BMCR 2009.02.50, Roger Wright, Latin vulgaire--latin tardif VIII

Roger Wright (ed.), Latin vulgaire--latin tardif VIII: actes du VIIIe
Colloque international sur le latin vulgaire et tardif, Oxford, 6-9
septembre 2006.  Hildesheim/New York:  Olms-Weidmann, 2008.  Pp. xiii,
623.  ISBN 9783487135328.  EUR 98.00 (pb).

Reviewed by Rolando Ferri, Universita\ di Pisa ([email protected])
Word count:  2442 words
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Table of Contents (http://d-nb.info/988192896/04)

The volume under review contains the proceedings of the eighth
Conference on Vulgar/Late Latin. The series started in 1985 and the
proceedings, in the course of time, have considerably grown in size.
The present volume collects 68 of the 89 original papers delivered at
the conference, and reaches over 600 pages although printed in
hideously small print. The pieces are organized in chronological order
of topics, and cover a period from early Latin and Italic to Dante and
15th-century metalinguistic uses of the word "Latin". The quality of
the papers is uneven, from very expert and illuminating to perplexing
or irrelevant, but the majority make the book definitely worth having.
In the following paragraphs, I give brief presentations of what I
thought were the most striking contributions, or at least those from
which I learned most. Exclusion from this sample does not reflect
necessarily on a given contribution's individual worth.

For clarity's sake, I have attempted to discuss the book's contents by
object of study and areas of methodology, rather than follow the
chronological succession of the pieces as in the volume. The three
areas which I think help us best to envisage the volume's most
interesting features are 1) lexical novelties, typically extracted from
inscriptions, but also from unfamiliar texts and documents from Late
Antiquity or the Early Middle Ages, or reconstructed from a comparative
perspective; 2) new approaches to grammatical, typological, pragmatic
topics relating to Latin with the help of modern synchronic
linguistics; 3) 'vertical communication', i.e. studies devoted to the
issue of the intelligibility of Latin to illiterate or barely literate
audiences.

In what I call group 1, the single most outstanding paper is Solin's
("Vulgar Latin and Pompeii",  60), a preview of the forthcoming
supplement to CIL IV, the Pompeii and Herculaneum inscriptions, on
which Solin and others have been working for several years. Solin
discusses several graffiti, correcting previous editors' readings on
the basis of his own inspection in situ. Here the contents are naughty,
the scholarship impeccable. I shall simply attach some marginal notes
on details. The syncopated perf. ending -aut in CIL IV 1391 exmuccaut
'(she) dried (me) clean of mucus/snot' (i.e. semen), has several
parallels in Vaeaenaenen's Le latin vulgaire des inscriptions
pompe/iennes, p. 45; several more can be found in city of Rome's
inscriptions: cf. my review of CIL 6.6.3 in CR 58.2 (2008), 532. On CIL
IV 2178a NICA CRETEISSIANE  Solin suggests NICA C(H)RE(S)TE ISSIME
"long may you live, Chrestus, yourself'. If the new reading is correct,
the superlative issime from ipse, with the phonetic 'popular' spelling
-ss-, is a very important acquisition, and means not 'yourself' but
'master'. Solin's reading thus gives support to a rare form of
respectful address which we knew only from Petronius up to now
(ipsimus= dominus, but not in address: cf. 69.3 solebam ipsumam meam
debattuere 'I was wont to batter my mistress'). For isse, issa as
honorifics in Pompeian inscriptions cf. CIL IV 8364 SECVNDVS | PRIME
SVAE VBI|QVE ISSE SALVTE, CIL IV 8954, HABITVS ISSAE SALVTEM. On CIL IV
4874, VITALIO BALIAT CAR EST MUSICUS 'long life to Vitalio, because he
is a musician', one might consider punctuating 'why? (because) he is a
musician', although Vaeaenaenen had indeed included a similar case of a
possible causal QVARE, op. cit. p. 126. For the treatment in Pompeian
inscriptions of word initial qu- cf. e. g. como = quomodo in CIL IV
9251.

