause, as here. There is no overt connective, but eae rēs refers back to the previous events. The subject is in initial position and the verb

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ends the sentence, which is the most common pattern in Caesar, but the next sentence shows that other patterns can be used if the context requires it. The new topic is the Gauls, and they come at the end of the main clause, in a construction that resembles presentative ones, but the pattern is more intricate insofar as we have a double hyperbaton: the verb phrase addunt … et adfingunt is split by ipsī, which is in turn separated from Gallī. In the accusative and infinitive constructions reporting the rumours, there is something of a chiasmus, with the first one beginning with a verb and the second one ending with one. (3) again does not have a connective particle, but fronted hāc, separated from its head noun through the conjunct participle these words depend on, does create a connection. In (4), the scene is again set by an ablative absolute, but as it is quite long and modified by a further ablatival phrase indicating location, Caesar splits it up by inserting the main clause subject prīncipēs Galliae into it, a practice that is not uncommon. (5) is not connected with (4) by means of a particle, and the sentences in (5) are not connected either, which is deliberate: it indicates the quick succession from worry to self-pity and then a plan of action. One could argue that the first accusative and infinitive in (5) begins with the verb, posse, because it is focal; the Gauls think of this scenario as a real possibility. The finite verb dēmōnstrant is in final position, as expected, and when the next sentence begins with a finite verb, miserantur, this could simply be the result of a desire for variation. The relative clause stands after dēposcunt partly because of its length, since heavy constituents are commonly placed later, and partly because it is final, and purpose clauses follow because of the principle of iconicity. While the preceding sentences contained several verbs of speech, (6) – (8) gives us a longer stretch of indirect speech entirely dependent on a single verb, dīcunt. (7) contains another ablative absolute, absente imperātōre, but ablative absolutes with absente or praesente are hackneyed and not restricted to specific registers; since the singular is so much more frequent than the plural, absente and praesente were fossilized, and some authors do not exhibit the expected number agreement when a plural noun does occur.⁸ In (8), praestāre splits up the accusative and infinitive construction dependent on it, presumably because in aciē is fronted for emphasis. Interficere is a relatively neutral word for ‘to kill’. Veterem bellī glōriam shows a typically classical word order pattern, with the dependent genitive enclosed in between adjective and noun. And finally, the relative clause quam … accēperint is heavy, but not placed in final position; Caesar had a choice.

8 E.g. praesente multīs ‘in the presence of many’ in Rhet. Her. 4.16 in a sample of the debased form of the simple style.

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8.2.3 An Excerpt from the Bellum Hispaniense We can now compare Caesar’s Gallic War with the Spanish War. The text I have chosen is chapter 4; Caesar is sending forces to Ulia and is going to Corduba himself: 1. Hōc missō ad Vliam praesidiō Caesar, ut Pompeium ab eā oppugnātiōne dēdūceret, ad Cordubam contendit, exque⁹ itinere lōrīcātōs uirōs fortīs cum equitātū ante praemīsit. 2. Quī simul in cōnspectum oppidī sē dedērunt, cum equīs recipiuntur. Hoc ā Cordubēnsibus nēquāquam poterat animaduertī. Appropinquantibus ex oppidō bene magna multitūdō ad equitātum concīdendum cum exīssent, lōrīcātī, ut suprā scrīpsimus, ex equīs dēscendērunt et magnum proelium fēcērunt, sīc uti ex īnfīnītā hominum multitūdine paucī in oppidum sē reciperent. 3. Hōc timōre adductus Sex. Pompeius litterās frātrī mīsit ut celeriter sibi subsidiō uenīret, nē prius Caesar Cordubam caperet quam ipse illō uēnisset. 4. Itaque Cn. Pompeius Vliā prope captā litterīs frātris excitus cum cōpiīs ad Cordubam iter facere coepit. ‘1. When this (sc. relief force) had been been sent to Ulia to provide protection, Caesar hastened to Corduba in order to lead Pompeius away from that attack, and from the journey he sent ahead brave men wearing cuirasses together with cavalry. 2. As soon as they came within sight of the town, they took to the horses. This could not be seen by the men in Corduba at all. When they were approaching and when a pretty large force had come out of the town in order to cut the cavalry into pieces, the men in cuirasses, as we wrote above, got off from their horses and fought a great battle, in such a way that out of the endless number of men few retired back into the town. 3. Driven by this fear, Sextus Pompeius sent a letter to his brother so that he should come to his aid quickly, so that Caesar would not capture Corduba before he himself got there. 4. Thus, even though Ulia had almost been captured, Gnaeus Pompeius, driven by his brother’s letter, began to make his way to Corduba with the forces.’

8.2.4 Language Notes The writer of the Bellum Hispaniense uses ad instead of the bare accusative in order to indicate direction to a city (ad Vliam, ad Cordubam twice); Caesar would have used the bare accusative, but already Livy uses ab with place names instead of the bare ablative, and Augustus is said to have combined place names with prepositions

9 Thus Pascucci; the alternative manuscript reading ex quō is tempting.

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for the sake of clarity (Suet. Aug. 86.1). Fortis seems a little redundant when the men are already modified by another adjective, but it probably still has its original semantic force, ‘valiant’, as it does whenever Caesar uses it.¹⁰ In ante praemīsit, ante is redundant, since the concept is already expressed by the preverb. Simul instead of simul atque ‘as soon as’ is not particularly common in classical Latin,¹¹ but is found also in Caes. Gall. 4.26.5. At first sight, one might be somewhat surprised by the subordinate clause appropinquantibus ex oppidō bene magna multitūdo ad equitātum concīdendum cum exīssent, which precedes its main clause. Appropinquantibus is taken as a shortened ablative absolute by Pascucci, an un-Caesarian type of construction with a missing subject. Cum stands directly before the finite verb, and everything else has been fronted, including the subject, which is not shared with the main clause. However, while this is not a Caesarian type of structuring a sentence, it is simply a hangover from earlier Latin, where such subordinators often stand directly before the finite verb. Bene magna multitūdō ‘a pretty large force’ belongs to a lower register; bene as an intensifier is as much at home in colloquial speech as male is as a negation. Multitūdō … exīssent exhibits a typical cōnstrūctiō ad sēnsum; it would not be strange for Caesar to pick up a collective noun of this type with a plural verb in a later sentence, but within the same sentence one would expect singular agreement in accordance with the morphology. In our passage from Caesar, the word for ‘killing’ was interficere, something of a euphemism favoured by him. Here we find concīdere, ‘to cut to pieces’, a classical word used for cutting up things, but also for brutal killings. Our author employs this strong word in a fairly neutral sense, while Caesar reserves it for particularly violent clashes, as an emotive word. In the Gallic War, Caesar uses interficere 82 times, but concīdere only twice.¹² In our author, interficere also predominates with fifteen attestations, but concīdere is found four times; the figures are low, but suggestive. Vt suprā scrīpsimus is not unclassical in and of itself, but after such a short interval of a first mention it is redundant. Īnfīnīta hominum multitūdō ‘endless number of men’ does not contain any non-classical words or word combinations, but the exaggeration is rare in Caesar (who has it in Gall. 5.12.3). Illō ‘to that place’ is less common than illūc in classical Latin, but attested in both Cicero and Caesar. Coepit with infinitive tends to cluster in simple narratives, without entirely losing its semantic force; Adams 2016, 126 argues that it means ‘began to and repeated the action’. An individual instance, as

10 Pascucci 1965 ad loc. treats uir fortis as a fixed collocation and hence does not consider the further modification problematic. 11 Pascucci calls it an archaism, but that is overstating it. 12 Actually three times, but one token refers to the tearing up of paths rather than of human beings.

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here, is insignificant for stylistic analysis, but in Bell. Hisp. 34 there is a cluster of such constructions. However, we should not exaggerate the differences between our writer and Caesar. Our writer is largely at home with the ablative absolute and starts this chapter with one; a second one, Vliā prope captā, comes up later, again used correctly. That said, if we take appropinquantibus as a shortened ablative absolute, it is a rather clumsy construction. Our writer is careful to connect his sentences with each other; the second begins with a relative connection quī and the third, while not having a particle, has a sentence-initial pronoun hoc that looks back to what precedes. The next sentence lacks a connection, but the next one starts with a conjunct participle construction, hōc timōre adductus, again with a pronoun that looks back. And then we find itaque in the next sentence, which again contains a conjunct participle. Our author is thus no stranger to regular connections and to non-finite subordinate clauses. There is a fair amount of subordination, and an isolated short main clause, such as hoc ā Cordubēnsibus nēquāquam poterat animaduertī would not be alien to Caesarian style: this is a major point to be made, so it should not end up as an afterthought in a longer sentence, but deserves a sentence in its own right.

