BMCR 2009.03.12, Paolo Poccetti, Les pre/noms de l'Italie antique

Paolo Poccetti (ed.), Les pre/noms de l'Italie antique, Journe/e
d'e/tudes, Lyon, 26 janvier 2004. Ricerche sull lingue di frammentaria
attestaziona 5.  Pisa/Roma:  Fabrizio Serra, 2008.  Pp. 150.  ISBN
9788862270489.  EUR 48.00 (pb).

Reviewed by D. M.  Goldstein, University of California, Berkeley
([email protected])
Word count:  1438 words
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To read a print-formatted version of this review, see
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2009/2009-03-12.html
To comment on this review, see
http://www.bmcreview.org/2009/03/20090312.html
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[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]

This collection of papers results from a journe/e d'e/tudes held at
Lyons on 26 January 2004, which brought together French and Italian
scholars to examine the praenomina of the fragmentary languages
(Etruscan and Sabellian, essentially) of ancient Italy.  Etrusco-Italic
onomastics has witnessed dramatic advances over the past two decades,
thanks especially to the inspiring work of the late Helmut Rix, among
others.  This volume, while compact, maintains the impressive
trajectory.  Within the domain of praenomina, the range of topics is
broad and stimulating, from Etruscan diminutive morphology to Italic
sociolinguistics.  As such, it demonstrates the fascinating depths of
onomastics; the downside, however, is that the volume does not cohere
particularly well at a thematic level, and I do not imagine one sitting
down to read the volume from cover to cover (though I can vouch for the
pleasure and benefit of doing so).  Rather, its articles will be
consulted piecemeal by graduate students and more advanced scholars who
have a developed interest in the onomastics of ancient Italy beyond
Latin.  The articles are of high quality, and particularly useful for
their collections of data.  In what follows, I offer a brief
description of each contribution; more attention is given to the
articles that I imagine to be of more central concern to the readers of
BMCR.[[1]]

The volume is introduced by Fre/de/rique Biville, who provides a brief
overview of the participants and their papers, and summarizes recent
work in Etruscan and Italic onomastics.  She also offers a sound
prospectus of just how much can be learned from this
subdiscipline.[[2]] The first paper is by Olli Salomies, who, in 1987,
published the majestic Die Roemischen Vornamen. Studien zur roemischen
Namengebung.  In this article he updates some of the entries, adds new
ones, and deletes some that are no longer thought to exist.  Two other
articles also offer new and useful collections of data.  The first is
by Fabrice Poli, who offers a collection of five Etruscan inscriptions
from the Royal Ontario Museum.  The inscriptions are from vases and
funerary urns and range from two letters to several words.  The second
is by Gilles van Heems, who offers a thorough description and analysis
of Etruscan diminutive morphology; this includes not only truncation
(e.g. <greek>*qanax</greek> nil > <greek>*q</greek> ana ) but also a
rich collection of morphemes (namely, -za, -iu, -cu, -(i)le, -la, -tu).
He complements his descriptive account with an inquiry into the age
and socio-political class of the individuals receiving these names, as
well as the productivity of each morpheme.

The remaining articles are devoted to more specific questions.  Jean
Hadas-Lebel argues that the Umbrian abbreviation Vois. reflects the
Voisis, which is cognate with Latin Lucius < Loukios.  His proposal
counters the current interpretation (proposed by Vetter) that Vois.
represents Volsio- (cf. Volsienus).  Dominique Briquel provides a
thorough review of the ancient sources concerning the royal name
Servius.  Dionysius of Halicarnassus, among others, claims that Ocresia
(Servius' mother) gave him the praenomen Servius because she bore him
while she was a slave; the name Tullius descends from his father.
There are various questions here, including whether the name Servius
was derived from seruus or servare, what sort of shadow semantics these
connections would activate, and whether Servius' father bore the
praenomen Servius or Spurius.  As for the gentilicium Tullius, Briquel
points out (p. 44) a fundamental problem with Dionysius' account: as a
slave, Ocresia could not have transmitted the name of her husband,
Tullius, to her son.  He concludes that the name Servius need not have
indicated a servile origin (p. 48), and that Dionysius bases his claim
on Servius' low birth.  As such, this may be a case where a name
creates rather than reflects history.  Briquel's points are well taken,
and his article prompts the further question: why did Dionysius and
others after him find the aetiology of Servius' name persuasive?