Several other valuable papers deal with items of the lexicon in the
lower registers of Latin.  One of these is Cam ("Nomenclature des
realia de la vie rurale: e/tude du vocabulaire des installations et des
e/quipements de l'e/curie dans les textes latins de me/decine
ve/te/rinaire", 281), on hippiatrics and horsekeeping generally, in
which a great deal of technical vocabulary is aptly discussed and
convincingly interpreted, starting from a chapter in Vegetius' Digesta
artis mulomedicinalis. I found of particular interest Cam's discussion
of the 'vulgar' word for 'stable, fold' in Veg. Mul. 1.56, zaca
(cratis, quae et zaca uocatur a uulgo), against the concurrent
readings/ conjectures iacca (also in TLL) or occa. Cam supports  zaca
on the basis of a Greek passage in Theophanes, Chronographia, PG 108,
533c, so far ignored by scholars in this connection, where the hapax
<greek>za/ka</greek> (accusative) occurs with the same meaning. In
addition to this and other significant linguistic acquisitions (I
mention only the interpretation of the Lt. neologism pontile 'wooden
stable floor' and the Greek loan-word bruncarius 'muzzle'), the paper
is useful also for its discussion of various Realien of horsekeeping in
antiquity, with clarifying, and much needed, drawings.

Be/la Adamik ("Remarks on the Changes of Consonantism in Pannonian
Latinity as Evidenced by the Inscriptions", 103) shows that consonant
change in Pannonian Latin was in step with contemporary trends in other
Latin-speaking areas until the perhaps modest-sized Romanized
population was either swallowed or forced to move out by mass
migrations from East. In this context, the paper is also notable for
some persuasive interpretations of substandard inscriptions, and
particularly of the names TEOTIGINOS < THEOTECNOS, and IODOROS <
DIODOROS, exhibiting respectively yodisation of 'e' in hiatus and the
reduction of [dy]+ vowel> [y]+ vowel.

A strong point of the Conference, traditionally, is the search for
evidence of spoken Latin at the transitional period from the
comparative evidence of the Romance languages in their earliest
documented stages. A strong paper is offered by E. Nieto Ballestrer
("Sustantivos latino-romances derivados en -toriu y en -toria en la
toponimia de Huesca", 261), whose research concentrates on the
linguistically conservative area of Northern Aragon, so immune from
common linguistic evolution that even voicing of intervocalic Latin
occlusives has not occurred in the local dialect. The local
toponomastic allows to recapture items of Latin -orium derivatives
which must have been current in the spoken Latin of the area. Similarly
impressive is J. Trumper on "Latino Sommerso", Substrate, and the
Composite Nature of Late Latin" (301), devoted to fish names in
Polemius Silvius, the author of the Laterculus, a kind of Latin Concise
in the form of lists of names arranged by thematic areas (edition by
Mommsen in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Chronica minora saec.
IV.V.Vi.VII
(
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tp://mdz11.bib-bvb.de/dmgh_new/app/web?action=loadBook;bookId=00000798)
(Berlin, 1892), p. 544 (nomina natancium); more recently, Polemius has
been discussed in some detail by J. N. Adams, The Regional
Diversification of Latin (Cambridge, 2007), 295-9, as a source of
Gallic regionalisms. Trumper, an expert in Italian dialectology of the
Veneto area, tries to identify fish species in the list, against the
background of the rapidly changing fish vocabulary of Late Latin, as a
result of language contact. The conclusion to which Trumper reaches is
that in the fifth century little Germanic influence is noticeable in
the fish names of Polemius' list. M. Loporcaro, in a formidably dense,
closely argued paper challenging the belief in open-syllable tendency
in Late Latin ("La tendenza alla sillaba chiusa in latino tardo", 336)
seeks and finds confirmation from Italian dialectology for the
hypothesis that in Late Latin muta cum liquida was heterosyllabic, i.e.
made position, at least as a diatopic and diastratic variant, against
the Classical Latin norm. M. Loerinczi ("Ideologia linguistica e
fondamenti di storia della lingua sarda", 548) makes a persuasive case
against M. L. Wagner's view that the treatment of inherited voiceless
labiovelars in Campidanese Sardinian was b rather than qu (i.e.
Campidanese abba for Lt. aqua). R. Sornicola ("Nominal Inflection and
Grammatical Relations in Tenth-Century Legal Documents from the South
of Italy (Codex Diplomaticus Amalfitanus)", 510), highlights the
tension between the written and the spoken register in the Codice
diplomatico amalfitano, a collection of notarial Latin charters and
documents going back to the tenth century. These documents, Sornicola
claims persuasively, continue lexical and phraseological usages of the
ancient Roman legal tradition, and often reflect 'vulgar' usage of very
long standing.