8.2.5 Earlier Assessments How does this assessment sit with the views expressed by other scholars?¹³ Pascucci 1965 stands in a long tradition of scholars accusing our author of generally low educational attainment, while conceding that he possesses a beginner’s skills in rhetoric and can on occasion even display learning, as evidenced by quotes of Ennius. Gaertner 2010 has a more balanced approach and argues convincingly that in the 40s BC there did not yet exist a universally ‘accepted notion of what constituted “good” or “exemplary” Latin. (…) Hence, the traditional characterisation of the Bellum Hispaniense is based on a retrojection of the classical norm’ (2010, 245). For Gaertner, our author is consciously following in the footsteps of the Roman historiographical tradition of the late annalists. Allendorf believes that this assessment is ‘too confident’ (2016, 554); for him, our author has a more inclusive style admitting usages that were not acceptable to purists, but also certain substandard features that other, similarly inclusive authors would not admit. Let us briefly examine some of the linguistic features that gave rise to such divergent assessments. Pascucci’s list of stylistic and grammatical crimes is a mixed

13 Adams 2012 provides the most balanced assessment of the Bellum Africum; nothing quite like it has been produced for our work.

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bag; they are ‘non-classical’ for very different reasons. In terms of morphology, Pascucci notes cornum ‘horn’ (30.7) instead of cornū, a trivial normalization given the rarity of fourth-declension neuters; carrum ‘waggon’ (6.2) is used instead of carrus, but such alternations are to be expected among loanwords;¹⁴ and in quīs ‘among which’ (23.8) instead of in quibus shows the survival of alternative morphology in fixed collocations.¹⁵ Lexically, cīuitās ‘town’ (8.5) for oppidum and tōtī ‘all’ (16.2) rather than omnēs foreshadow developments in later Latin and Romance (compare Italian città and tutti); and clanculum ‘secretly’, the diminutive of the adverb clam, is a survival from early Latin, where it is common in Plautus. Pleonastic expressions such as cum celerī festīnātiōne ‘with rapid hurrying’ (2.1) are little more than exaggerated expressions; and ēruptiōnem facere ‘make a breakout’ (3.8) instead of ērumpere, along with similar paraphrases with facere, are quite normal in technical genres. Gaertner’s assessment is much more circumspect; he shows very clearly that most non-Caesarian features can be paralleled in other authors who are not considered substandard. A dative nūllō (25.1) instead of nūllī can even be paralleled in Caesar himself (Gall. 6.13.1); an uninflected future infinitive active sē (plural) … esse positūrum (13.3) instead of positūrōs is nothing more than an earlier usage (see 4.2.2); and plēnus with the ablative rather than the genitive is equally unproblematic.¹⁶ I very much agree with his conclusion that the Bellum Hispaniense is ‘not a substandard, but rather a “pre-standard” work’ (2010: 251), though I would not go so far as to say that our author ‘consciously placed himself in the tradition of (mildly) archaising and poeticising historiography’ (2010, 251). Gaertner states that in the Bellum Hispaniense, ‘few usages can be justly called colloquial or substandard’ (2010, 250), but that is only really true insofar as they can be paralleled elsewhere. There are words and constructions whose very presence would make a work substandard, and these are indeed missing here; however, other usages found in our author can result in a substandard work if they occur with great frequency, and in such cases the existence of parallels in respected authors means little one way or another, as it is their quantity that matters, not their sheer existence. This is where Allendorf shines. The scope of his investigation is narrower, but he goes into more detail for the three constructions he examines. He shows convincingly that the intensifiers bene and uehementer, both combined with adjectives,

14 Carrus is from Gaulish; its Latin cognate is currus. 15 Incidentally, in quīs is also perfectly normal in Varronian relative connections. 16 Cf. Adams 2016, 495, who notes that this adjective is normally combined with the genitive in early and classical Latin, and that Cicero has 200 genitives, but only 5 ablatives; however, already Quint. inst. 9.3.1 states that the ablative iam dīcitur ‘is now being said’, so he is clearly noticing an ongoing change of construction.

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have a colloquial ring, to judge from their frequencies in various authors; bene is particularly common in our author, much more so than uehementer.¹⁷ He also points out that coepisse with the infinitive is more frequent than one would expect in other authors, that it comes in clusters, and that it can even be combined with frequentative verbs; for Allendorf, this last point indicates that coepisse has been bleached of its ingressive meaning ‘since the frequentative verb and the ingressive function of the periphrastic coepisse seem to contradict each other’ (2016, 551). I, too, believe that coepisse has a weakened meaning here, but not because of any contradiction in meaning; with Adams 2016, 126, I take coepisse to mean ‘he began to do X and then did it again and again’, so that coepisse with a frequentative is somewhat tautological. There are also instances of indirect speech introduced by quod, followed by quotative subjunctives; at this point in time, this construction was still substandard. At 36.1, we find lēgātī Carteiēnsēs renūntiāuērunt quod Pompeium in potestātem¹⁸ habērent ‘envoys from Carteia reported that they had Pompeius in their hands’. Another example has been explained away by some; at 10.2, we read suō locō praeteritum est quod equitēs ex Italiā cum Asprēnāte ad Caesarem uēnissent ‘it was omitted in its proper place that the cavalry had come to Caesar from Italy with Asprenas’. This has been compared with Ciceronian usage, who says praetereō quod … sibi domum sēdemque dēlēgit ‘I pass over the fact that she chose for herself a house and residence’ (Clu. 188). The two constructions are close, but not identical: Cicero does not use praetereō as a verb of speech, but as a factive predicate, ‘I pass over the fact’; if we were to negate it, the subordinate clause would still be true, so a factive quod is appropriate. Our author, on the other hand, uses praeteritum est in the meaning ‘I forgot to say’, as can be seen from the fact that he uses a quotative subjunctive, unlike Cicero. We should not equate the two.

8.2.6 Conclusion It is time to sum up. The author of the Bellum Hispaniense has traditionally been treated as an incompetent writer. This assessment is unfair, but Gaertner’s

17 Such intensifiers come and go rather quickly: in Plautus, īnsānum was still fashionable, but Varro no longer understands the usage fully and misquotes a Plautine passage as having īnsānē (ling. 7.86); in Plautus, īnsānē would have to be taken literally (‘in an insane way’), while īnsānum is never more than an intensifier. 18 Note also the trivial, but substandard confusion between an accusative of direction and the more appropriate ablative of place; of course this could be no more than a scribal confusion between e and ẽ.

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rehabilitation probably goes a little too far. Our writer was competent, though no great stylist; he is not as restrictive as Cicero or Caesar, and here Gaertner’s concept of a ‘pre-standard’ work is particularly helpful. But there are features that were probably felt to be colloquial or low-register, even if Ciceronian prose had not yet been put on its pedestal. Not too much should be made of the Ennius quotations at 23.3 and 31.7; they merely show that he had some school education, not that he excelled at it. All in all, it is likely that much prose of the first century BC was of this type; but our perceptions are skewed because so much of Cicero and Caesar has survived, and so little else.

8.3 A Paraphrase of Cato by Gellius Our final text is a chapter from Gellius’ Attic Nights (1.23), in which he paraphrases a story told by Cato in one of his speeches. The story is about an event in the childhood of Lucius Papirius Praetextatus (died in 272 BC). Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 BC) was a prolific writer, but apart from his De agri cultura ‘On agriculture’ we only have fragments from his other works. His œuvre exhibits great stylistic diversity, from plain, simple, and technical to ornate, elaborate, and rhetorical. Unfortunately, we do not have Cato’s original speech to compare with Gellius’ paraphrase. Aulus Gellius (ca 125–180s) was one of the great archaists of the second century AD, seeking stylistic inspiration in the pre-classical writers more than in Cicero or Caesar. An author like Cato, especially in a rhetorically polished speech, would have been a model to aspire to. Gellius tells us that he did not have the original at hand when writing this chapter, so he had to paraphrase. He modestly asserts that he can only provide the subject matter (rēs), not the beautiful presentation, but this assertion is very much tongue in cheek: not only does it allude to Cato’s precept rem tenē, uerba sequentur ‘stick to the subject matter, the words will follow’ (quoted by Julius Victor, p. 374.17-18 Halm), we will also see that Gellius’ style in this chapter is a clear nod to Cato and early Latin. However, it is no more than a nod: Gellius does not attempt to imitate early Latin in every respect; rather, he decorates the refined speech of his own day with selected elements of early Latin, some of which he employs in ways that would have been alien to a writer of the second century BC. The text printed here is that of Holford-Strevens 2020.¹⁹