The last two articles are sociolinguistic investigations and are, to my
mind, the most interesting of the volume.  In the first, Emmanual
Dupraz examines the changing linguistic ecology of North Oscan
territory (Vestinians, Marrucinians, Paelignians) through praenomina.
North Oscan inscriptions are attested from the 3rd to 1st centuries
BCE; during this time the number of Latin inscriptions gradually
increases and from the middle of the 1st century BCE only Latin is
attested.  Through the epigraphic data, we can thus chart the
Latinization of the region and the concomitant death of North Oscan (at
least in its written form).  As Dupraz shows, onomastic data form a
sub-system with their own behavior and thus offer unique insight into
the process of Roman acculturation.  In inscriptions datable to the 3rd
and 2nd centuries, there are 57 tokens of praenomina attested, which
yield 17 different masculine names: 13 of these are purely Oscan,[[3]]
three are common to Oscan and Latin, and one is exclusively Latin.  In
the middle of the first century, there are ca. 255 attested tokens of
praenomina, which yield 28 different names: 17 of these are purely
Oscan, four are common to Oscan and Latin (Lucius, Titus, Gaius, and
Gnaeus), and seven are purely Latin.  As we would expect, the
token-frequency of uniquely Latin names increases dramatically: from
less than one percent in the earlier period to ca. 18 percent in the
later.  Of greater interest is the fact that the token frequency of
names common to both Latin and Oscan also exhibits a significant
increase: in this period, it accounts for ca. 60 percent of all names,
while in the earlier period it accounted for ca. 35 percent.  These
bicultural names are the most productive overall; Dupraz notes also
that the token frequency of Lucius and Titus in particular is higher in
North Oscan territory than in Rome itself at this time.  He interprets
this as a way for North Oscans to simultaneously maintain their native
culture and adapt to that of the Romans.  And even when North Oscans do
borrow uniquely Latin names, their usage of the names does not mimic
that of the Romans, as we find different token frequencies for such
names in the two areas.  So in this way local identity can be still be
created in the face of a moribund local language.[[4]]

Paolo Poccetti closes the volume with his ambitious study of onomastics
in archaic Campania, where we find Etruscan names in Greek and Italic
contexts, and vice versa.  These data are extremely interesting in
terms of loanword adaptation and morphophonology, and Poccetti's
article is of considerable value for the wealth of evidence that it
brings together.  Particularly interesting is his discussion of the
complexities of the diffusion of the name Mamarkos/Mamerkos in
Etruscan, Sabellic, Latin, and Greek sources.  On the social level, one
question that I was left with was how we determine whether the
occurrence of names in foreign contexts (e.g. an Etruscan name in an
Oscan inscription) is a case of borrowing (i.e. a Samnite with an
Etruscan name) or whether we have an actual Etruscan individual named
in an Oscan-language inscription, in which case the name would not be
borrowed per se.  I also wonder to what extent it will be possible to
synthesize the data that Poccetti has collected to build an account of
social history or loanword phonology.[[5]]

There is a noticeable absence of Anglo-American scholarship in each of
these articles.  While it is certainly true that much of the work in
this field is being carried out by continental Europeans, still one
wonders how, e.g., Jim Adams' seminal work on bilingualism[[6]] could
not have been useful for at least the last two papers.  The volume is
peppered with typographic errors of varying degrees of irritation; the
binding and paper are of remarkably high quality.  An index of forms
would have significantly increased the utility of the volume.  In sum,
this is a welcome and accomplished little volume that testifies to the
continuing strength of Etrusco-Italic onomastics.  It is through
detailed investigations such as those presented here that we will be
able to answer the larger social and sociolinguistic questions posed by
the diverse remains of ancient Italy.

Authors and titles:

Fre/de/rique Biville, Avant-propos

Olli Salomies, Les pre/noms italiques: un bilan de presque vingt ans
apre\s la publications de Vornamen

Dominique Briquel, Le pre/nom du roi Servius Tullius de/note-t-il un
origine servile?

Fabrice Poli, Les inscriptions E/trusques du Royal Ontario Museum

Jean Hadas-Lebel, Une nouvelle interpre/tation de l'abreviation
pre/nominale ombrienneVois.

Gilles van Heems, Diminutifs, sobriquets et hypocoristiques e/trusques

Emmanual Dupraz, Des pre/noms sabelliqus aux pre/noms latins en pays
nord-osque

Paolo Poccetti, Reflets des contacts des langues dans les pre/noms de
la Campanie ancienne


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Notes:


1.   I would, however, like to note the recent appearance of Rex
Wallace's Zikh Rasna: A Manual of the Etruscan Language and
Inscriptions (Ann Arbor/New York 2008), which will undoubtedly make
Etruscan evidence far more accessible to classicists.

2.   The information that Biville provides for the articles in the
volume in some cases differs from what we find in the actual article;
the inconcinnity involves only misquoted titles or miscited facts.

3.   The (potential) Oscan name Asinius leads Dupraz into a
consideration of the noun asinus 'ass.' His suggestion (p. 115) that it
was borrowed during the period of common Italic is problematic: for if
borrowed at such an early date, how and why did it escape rhotacism
(i.e. > **arinus)?  This question is not raised.

4.   Comparison between the case of North Oscan and that of Gaul may
offer further insights into Romanization, sociolinguistic change, and
language death:  see Karin Stueber, "Effects of Language Contact on
Roman and Gaulish Personal Names," in Hildegard L.C. Tristram, ed., The
Celtic Languages in Contact: Papers from the Workshop Within the
Framework of the XIII International Congress of Celtic Studies, Bonn,
26 - 27 July 2007 (Potsdam 2007): 81-92.  (The volume has been
published online at
http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2007/1568/
(http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2007/1568/) .

5.   For a recent example of social analysis rooted in onomastics, see
S. Marchesini, Prosopographia etrusca. II.1 Studia: Gentium mobilitas.
(Rome 2007).

6.   J. N. Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language (Cambridge 2003);
or J. N. Adams, M. Janse, S. Swain, edd., Bilingualism in Ancient
Society (Oxford 2002).