In group 2, and one of the best papers, though neither on Vulgar nor on
Late Latin is R. Ashdowne's on the 'pragmaticalization' of Latin oaths
("E-vocative Invocation: on the historical morphosyntax of Latin
"Oaths"", 13). Ashdowne looks at the gradual weakening of oath phrases
from performatives ('I swear to Jupiter this to be true') to
asseverative formulas, indicating non-neutral speaker attitude to what
is being said ('help me god/heavens! what a naughty thing have I done
today!'). The author persuasively interprets the pragmatic function of
many (pseudo)-vocative and interjectional formulas in Roman comedy and
Cicero (such as hercle, edepol, per deos) -- a topic long overdue for
study with up-to-date methodology. However, I am not sure that the
author is right to explain the origin of phrases such as (1) per te...
obsecro / deos immortalis or (2) per deos atque homines ego te obtestor
"I beseech you in the name of god (and man)" from the basic oath form
as he takes it to be, e. g. (3) per Iouem iuro (med esse) (Pl. Amph.
435) 'I swear by Jove that (I am that person)'. (1) and (2) are, I
think, requests based on the belief that the gods mete out just
retribution to the good and the compassionate, i.e. 'before the gods'
is used because of the belief that they will remember a good deed. In
other words, what proves that (2) is a weakening of the (3) oath form,
rather than an independently evolved request?

Another paper in which a general linguistics approach offers important
insights is Fruyt and Orlandini on the evolution of the Latin verb
("Some Cases of Linguistic Evolution and Grammaticalisation in the
Latin Verb", 230), focussing mainly on grammaticalization and
neutralization processes. They start from imperative periphrases such
as i et, noli, caue and fac followed by either the infinitive or the
subjunctive. I agree with their conclusion that fac is grammaticalized
as a polite variation for the imperative, as can be seen clearly from
polite phrases in Apul. Met. 1.23 fac libenter deuerseris in nostro
'make yourself at home in our lodgings' and Tab. Vindol. 2.291 iii Idus
Septembr[e]s soror ad diem sollemnem natalem meum rogo libenter facias
ut uenias ad nos 'on the third before the Ides of Sept., my sister, I
have the pleasure to ask you to come to our birthday celebration'.
Their next point is a discussion of coepi as a verb focalizer,
gradually losing its lexical meaning of 'beginning to' (though the
dividing line between the lexical and the focalizing meaning is
somewhat obscure to me). Moving on to the quasi-auxiliary usage of
habeo with the infinitive, Fruyt/Orlandini discuss instances in
Tertullian which seem to pave the way for the Romance conditional, esp.
the 'future in the past' function of the conditional, as in habebat
reuelari 'was to be revealed' or prouenire habebat "had to happen".
(The same topic is discussed from a different angle in another good
paper, V. Bourova, "Les participes futurs en -urus / -ndus combine/s
avec un temps passe/ de esse en latin tardif. Un conditionnel non
abouti?", 271, on the Latin 'failed' constructions for the later
conditional). Fruyt/Orlandini then discuss neutralization of perfect
participle forms, and weak causativity with iubeo and facio. They argue
that iubeo has weak semantic content in stereotyped polite formulas
such as iubeo te bene ualere, but I doubt if it is necessary to go back
to a supposed pre-literary inherited meaning 'to encourage': in
politeness contexts, iubeo is used to reassure the addressee of the
speaker's interest in his/her well-being and the mock-assertiveness is
part of the politeness 'scenario' of conversation. Facio too can be
used with weak semantic content, as an all-purpose expression,
typically in the lower, colloquial registers, as one can see from the
following parallels: Vetus Latina, Ev. Ioh. 6.21 facta est nauis ad
terram 'the ship came near the shore', Sch. Cic. Gron. p. 436.20 Orelli
dicimus: fac ad manum illum codicem 'we say, pass that book'. Indeed,
commenting on Ter. Ad. 916 quid cessas ire ac facere?, Donatus
qualifies the use of facere as <greek>i)diwtikw=s</greek>, that is,
probably, 'colloquial'.