19 However, I have changed punctuation, taking lacrimantēs atque obsecrantēs with ōrant rather than with what precedes.

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8.3.1 The Text Quis fuerit Papīrius Praetextātus; quae²⁰ istīus causa cognōmentī sit; historiaque ista omnis super eōdem Papīriō cognitū iūcunda. 1. Historia dē Papīriō Praetextātō dicta scrīptaque est ā M. Catōne in ōrātiōne, quā ūsus est ad mīlitēs contrā Galbam, cum multā quidem uenustāte atque lūce atque munditiā uerbōrum. 2. Ea Catōnis uerba huic prōrsus commentāriō indidissem, sī librī cōpia fuisset id temporis, cum haec dictāuī. 3. Quod sī nōn uirtūtēs dignitātēsque uerbōrum, sed rem ipsam scīre quaeris, rēs fermē ad hunc modum est: 4. Mōs anteā senātōribus Rōmae fuit in cūriam cum praetextātīs fīliīs introīre. 5. Tum, cum in senātū rēs maior quaepiam cōnsultāta eaque in diem posterum prōlāta est, placuitque, ut eam rem, super quā tractāuissent, nē quis ēnūntiāret, priusquam dēcrēta esset, māter Papīriī puerī, quī cum parente suō in cūriā fuerat, percontāta est fīlium, quidnam in senātū patrēs ēgissent. 6. Puer respondit tacendum esse neque id dīcī licēre. 7. Mulier fit audiendī cupidior; sēcrētum reī et silentium puerī animum eius ad inquīrendum ēuerberat: quaerit igitur compressius uiolentiusque. 8. Tum puer mātre ūrgente lepidī atque fēstīuī mendāciī cōnsilium capit. Āctum in senātū dīxit, utrum uidērētur ūtilius exque rēpūblicā esse, ūnusne ut duās uxōrēs habēret, an ut ūna apud duōs nupta esset. 9. Hoc illa ubi audīuit, animus compauēscit, domō trepidāns ēgreditur, ad cēterās mātrōnās per. 10. Vēnit²¹ ad senātum postrīdiē mātrum familiās caterua; lacrimantēs atque obsecrantēs ōrant, ūna potius ut duōbus nupta fieret, quam ut ūnī duae. 11. Senātōrēs ingredientēs in cūriam, quae illa mulierum intemperiēs et quid sibi postulātiō istaec uellet, mīrābantur. 12. Puer Papīrius in medium cūriae prōgressus, quid māter audīre īnstitisset, quid ipse mātrī dīxisset, rem, sīcut fuerat, dēnarrat. 13. Senātus fidem atque ingenium puerī exōsculātur, cōnsultum facit, uti posthāc puerī cum patribus in cūriam nē introeant, praeter ille ūnus Papīrius, eīque²² puerō posteā cognōmentum honōris grātiā inditum ‘Praetextātus’ ob tacendī loquendīque in aetāte praetextae prūdentiam.

20 Although this addition is convincing, I have not counted it in my discussion of coordination below. 21 Thus Heraeus, followed by Holford-Strevens. The transmitted reading, which also makes sense, ends the previous sentence with mātrōnās and introduces the next one with peruēnit. 22 Some manuscripts have atque here, others have eīque, which is also the reading transmitted by Macrobius. The latter fits better with the usage in this chapter.

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‘Who Papirius Praetextatus was; what the reason for that surname is; and that whole story about the selfsame Papirius, enjoyable to learn. 1. The story about Papirius Praetextatus was told and written down by Marcus Cato in the speech which he gave “To the soldiers, against Galba”, with much charm indeed and light and elegance in words. 2. I would have inserted these words of Cato into this very commentary, if I had had access to the book at that point in time when I dictated this. 3. But if you do not seek to know the excellent and dignified choices of words, but the matter itself, the matter was roughly like this: 4. In previous times, the senators in Rome had the custom to enter the assembly-hall with their sons wearing the praetexta. 5. Then, when a certain matter of major import was discussed in the senate, and when it was postponed for the following day, and when it was decided that no one should tell this matter which they had been dealing with until a decision had been made, the mother of young Papirius, who had been in the assembly-hall with his father, asked her son what the Fathers had debated in the senate. 6. The boy replied that one had to be silent and that one was not allowed to say it. 7. The woman becomes more eager to hear; the secrecy of the matter and the boy’s silence push her mind to question him: so she asks more urgently and forcefully. 8. Then, since his mother insisted, the boy decides on a witty and charming lie. He said that it was debated in the senate whether it seemed more expedient and in the interest of the state for one man to have two wives, or for one woman to be married to two husbands. 9. When she hears this, her heart becomes fearful, and, shaking, she goes out of the house to the other married women. 10. The next day, a crowd of mothers of the household came to the senate. With tears and entreaties they ask that one woman should get married to two husbands rather than two women to one husband. 11. When the senators entered into the assembly-hall, they wondered what that madness of the women and that demand meant. 12. Having stepped forward into the middle of the assembly-hall, young Papirius tells what his mother had insisted on hearing and what he himself had told his mother, the matter, just as it had been. 13. The senate is charmed and praises the boy’s loyalty and cleverness, and decides that henceforth boys should not enter the assemblyhall with their fathers, except that one Papirius, and thereafter, in order to honour him, the boy was given the added name “Praetextatus” on account of his discretion in being silent and speaking at the age of wearing the praetexta.’

8.3.2 Morphology When Plautus tries to sound oldfashioned, he often resorts to deviant morphology that is on its way out. It is noticeable that Gellius does not do so; he barely imitates earlier Latin morphologically, with only one relevant instance, feminine istaec

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(modelled on haec and common in Plautus). In Plautus and Terence, the genitive of nouns in -ium is consistently contracted to -ī, but, if the manuscripts are to be trusted, Gellius uses mendāciī, a quadrisyllabic form restored by analogy. The archaic genitive familiās only occurs in a fixed phrase, mātrum familiās, ‘of the mothers of the household’, where it was also normal in classical Latin.

8.3.3 Lexical Choices The area in which Gellius tries to set his language apart the most is the lexicon. However, he does not simply resort to straightforward archaisms; rather, he uses an eclectic mix of genuine archaisms, poeticisms, and unusual features. Right from the start he characterizes himself as an admirer of early Latin by praising Cato’s speech for its uenustās ‘charm’, lūx ‘light’, and munditia ‘elegance’; these terms can be applied to speech in classical Latin as well (and lūx is attested in this function at least in Quintilian), but their combination is noticeable. For Gellius, Cato’s speech exhibits uirtūtēs dignitātēsque uerbōrum ‘excellent and dignified choices of words’, with two abstract nouns that are commonly used for things, but rarely for words. Gellius wants to be seen as a connoisseur. However, few of the lexical choices he makes are entirely restricted to early Latin. Cognōmentum was felt to be an earlier form of cognōmen ‘further name’ and is treated as such here; the two words were not originally connected etymologically, but rather, cognōmentum was a derivative of cognōscere ‘to recognize’, as a ‘means of recognition’, whereas cognōmen was a derivative of nōmen ‘name’, as a ‘further name’. The folk-etymological connection must be old, hence the unetymological -gin cognōmen. The two terms then became fully synonymous, and cognōmentum, well attested in Plautus, fell out of use, being adopted by the historians Sallust and Tacitus and then by the archaists Gellius, Fronto, and Apuleius, while being given a wide berth by Cicero and Caesar. Fermē ‘roughly’ is synonymous with ferē, but originally started as its superlative; fermē does not occur in Caesar or in Cicero’s speeches, but was common in early Latin and was then continued by historians like Livy and Tacitus, who chose it because of its outdated ring. Intemperiēs ‘madness’ or the plural intemperiae is also found in classical Latin, but is rare there and is predominantly associated with Plautus and Cato. Dēnarrāre ‘to tell’ is again found in Plautus and Terence, but not in Cicero or Caesar; in classical Latin it may have had an informal ring to it, hence its use in Horace’s satires, but for Gellius the word was probably oldfashioned. As for collocations, the phrase lacrimantēs atque obsecrantēs ōrant ‘with tears and entreaties they ask’ is reminiscent of Terence’s lacrumāns ōrāns obsecrāns ‘crying, asking, entreating’ (Ad. 472), said of a young man. The collocation of ōrāre and obsecrāre is, however, not attested elsewhere in Terence, while

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being rather common in Plautus: ōrō … et tēd opsecrō (Bacch. 909), ōrāt opsecrātque (Capt. 511a), ōrāt opsecrāt (Cas. 321), opsecro hercle ōrōque (Merc. 170), ōrāre atque opsecrāre (Mil. 971). In the introductory paragraph I pointed out that Gellius’ rem ipsam was meant as a nod to Cato’s motto. When, later in the story, young Papirius tells the senate rem ipsam, sīcut fuerat ‘the matter itself, just as it had been’, he is charmingly presented as a miniature Cato. Placet for senatorial decrees is a standard expression, persisting from early Latin till late; however, the combination of ut, directly after placet, with nē, in front of the subordinate verb, is deliberately archaizing. Vidētur ūtilius exque rē pūblicā esse ‘it seems to be more useful and in the public interest’ is again officialese, suitable for an imitation of legal language; what is a nice touch is that the phrase is given to young Papirius, who is clearly learning the senatorial ropes rather quickly. There are other words whose presence as such would not raise an eyebrow in classical Latin, but which are used in unusual ways. Ōrātiōne ūtī ‘to give a speech’ is not a common collocation; ōrātiōnem habēre is much more normal. However, the former is occasionally found in classical prose, as in Liv. 24.7.12. Cōnsultāre is commonly used intransitively (‘deliberate’) or with a person in the accusative (‘consult someone’); rarely is it used with a non-human accusative, as here (‘debate an issue’), although parallels can be found in Plautus (Bacch. 1154), the Rhetorica ad Herennium (3.2.2), and a few times in Livy. Ēuerberāre mostly means ‘to strike violently’. I have only come across two metaphorical uses, both times in Gellius: in 13.25.22, the verb means that words hurt, but the pattern found here, with ad, ‘to stir to an action’, is a one-off. In our passage, compressius and uiolentius also have unusual meanings. Compressē has the expected meaning ‘succinctly’ in Cic. fin. 2.17, but in Gellius the meaning is ‘urgently’ and is unparalleled. The metaphorical meaning of uiolenter ‘forcefully’ also occurs in 9.9.2, but not really outside Gellius. Lepidus ‘witty’ and fēstīuus ‘charming’ also deserve comment. Lepidus is by no means restricted to comedy, but is particularly frequent there; in Plautus and Terence it is used of people and things, but not yet of remarks or books, as in Catull. 1.1 and here. Fēstīuus is used more widely, in various functions, but it also has an association with comedy, though that association is weaker than with lepidus. Exōsculārī literally means ‘to kiss fondly’; the metaphorical meaning ‘to praise’ is found only three times, in Sen. con. 1.2.17 and then twice in Gellius (here and in 2.26.20). The terms for spouses and parents are not unusual, but interesting. Gellius uses patrēs ‘fathers’ for the senators, a standard and slightly deferential term; however, the actual father of Papirius is not referred to as pater, but as parēns ‘parent’. This is not an old usage. Historically, parēns started as an aorist active participle of parere ‘to give birth’ and must have referred to the mother. But already in our earliest texts,

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parēns can refer to either parent. However, if the parent’s sex is clear, pater or māter ‘mother’ are normally used instead in Plautus, who uses parentēs mostly as a plural referring to both parents at the same time. Parentēs is used thus forty-one times, whereas in Plautus the singular parēns occurs only twice, in special contexts: in Merc. 209 we are told that lying to a parent is wicked, and the statement is intended as a general one, referring to father or mother (although the person being lied to in this particular situation would be the father); and in Stich. 96 it is stated that it is important to look after a widowed parent, which could again in principle be the father or the mother (though in this particular situation it is again the father). The mother of Papirius is referred to as māter when it is her relationship to the son that matters; thus, māter Papīriī puerī ‘the mother of young Papirius’, puer mātre ūrgente ‘the boy, when his mother pressed him’, and māter twice when the boy speaks of her. Mātrēs familiās ‘mothers of the household’ occurs once in reference to the status of the women who protest; in this function, mātrōnae also occurs once. The mother of Papirius is unceremoniously referred to as mulier ‘woman’ when no relationship is mentioned, and the senators speak of mulierum intemperiēs ‘the madness of the women’ when they want to distance themselves from the women who are presumably their wives. Young Papirius is referred to as fīlius ‘son’ when set in relation to his parents, but as puer when it is his age that matters. Some other lexical choices may be remarked on. Iūcundus ‘enjoyable’ in the chapter heading ‘was an emotive word, and not in favour in the higher forms of poetry or prose’ (Adams 2016, 258). Compauēscere ‘to begin feeling frightened’ is attested only here, but is regular in formation and meaning; the simplex pauēre and its inchoative pauēscere do not survive into Romance, but in Gellius’ day they were probably still in common use, and the noun pauor does survive (French peur, Italian paura with morphological remodelling). Lacrimāre ‘to cry’ is unmarked, common in early and classical Latin and with reflexes in Romance, such as French larmoyer (again remodelled morphologically); flēre would have been more literary (and has no Romance reflexes), while plōrāre and plangere would have been of a lower register (and both have Romance reflexes). Gellius uses both posthāc and posteā ‘thereafter’; both are common in early and classical Latin, but if he had wanted to be particularly oldfashioned, he could have said postid locōrum (Plaut. Cas. 120) or postideā (Plaut. Stich. 758) instead.

8.3.4 Grammatical Words As for grammatical words rather than content ones, quidem here emphasizes the preceding word, but without the contrast that would come from a following sed; this usage is common in early Latin, but also still current in the classical period. The use

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of demonstrative and anaphoric pronouns is again as one might expect it, except that the heading has two instances of iste without second-person deixis, and that in the main text there is a further instance.²³ Iste here is equivalent to hic, a usage which became widespread in some varieties of Romance and survives in Modern Spanish.

8.3.5 Coordination A few words need to be said on coordination. In book 1, excluding the current chapter, but including quotations from other authors, Gellius uses et 260 times; -que 178 times; and atque 87 times and ac 28 times. In this chapter, however, the distribution is very different. The style is simple and there are few subordinate clauses, clearly meant as an imitation of the language of a supposedly simpler time. However, the all-purpose connective et, so common elsewhere, is used only twice, while -que is found nine times, and atque five times. The inherited -que is used to coordinate clauses, nouns, and adjectives, especially pairs, while atque is used only for nouns and adjectives, especially in the type X atque Y atque Z. This is again a clear nod to Cato, who often used -que, and who was particularly fond of atque in his speeches, as we can still see from the fragments, especially again in the type X atque Y atque Z.

8.3.6 Syntax Many of Gellius’ constructions are straightforwardly classical. Historia ‘story’ with adnominal dē is unproblematic (and in historia with super it is the choice of preposition that is unusual rather than the adnominal construction). Ad mīlitēs ‘addressed to the soldiers’ is part of the title of Cato’s speech, but would be equally acceptable in classical Latin, where verbs of speech can be combined with ad if a group is addressed and one speaks ‘at’ them, with raised voice (see 5.3.3). Id temporis ‘at that time’ instead of the more common eō tempore survives into classical Latin as a fully fossilized phrase, along with id aetātis and other idiomatic expressions. While quem ad modum ‘in which way’ also survives into classical Latin as a fossilized expression, Gellius’ ad hunc modum is slightly unusual; Caesar does have ad hunc modum five times, but normally prefers hōc modō, and in Cicero ad hunc modum is mostly

23 Note that Gellius uses the classical feminine ista in the heading, but the Plautine form istaec in the main text.

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associated with his De inuentione, an early work. Ad hunc modum has a slightly Plautine feel to it (six attestations, alongside six of hōc modō). Mōs est ‘it is custom’ is most commonly combined with ut in early and classical Latin, but the bare infinitive that we can see here also occurs at all periods. Impatient quidnam ‘what, tell me’ is particularly frequent in comedic dialogue, but is not excluded from classical Latin. The ‘closed’ word order illa mulierum intemperiēs ‘that madness of the women’ is a hallmark of classical prose. Quid sibi uult ‘what is that supposed to mean’ mostly has a human subject, but inanimates like lēx ‘law’ do have good parallels in the classical period. Nōmen alicuī indere ‘to give someone a name’ is here combined with the name in the nominative, as in classical prose, while in Plautus that name would stand in the dative, agreeing with alicuī. Other constructions are a little unusual and indicate a desire to be stylistically distinctive. Cognitū iūcunda ‘pleasant to learn’ contains the second supine; the supine is still relatively productive in early Latin and found in different cases, but by the classical period it is restricted to the accusative supine (‘supine I’) after verbs of motion, a purposive construction, and to the old dative supine in -ū (‘supine II’), which is by and large fossilized insofar as few verbs form it (factū ‘for doing’, dictū ‘for saying’) and insofar as it can only depend on a handful of adjectives such as facile ‘easy’. Gellius extends an archaic use here, which the real Servius would not have approved of, while the Servius as we find him in Macrobius would have applauded or ‘kissed’ the usage, to use Gellius’ expression above. Multus here shows a largely poetic usage. In prose it is normally combined with plural nouns or with mass nouns such as uīnum ‘wine’; the combination with abstract nouns, like here, is more restricted. Gellius has something of a predilection for super; with tractāre, classical prose prefers the accusative (‘examine’) or dē (‘discuss’), but super is found only here. We saw ut … nē quis already above, but later on there is a second instance of uti … nē, a type which remained in limited use in legal idiom in the classical period. The fuller form uti is also more oldfashioned, but manuscripts are not entirely reliable on such issues. For locational adjectives, classical Latin strongly prefers agreement with a head noun, of the type in mediam cūriam ‘into the middle of the assembly-hall’, which could in principle also mean ‘into the middle assembly-hall (of three or more assembly-halls)’. Gellius’ in medium cūriae becomes more common with Livy (in medium campī ‘into the middle of the field’, 4.18.3) and then with Tacitus and also in poetry.