Natalya Stolova ("From Satellite-Framed Latin to Verb-Framed Romance:
Late Latin as an intermediate stage", 253) studies the transition from
Latin to Romance in a typological perspective, focussing on verbs
expressing directionality and movement. Romance languages, she argues,
have lost most Latin prefixed movement verbs, such as abscedere, abire,
deuenire, with few (she lists five) exceptions. She reads the change in
the context of Leonard Talmy's typological theory and she finally
argues that the cause of the change was an attempt to foreground, in
terms of cognitive salience, the path/movement element, as can be seen
in the loss of Latin ascendere to Late Latin (in fact only a
reconstruction) *MONTARE, It. montare, Fr. monter, in which the mons
element is immediately recognizable.

As in previous volumes of the series, 'vertical communication' (my
group 3) has produced some important papers. Among these, I single out
Biville, who presents a little known grammatical treatise by
Cassiodorus on orthography ("Normes "orthographiques" et oralite/ dans
la latinite/ tardive: le latin du De Orthographia de Cassiodore", 381)
and Van Acker ("Dans les me/andres de la communication verticale
me/rovingienne: connaissances passives et perte d'informations", 463).
The problem of 'vertical communication' in Cassiodorus' work is in
evidence from the start, where in a sort of metaliterary preface the
author has his Vivarium brethren interrupt his scriptural exegesis with
the outcry: "what's the use of learning all that the Ancients have
done, and all the knowledge Your wisdom has taken the trouble to
collect for us, if we cannot write it, nor repeat correctly what we
don't understand in writing?" -- an excerpt from which it is easy to
grasp the rich interest of the following piece. The treatise is also
original in contrasting 'modern' and 'ancient' Latin usage, and in
assigning precedence, at least for the practical purposes of teaching
the monks, to the former. Van Acker attempts to outline the passive
Latin competence of Merovingian church-goers listening to the simple,
but fully Latinate Passio Memorii (edited by B. Krusch in MGH, SRM 3,
101-4, Vita Memorii presbyteri et martyris
(
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11.bib-bvb.de/dmgh_new/app/web?action=loadExtra;extraAction=loadSearch)
), as well as the varying degrees of difficulty presented by different
excerpts (in terms of lexicon, sentence length, structure etc.),
against the background of the supposed 'spoken language' of the time.
My only query is about the clearly high-register dramatic phrase in
paragraph 5, ad ille sacer unda sanguinis suis perfusus est ('And that
holy man was drenched by his own overflowing blood"), where suis, sic
in the MS, is not the genitive. It may be true that a general idea was
conveyed by the formularity of the phrase, and by the survival of some
left-branching in old French, but was the pseudo-genitive suis,
[suwes], really what the old preacher read out?