8.3.7 Pragmatics On the pragmatic side, the use of the historic present is remarkably frequent. Gellius uses this technique to make the story more lively, but it was probably also

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considered a feature of older, more naive narrative.²⁴ Since Gellius seems to have a tendency to introduce the background in a past tense, before switching to the historic present for the main action, I have taken uēnit ad senātum as being in the perfect rather than the present; incidentally, the word order, with the verb in first position, fits well with a presentative construction. The story is narrated pleasantly: when the boy is pressed by his mother, he says tacendum esse neque dīcī licēre ‘one has to be silent and is not allowed to say’; the impersonal construction, with absence of sibi, indicates that young Papirius presents this as a general rule, part of something bigger, making it more difficult for his mother to continue asking. When he finally seems to cave in and comes up with his tall story, we notice the word order: ūnusne ut, with a focal element preceding the subordinator, followed by an ut ūna, where the numeral is presumably just as focal. Focal elements can be fronted, but need not be so, and presumably a repeated fronting would be too much. The same word order is observed in the women’s slogan, ūna potius ut, with a fronted focal element, followed by ut ūnī, without fronting.²⁵ Young Papirius presents the women as having no agency, as the object of habet and as being married, statively, to men (nupta est rather than nūbit).²⁶ When the women protest, the perspective changes: in ūna duōbus nupta fieret, the women are still not in charge, but at least they are undergoing a process rather than being presented as being in a specific state; and the same is true of the second half of the sentence. In both parts, the women are the subject, and the event is presented from their perspective.

8.3.8 Conclusions It is time to sum up. Gellius the archaist is not as archaic as one might expect. He does not want to write a text that could pass as Cato; rather, he wants to write in

24 Note also cum haec dictāuī with an independent tense in a cum-clause, when an imperfect would have indicated simultaneity to the main clause more clearly. Authors have a choice, and especially in temporal clauses the connections need not be made so explicit, but the choice is an indication that Gellius opts for a superficially simple style. 25 On the issue of fronting, compare also the sentence opening hoc illa ubi, with an object pronoun and a subject pronoun moved to the left of the subordinator because both are given from the preceding context; the position of illa would be unusual from a classical perspective, where subject pronouns are fronted in this way only if they are the subject of subordinate and main clause, which is not the case here. 26 The active nūbit would take a dative (originally ‘put on a bridal veil for someone’), while the passive can be combined with the dative as well or with cum, the latter of which indicates that marriage is a state rather than an action. Here we have nupta combined with apud, an unusual state of affairs, but perhaps indicating even greater inactivity on the side of the women.

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the Latin of his own day, with a certain amount of decoration taken from early authors. Thus, his morphology is by and large classical. Archaisms can be found in his lexical choices, individual words as well as simple collocations, but there are also older words used in ways that deviate from earlier norms, and certain other lexical choices which are unusual and cannot simply be described as archaisms, poeticisms, or the like. In his syntax, Gellius uses a few constructions that are loosely based on early Latin or are otherwise eccentric, but by and large he follows classical norms. The style, however, is deliberately simple, with a preponderance of main clauses, and coordination patterns that are borrowed from Cato. Gellius was inspired by Cato, but his imitation was not meant as an obliteration of his own style, just as Brahms’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini was meant as a respectful homage in Brahms’s own style rather than a slavish imitation eliminating Brahms’s contribution.

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Index of Passages AESCHINES MILESIUS – Adams 2003: 53–63 192–3 AFRANIUS com. – 67 (Diuortium) 139 APPENDIX PROBI – 19 27–8 – 22 78 – 147 49 fn. 33 – 159 78 – 149 39 APULEIUS met. – 4.32 7 AUGUSTINE doctr. Christ. – 4.10.24 61 epist. – 184 199 in psalm. – 138.20 201 fn. 27 – 140.25 200 fn. 25 ord. – 2.17.45 183, 236 serm. – 17.6.6 198 – 29.2.2. 199 BELLUM HISPANIENSE – 4 266–71 – 36.1 171 – 36.4 80 CAESAR civ. – 1.5.3 119 – 1.7.6 34 – 2.5.5 34–5 – 2.39.6 35 – 3.37.4 35–6 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111172002-010

Gall. – 1.14.3 144 – 1.26.1 123 – 1.39.1 36 – 1.50.2 34 – 3.2.4 35 – 3.6.2 37 – 4.9.3 34 – 5.28.6 144 – 5.40.7 35 – 7.1 263–5 – 7.6.4 34 – 7.29.6 35–6 – 7.47.5 36 CATULLUS – 4.1–2 189 – 5.10–11 91–2 – 84.1–2 231–2 – 84.10–12 232 CICERO ad Q. fr. – 3.5+6.3 147 Arch. – 26 175, 234–5 Att. – 9.11.3 144 – 11.8.2 122 – 16.2.2 240 Brut. – 54 37 – 171 233 – 192 9 – 269 37 Cael. – 36 207–8 de orat. – 2.260 212 – 3.42 233 – 3.45 241 – 3.46 233 – 3.184 37 – 3.191 215

290

Index of Passages

div. – 2.84 29 div. Caec. – 35 34 fn. 11 fam. – 2.7.2 227 – 2.11.1 122–3 – 6.12.1 122 – 9.21 47–8 – 12.1.1. 105 fn. 60 – 12.17.1 122 – 14.7.1 242 fat. – 5 36 fn. 13 fin. – 3.64 144–5 Flacc. – 56 172 fn. 55 Phil. – 5.2 123–4 Planc. – 2 123 – 16 123–4 – 84 129 Quinct. – 73 34 fn. 11 S. Rosc. – 1 5 – 24 169 – 78 35 fn. 12 Tusc. – 3.20 145–6 – 4.40 119 Verr. – I.12 169–70 – II.4.147 190 – II.5.176 123 CORPUS INSCRIPTIONUM LATINARUM – 12 .3 3–4, 50, 87, 176, 224 – 12 .4 52, 224, 257 – 12 .9 52 – 12 .365 180 – 12 .401 177–8 – 12 .581 4, 84 fn. 14 and 15, 180 – 12 .827 224 – 12 .2437 224

– – – –

12 .2832a 257 4.5296 238 fn. 8 4.10231 238 fn. 8 8.3917 194–5

CLAUDIA SEVERA – epist. 247–8 CLEDONIUS gramm. – 5.74 154 fn. 33 COMMODIAN apol. – 644 93 CONSENTIUS gramm. – 5.349.4–5 86 fn. 20 CORIPPUS Iust. – 2.204 160 fn. 42 CORNELIA epist. – frg. 1–2 245–7 DONATUS ad Ad. – 291.4 241–2 ENNIUS ann. – 125 91 fn. 30 – 186 91 fn. 30 – 369 96 fn. 37 – 541 78 FRONTO MC – 1.6, p. 13 v.d.H. 227 fn. 21 – 2.3, p. 21–4 v.d.H. 242 – 2.15, p. 32–3 v.d.H. 242 GELLIUS – 1.7 135 – 1.23 271–80 – 6.9 88 fn. 27

Index of Passages

– 11.6 239 – 13.3 79 – 19.9 234

PEREGRINATIO EGERIAE – 1.23.8–10 243–5 – 2.36.3 99

HISTORIA AUGUSTA Sept. Sev. – 15.7 235

PETRONIUS – 77.4 106

INSCRIPTIONES FALISCAE, BAKKUM – 2 257–61 – 3 257

PLAUTUS Amph. – 238–9 152 – 277 161 – 303–4 165 – 398 151–2 – 431 165 – 516–17 148–9 – 561 155 – 681 167 – 723 29 – 777 120–1 – 824 155 – 839–41 120 – 918 151 – 958 167 – frg. xiv 125 Asin. – 131–2 141 – 254 151 – 452 221 – 633–4 189 – 643 155 – 666–7 165 – 668–9 116 Aul. – 56–9 137 – 90 153 – 190 161 – 252–3 166 – 492–3 100 fn. 47 – 500 154 – 620–1 133 – 639 151 – 811 154 Bacch. – 392 161 – 456 166–7 – 722 133 – 735 117

JULIUS VICTOR – p. 374.17–18 Halm 271 LEX XII TABULARUM – Macr. Sat. 1.4.19 149–50 LEX REGIA – Paul. Fest. p. 6 142 LIVY – 1.7 215–16 – 9.36 184 – 27.15.9 148 MACROBIUS Sat. – 1.4 254 – 1.16.6 199 MARCUS AURELIUS med. – 1.10 171 fn. 52 MARTIAL – 1.65.4 105 – 12.21 236–7 NAEVIUS com. – 69 93 OVID fast. – 3.507–8 15–16 trist. – 2.1.49–50 166–7 PAUL THE DEACON – p. 299 M 93

291

292

Index of Passages

– 831–2 221 – 1132 91 fn. 29 – 1176 29 Capt. – 439 152–3 – 683–4 150 Cas. – 158–61 119 – 274 125 – 321 116–17 – 507 161 – 670–1 135 Curc. – 67 161 – 72 134 – 77 78 fn. 7 – 143–4 134 – 178–9 189 – 586–7 140–1 – 700 10, 100 fn. 51 Epid. – 81 166 – 263–4 138 – 656 139 Men. – 144 186 – 223 118 – 319–22 208 – 402–5 209–10 – 425–7 220–1 – 791 140 Merc. – 150 119 – 245–6 150 – 386 165 – 444–5 147 – 574–5 116 – 598 166 – 879–80 121 Mil. – 148 104 fn. 58 – 156 91 fn. 29 – 157 91 fn. 29 – 242–5 116 – 416–17 33 – 962–3 146 – 1089 165

Most. – 324 152 – 670 157 – 974–80 222 Persa – 260 85–6, 114 – 766 146 Poen. – 116–17 153, 223 fn. 16 – 468–9 112 – 494–5 157 – 539–40 124–5 – 861 124–5 – 1094–5 147–8 – 1165 134 – 1308 120 Pseud. – 3 4 – 5–6 124 – 457 113–14 – 766 140 – 1167–8 117 – 1296 152 Rud. – 5 117 – 265a 78 – 938 105 fn. 60 Stich. – 62–5 223 – 111–13 209 – 168–9 107 Trin. – 347 99 fn. 46 Truc. – arg. 1 147–8 – 521 156 – 530–1 112 – 539–40 156 – 690–1 183 PLINY THE YOUNGER epist. – 9.23.2 183 fn. 12 PLUTARCH Cic. – 4.4–5 190

Index of Passages

POMPEIUS gramm. – 15.6–8 175, 235 POMPONIUS com. – 101 146–7 – 163 104 fn. 58

– 514–15 133 Andr. – 258–9 100 fn. 48 and 52, 209 – 904–5 146 Eun. – 20 88 fn. 25 Hec. – 572 168

PRISCIAN gramm. – 2.29 27

TERENTIANUS MAURUS – 199–203 26–7

PROPERTIUS – 3.21.31–2 16

TIBULLUS – 2.3.12 88 fn. 25 – 3.13 242–3

QUINTILIAN inst. – 1.1.14 234 – 1.7 43–4 – 1.7.2 2 – 9.3.1 121 SALLUST Cat. – 31.7 233 Iug. – 14.9 226 SENECA THE YOUNGER epist. – 47.1 6 SUETONIUS Aug. – 86.1 114 Claud. – 4.1–4 242 Tib. – 42 72 fn. 3 Vesp. – 22 52, 232–3

VARRO ling. – 5.97 52, 235 – 5.162 175 – 7.56 148 – 7.86 270 fn. 17 – 7.96 179 – 8.1 108 – 8.61–2 77–8 – 9.56 105 – 9.80 45 rust. – 1.2.14 233 – 3.12.5 107 VELIUS LONGUS gramm. – 7.78–9 28

TACITUS Germ. – 4 217

VIRGIL Aen. – 1.133–5 208 – 4.139 218 – 6.179 114 ecl. – 3.1 178 georg. – 3.381 160 fn. 42

TERENCE Ad. – 74–5 120

VITRUVIUS – 2.9.14 79 – 10.2.2 106

293

Index of Words Latin precedes the other languages, which are in alphabetical order. LATIN ab oculīs 181 accūsātīuus 203 Aetna 54 fn. 44 agricola 77, 105 Albia, Aubia 27 Alpēs 54 fn. 44 altitonāns 78 altus 27 ampitzatru 62 analogia 203 anōmalia 203 ante 57 apocalypsis 200 apostolus 198 aquiductus 78 arātrum 49 arbiter 178 fn. 3 argentārius 187 argentifodīna 77–8 Arpīnās 50 fn. 35 asinus 48 ast 149–50 Astaphium 105 atque, ac 277 auscultāre 82 baiae 182 balineum, balneum 51 baptisma, baptismum, baptismus 198 baptizāre, baptista, baptizātor 200 basilicē 188 beātificāre 196 benedīcere 149 bibere 58 fn. 56 biblia (neuter plural, feminine singular) 96 fn. 36 bonā fidē 157 bōs 186 caedere, excīdere 51 carō, carnāliter 198 Carthāgō 232 cāsus 203 Catamītus 186 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111172002-011

cauē 152–3 Cauneās 29 caussa 48 cēnāculum 175 Cethēgus 232 cilliba 191 circuitus 215 cīuitās 80 clāritās 196 fn. 19 claudere, exclūdere 51 Claudius, Clōdius 52, 232 collēgī, collēxī 92–3 columba (early and classical), columbus (classical) 105 cōnfitērī, cōnfessiō 199 crēdere 149, 198 cuius, cuia, cuium 178 dandī (and datīuus) 203 datīuus 185 datus 58 dēcipere 82 DEIVOS (= deiuōs) 52 deixei (present deicō) 89 dēperīre 147–9 diaconus 198 diadēmam 104 fn. 58 diēs 106 Diēspiter 106 diffrēgerĭtis 91 fn. 29 dissessit 62 dīuīssiō 48 dōnābilis 82–3 fn. 13 dōnum 57 dulcor 182 ecclēsia 198 ēdūc 50 fn. 35 elephantus 107 em 93 fn. 31 ēmĕrunt 88 fn. 25 ēmī 89 equus, equa 57, 105 ethnicus 198

296

Index of Words

euangelium 198 exterere 203 factus 57 faenerātrīx / fēnerātrīx 179 faenisicia / fēnisicia 179 famulus, familia 51 fēcerīmus 91 fēcĕrunt 88 fn. 25 fēcī 57, 89 fefellī 88–9 fēriae, fēstus 48 ferō 53 fīcus 105 fidēs 198 figūra 203 fīnis 105 fn. 60 flāmen 198 forceps, forpex, forfex 106 formus 54 fouēre 54 frāter 53 fūmus 53 fundāmentum (with masculine ille) 96 fn. 35 Fundānius 234 gentīlēs 198 gerō, gessī, gestus 48, 66 girba 181 gladius, gladium 101 fn. 56, 187 glaucūmam 104 fn. 58 glōria 196 fn. 19 gnātus 58 haedus, hēdus 52 Herculēs, Herculēns 27–8 holera 54 honōs, honor 48 īnsānum (adverb) 79 īnsula 28 illīc 31 intellēxī, intellēgī 92–3 inuidentia 145–6 ioubeō, iousī 84 lātus 58 lēgī 89 leō, leaena 105 lepus 107 logī 188 lupus 186

machaera 187 māchina 187 Maesius / Mēsius 179 maestiter 78 magida 191 magnum malum 188 malam crucem 157 mălum ‘beating’, mālum ‘apple’ 29 mancipium 105 mandēbăt 91 fn. 30 manicillium 182 fn. 10 manus 106 marīnus 182 māteriēs, māteria 95, 203 medius 53 Megalēnsia, Megalēsia 28 meletrīx, meretrīx 49 fn. 33 memordī 88 fn. 27 merobiba 78 fn. 7 multibiba 78 fn. 7 mystērium and ministērium 200 nātiōnēs 198 nebula 53 necessitās and necessitūdō 79 noctū 254 fn. 21 oculus 57 oino 52 olĕre, olēre 92 olīua 187 optiō 105 ossum 61 ouis 191 pāgānus 198–9 Papeirio 27 paramus 181 parcuī next to pepercī, parsī 93 parricīda 77 participium, participāle 202–3 pater 66 perīre 147–9 pessica 39 petorritum 186 Pinacium 105 plaudere, plōdere 52–3, 232 plaustra, plōstra 52, 232 pōclum, pōculum 49 poena, pūnīre 52

Index of Words

popīna 185–6 porticus 106 potestur 168 praeposita 190 prandium 259 presbyterus 198 prigceps 193 prōfuĕrunt 88 fn. 25 prophēta 198 pulcher 232 puteus 191 quīn 150–2 quīs 269 quita est 168 reiecta 190 rettulī 51 reuēlātiō 200 rosa 48 ruber 54 rudēns 105 fn. 60 rūfus 54, 185–6 rutilus 54 sacerdōs 198 scaena / scēna 52, 179 scaeptrum / scēptrum 179 scortum 105 sēdī 89 senātī (gen.) 27, 95 sermō 196 fn. 19 Siculus, Sicilia 51 socrus 105 sonĕre, sonāre 92 stabulum 49 stāre 57 status 57 strātus 58 surēmī, sūmpsī 93 syllaba 203 talentum 51 tarpezīta 187–8 tegere, toga 55 tempus (uninflected) 96 fn. 35 termināciōnēs 62 tetulī 51 terrimōtium 78 tonĕre, tonāre 92 trīnitās 186–7, 197

297

triumphus 232 uātēs 198 uehere 54 uelīt 91 fn. 30 uellō, uellī 89 uēnerīmus 91 fn. 29 uerbum 196 fn. 19 uertō, uertī (uortī) 89–90 ueterum (nominative) 61 fn. 59 uēxī 89 uīderĭtis 91 fn. 29 uirtūs 186 uīs 188 uoluptās mea 156–7 uter ‘water vessel’ 258 zaconus 62 DUTCH achter 46 blijven 39 cadeau, kado, cadeautje 40 classicus, klassiek 39 domheid 39 ENGLISH adder 149 azure 31 bear (verb) 53 brother 53 bruv 55 business and busyness 82 cāsere (Old English) 30 cheese (Old English cȳse) 62, 186 cough 46 eke out 149 friend (verb) 82–3 fn. 13 gender 62 guys (gender-neutral form of address) 224 fn. 17 heathens 199 hoover 182 impregnable 82 fn. 12 kangaroo 182 kitchen 186 legible 80 mid 53 momentarily 81 fn. 10 nations (i.e. non-Jews or non-Christians) 199

298

Index of Words

nebulous 53 fn. 39 nickname 149 overlook 81 fn. 10 oversee 81 fn. 10 pagans 199 readable 80 realize 186 red 54 ride, rode, ridden (Old English rīdan, rād, ġeriden) 55–6 ring, rang and ring, ringed 82 rouge 31 sheila 182 sing, sang, sung 55–6 spake (older past tense of speak) 84 trinity and Old English þrīnes 186–7, 197 undateable 82–3 fn. 13 waggon 54 fn. 42 warm 54 way 54 yellow 54 ETRUSCAN Avile, Avle 224–5 Catamite 186 FALISCAN aufilio / oufilio 179 caesio / cēsi 179 hēc 179 lecēt 180 loufir / loifirtāto / lōfirta 179 pōla 179 prētōd 179–80 FRENCH Aix-en-Provence 86 fn. 20 ami, ennemi 81 fn. 11 aoust (Old French) 63 aveugle 181 Charles 98 fn. 42 chat 63 fn. 63 chevre (Old French) 97 chose 67, 95 écouter 82 fève 63

firent 88 fn. 25 genre 62 Georges 98 fn. 42 gratte-ciel 185–6 j’ai aimé 99 j’aimai 99 meautris (Old French) 49 fn. 33 mettre 63 monz (Old French) 97 murs (Old French) 97 ne ... rien 95 pèlerin 49 fn. 33 réaliser 186 Reims 86 fn. 20 rive 63 seigneur and sire (Old French) 98 sûr 63 vie 63 voile 96 voir 63 GAULISH carrus 269 fn. 14 GERMAN Detektiv 47 E-mail 104 Gasthaus and Gästehaus 81 fn. 10 Geduld 58 gelb 54 Genre 104 Handy 188 Kaiser 30 keuchen 46 Mädchen 106 Natter 149 Nebel 53 nemnen (Old High German), Name, nennen 81 fn. 11 realisieren 186 Virus 104 Weg 54 weiß, wissen 88 fn. 26 Wolkenkratzer 185–6 GREEK αἰτιατιϰή 203

Index of Words

ἀναλoγία 203 ἀνδρών 188 ἀντί 57 ἀνωμαλία 203 ἀπoϰάλυψις 200 ἀπoπρoηγμένα 190 ἀπóστoλoς 198 ἀρετή 186 ἄροτρον 49 fn. 34 βαλανεῖoν 51 βαπτίζειν 200 βάπτισμα 104, 198 βαπτιστής 200 βασιλιϰω̃ ς 188 βράσσειν 260 Γανυμήδης 186 γλαύϰωμα 104 διάδημα 104 διάϰoνoς 198 δίδωμι 57 δoτιϰή 185 δoτóς 58 δύναμις 188 ἔϑνη 198 ἐϑνιϰóς 198 ἐϰϰλησία 198 ἐλαίFα (Doric) 187 ἐρυϑρóς 54 ἐϰ 85 ἐξoμoλóγησις 199 εὐαγγέλιoν 198 εὐλoγεῖν 149 Ζεὺς πατήρ 106 ζωή 188 ϑεoῖς ϰαταχϑoνίoις 193 ϑερμóς 54 ϑετóς 57 ϑρίαμβoς 232 ϑυμóς 53 ἵππoς 57 ἵστᾱμι (Doric) 57 ϰαλεῖν 198 fn. 21 ϰασίγνητoς 58 ϰιλλίβας 191 ϰλάσσα 193 ϰυαϑίζειν 188 ϰώϑων 257

299

λείπω, ἔλιπoν, λέλoιπα 55 λειτoυργoί 200 Λεύϰιππoς 57 fn. 50 λóγoι ‘nonsense’ 188 λóγoς ‘God’s word’ 196 μαγίς / μαγίδα 191 μαστιγίας 227 fn. 22 μάχαιρα 187 μᾱχανά (Doric) 187 μέγα ϰαϰóν 188 μέλι μoυ 188 μέσoς 53 μετoχή 202–3 νεφέλη 53 oἶδα, ἴσμεν 88 ὄις 191 oἶσϑα 58 fn. 55 ὄμμα 57 ὄνoμα παγανóν 199 ὄνoς 191 παιδίoν 106 πάσχα 200 fn. 25 πάσχειν 200 fn. 25 πατήρ, πατέρα, πατρóς, εὐπάτωρ, εὐπάτoρoς 55, 66 περίoδoς 215 πηóς 77 πίνω 58 fn. 56 πιστεύειν 149, 198 πoινή 52 πρεσβύτερoς 198 πρίν 259 πρóβατoν 191 πρoηγμένα 190 πρóς 201–2 πρoφήτης 198 πτω̃ σις 203 πύτεoς (Aeolic) / πoτέoς 191 σάρξ 198 Σιϰελός, Σιϰελία 51 σϰηνή 52, 179 σϰη̃πτρoν 179 σπάϑη 187 στατóς 57 στρωτóς 58 συλλαβή 203 σύν 85

300

Index of Words

τάλαντον 51 τέφρα 54 τίϑημι 57 τλᾱτóς (Doric) 58 τραπεζίτης 187–8 ὕδωρ, ὑδρία 258 ὑψιβρεμέτης 78 φέρω 53 φλαυ̃ρoς 52 φράτηρ 53 φώς ‘man’, φω̃ ς ‘light’ 31 χλωρóς 54 ψυχή 188 Fεχέτω (Pamphylian) 54 HEBREW ‫ ֶאל‬201 ‫ ֲא ֶ͏שׁר‬202 ‫ ְ͏בּ‬201 fn. 26 ‫ ַה͏גּ͏וֹיִ ם‬198 ‫ה͏וֹדה‬ ‫ ׇ‬199 ְ‫ ו‬201 ‫ יִ ְ͏שׂ ָר ֵאל‬195 ‫ ְל‬201 ‫ ִמן‬201 ‫ ֶפ ַסח‬200 fn. 25 ‫ ִ͏שׁיר ַה ִ͏שּׁ ִירים‬201 ‫ ָ͏שׁל͏וֹם‬195 HITTITE hant-s 57 ˇ ITALIAN amai 99 amava (3rd person) 64 amavo (dialectal amava) 103 avocolo (Old Italian) 181 fn. 9 bacio 64 cagione 64 canterei, canteresti, canterebbe 101 canterò, canterai, canterà 101 cieco 181 cinque 192 cosa 67, 95 faccia 64 fecero 88 fn. 25 fuoco 64

ho amato 99 isola 28 libro 30 mezzo 64 oggi 64 orbo 181 ottimo 64 pellegrino 49 fn. 33 pesca ‘fishing’ / ‘peach’ 39 piazza 64 piede 64 popolo 64 ragione 64 remeggio 64 sorge, passato remoto sorse 94 suocera 105 uovo, plural uova 95 fn. 33 LATVIAN murdét 260 murdi 260 LITHUANIAN murdýnas 260 OLD CHURCH SLAVONIC dymż 53 OSCAN egmazum 48 lúvkis 52 niumsis 50–1 PORTUGUESE darás-me, dar-me-ás 101 páramo 181 PUNIC qart 232 SANSKRIT adita 58 fn. 54 ´ı 57 akṣ¯ ánti 57 áśvaḥ 57 bharati 53 bhrātar- 53

Index of Words

dadāmi 57 dadhāmi 57 dahati 54 datta- 58 fn. 54 dhitáḥ 57 dhūma- 53 ditáḥ 58 gharma- 54 hari- 54 hita- 57 fn. 53 jātáḥ 58 madhya- 53 nabhas- 53 píbati 58 fn. 56 pitár- 66 sthitá- 57 stīrńa- 58 tiṣṭhāti 57 vahati 54 SARDINIAN chentu 62 ghèneru 62

SPANISH cantaré, cantarás, cantará 101 cuyo, cuya 178 día 106 Don, Doña 226 fn. 19 eres 100 haba 234 fn. 4 hacer 234 fn. 4 hermano 63 hoja 63, 96 llama ‘flame’ 63 llamar 63 llorar 63 mucho 63 noche 63 páramo 181 señor 63 tomara 100 fn. 50 tomase 100 fn. 50 TOCHARIAN B tsak- 54

301

General Index ablative, syncretism and functions 114–15 Ablaut 55–6, 66 acquisition, phonological 230 actuation (sound change) 46–7 ad (Bible translations, late Latin) 201–2 address system 226–8 adjectives, qualifying and determinative 158 ae, monophthongization 179 agglutination 71 agreement hierarchy 106 air stream mechanisms 21–2 Akkadian script 56 allomorph 69–70 allophone 25–6 anaphora 214 anaptyxis 178 Antonius Julianus 234 apex 248 fn. 16 aposiopesis 208 Aramaic script 41 archaic Latin 3–4 archaists 6–7 aspect – general 126–43 – perfect aspect 128 – perfective 128 – phasal 168 – progressive 127 aspiration 22, 40, 42, 231–2 assertion 165, 211–12 au and ō 232–3 Austin, J.L. 205 bahuvrihi 72–3 barbarism 252 Behaghel’s law 158 bilingualism 184–5 Bloomfield, Leonard 70, 74 borrowing hierarchy 187 breathy voiced stops 53 Brown-Levinson model 219–20 calques 185–6 case https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111172002-012

– general 109–26 – Hittite 84 fn. 16 – Old French 97 – syncretism in general 84–6 – syncretism in Greek 84 Chomsky, Noam 108 Christian Latin – Christianism (integral, partial, direct, indirect) 196 – general 195–202 C/K/Q convention 3, 41–2, 248 fn. 16 classical Latin 5 Claudian letters 43 clear l 27 clitics 40, 70–1, 154–7, 162–4 Clodius (P. Claudius Pulcher) 52 Cockney 55 code-switching 185 coefficients sonantiques 56, 66 collocation 13–14 comparative method 10–12 comparative reconstruction 66 complementation 164–73 compounding 71–3, 77–8 cooperative principle 206–7 corpus linguistics 13–17 Cotta, Gaius Aurelius 233 Czech initial stress 50 Czech ř 230 dark l 27, 187, 235 decomposition 81 deixis 205–6 deontic modality 168–9 dereduplication 8 derivation 73 diachrony 8–10 dialects 174–83 digamma 3 diglossia 59–60, 250 Dik, Simon Cornelis 108–9 diphthongs 52–3 dissimilation 49 Doegen, Wilhelm 182–3

304

General Index

double passive 168 Dyirbal 104 dvandva 72 early Latin 4 Egadi rōstra 27 ei and outcomes 233 elegiac couplet 217–18 ellipsis of subject accusative 15, 213–14 epistemic modality 168–9 face-threatening action 219–20 factor analysis 15 Faliscan sound change 179–81 family tree model 12 female speech 237–49 figūra 252 filiation 193 final devoicing 39 final -m 28 focus (semantics and phonology) 32–8 formulae 13–14 French – Belgian French vowels 60 fn. 58 – gender 106 – Old French case system 97 – passé composé 99 – passé simple 99 Friulian (Rhaeto-Romance) 60 fn. 58 gender 103–7 – in loanwords 104 – Romanian 96 fn. 33 golden line 218 Gothic Bible translation 200 grammarians 249–55 grammatical terminology 202 Grassmann’s law 47 Greek – accent (when speaking Latin) 234 – alphabets 41 – case syncretism 84 – dialects 183 – labiovelars (Linear B) 54 fn. 43 – nouns with Latin prepositions (ablative) 190–1 – vocalism (Doric) 187 Grice, Paul 206–7

Guugu Yimidhirr 182 h aspiré 30 fn. 8 hapax legomenon 83 Hebrew features in Bible translations 201 Hindi 53 historical spellings 43 Hittite – case system 84 fn. 16 – traces of laryngeals 56–8, 66 homophone differentiation 39 hyperbaton 160–2 hypercorrect spelling 179 fn. 4 I longa 42 iambic shortening 28–9 Icelandic family names 225 fn. 18 iconicity 215 idiom principle 14–15 impersonal verbs 117–18 implicature 210–11 indirect speech 143–5, 211 inflection 71, 73, 83–4 interference 189, 193 internal reconstruction 66 intonation 32 isogloss 65 isolation (morphology) 71 Italian – and Western Romance vowels 66–7 – passato prossimo 99 – passato remoto 99 – sound changes 63–4 item-and-arrangement models 74 item-and-process models 74 jokes 52, 212 Kelabit (Austronesian) 53 fn. 38 koine 183 labiovelars 11–12 Labov, William 229 langue 174 laryngeals 55–8 late Latin 7–8 Latin in Greek script 192–3 law of Bentley and Luchs 155–6 lexical replacement 95 fn. 34

General Index

littera-rule 77 fn. 6 loan shifts 186 loanwords 185 locative 114, 254 long-vowel perfect 89 Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius 172–3 macro-roles 110 manner of articulation 22 manuscript modernization 45 marginal phoneme 31 markedness 76 mātrēs lēctiōnis 41 maxims of conversation 206–10 metaplasm 252 Middle English vowel shift 46 Møller, Hermann 56 monitor corpus 13 morph 69–70 morpheme 69–70 mūta cum liquidā 28 mutual information score 13–14 negative raising 221–2 Neogrammarian principle 46 New York English 229 nominative and infinitive 189 North Africa – accent 235 – vowels 66 oaths 239–40 object assignment 111–12 onomastic system 224–6 opportunistic corpus 13 optative (Indo-European) 90 organs of speech 21–2 Oscan – orthography 40, 42 – prohibitions 178 – vowels 178 paenultima rule 50 palatalization 62–3 paradigm economy principle 75 parole 174 parseability 82 participial syntax 118–19

305

passive of facere and compounds 52 perfect endings 88 perfect infinitive instead of present 243 fn. 14 perfect subjunctive 90–2 periodic style 214–16 periphrasis – future (Romance) 100–1 – future (-ūrus) 132–6 – passive 98–101 personal pronouns 121–6 Phoenician script 41–2 phonemes 25–6 phonological reconstruction 26–30 pitch accent 31–2 place of articulation 22 plural for exaggeration 208 politeness – general 218–23 – negative 219–20 – positive 219 polysynthesis 71 popular etymology 82 fn. 12 potential subjunctive 9–10 Praeneste, dialect 183 prestige 65 presupposition 167, 211–12 productivity 83 prohibitive constructions 8 Proto-Romance 59–60 pronoun resumption (relative clauses) 202 pseudo-conditional clause 209 Publicola 171 Punic 29–30 Quintilian (orthography) 43–4 reanalysis 140–1 reduplicated perfect 88–9 register 17–19 relational noun 72 religious language 176 rhetorical questions 144, 211 rhotacism 47–9 Romance languages 59–60 Romanian – future tense 100–1 – gender 96 fn. 33

306

General Index

root aorist 87 root modality 168 root present 87 ‘rustic’ accent 233 Saussure, Ferdinand de 21, 56, 66, 174, 203 semantic attrition 222–3 semantic incorporation 117 sententiae 216–17 Septimius Severus, Lucius 235 Serbian (scripts used) 40 Servius (grammarian) 253–5 sigmatic future 136–43 signifié and signifiant 21, 203 ‘silver Latin’ 5–6 simple perfect 89–90 soloecism 252 sound change 11 snapshot corpus 13 sortal noun 72 Spanish – Old Spanish 162–4 – South American Spanish 63 fn. 61 speaker commitment 171–3 speech act theory 206 s-perfect 89 spread (sound change) 64–5 stock roles in comedy 239 Sturtevant’s paradox 48 fn. 32 subject assignment 110–11 subject-to-subject raising 110–11 fn. 2 subjunctive (Indo-European) 90 synchrony 8–10 syncope 50–2 synonym test 18–19 Tamil 104 telicity 134–5 tense – absolute 126 – future (4th conjugation) 15–17 – future perfect 90–2, 129–30 – future (Romance) 100–1 – future (-ūrus) 132–6 – general 126–43

– imperfect (4th conjugation) 15–17 – imperfect for backgrounded events 129 – morphology and meaning 128–9 – perfect for foregrounded events 129 – relative 126–7 – sequence 131–2 – syncretism 86–90 Terentius Scaurus, Quintus 44–5 Tobler-Mussafia rule 162–4 transitivity 115–17 truth-conditions 205 unreal subjunctive 9–10 ut-clauses 168–70 u/u-perfect ̯ 89 valency 110 Veps (Finno-Ugric) 101–2 verum focus 159 Vespasian (Titus Flavius Vespasianus) 52, 232–3 ‘vocal fry’ 241 voice (verb) 112–14 voiced aspirates 53–5 voicing 22 vowels – Belgian French 60 fn. 58 – front/back, height, rounding 22–5 – Eastern Romance 66 – Italian and Western Romance 66–7 – late Latin 60–1 – Middle English vowel shift 46 – North Africa 66 – Oscan 178 – Sardinian 66–7 – weakening 50–2 Vulgar Latin 59–60 Wackernagel’s law 155 word-and-paradigm morphology 74–5 word as minimal free form 70 word order 153–64 writing systems 38–40 Yimas (Papuan) 104–5 zeugma 14 fn. 12