BMCR 2009.03.21, James Clackson, The Blackwell History of the Latin Language

James Clackson, Geoffrey Horrocks, The Blackwell History of the Latin
Language.  Malden/Oxford/Victoria:  Blackwell Publishing, 2007.  Pp.
viii, 324.  ISBN 978-1-4051-6209-8.  $99.95.

Reviewed by Brent Vine, University of California, Los Angeles
([email protected])
Word count:  1650 words
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Table of Contents
(http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0717/2007018802.html)

The stated goal of this welcome new survey is to overcome some of the
shortcomings of L. R. Palmer's classic handbook The Latin Language,
unrevised since its publication in 1954 (London; repr. Univ. of
Oklahoma Press). The goal is worthy, and the execution is in many ways
a success.

The book's eight chapters are as follows: I. Latin and Indo-European,
II. The Languages of Italy, III. The Background to Standardization, IV.
'Old' Latin and its Varieties in the Period c.400-150 BC, V. The Road
to Standardization: Roman Latin of the Third and Second Centuries BC,
VI. Elite Latin in the Late Republic and Early Empire, VII. Sub-Elite
Latin in the Empire, VIII. Latin in Late Antiquity and Beyond.[[1]]
These are followed by a glossary of linguistic terminology, an
International Phonetic Alphabet symbol chart, a short "Bibliography of
Reference and Other Works" (supplementing the reference lists that
conclude each chapter), and an index of subjects.[[2]] Greek words are
provided in transliteration, apart from one word inadvertently left in
Greek characters (p. 121).[[3]]

As some of the chapter titles themselves already indicate, Clackson and
Horrocks were particularly concerned to make use of "modern
sociolinguistic theory" so as to "help explain the interactions between
the spoken language and the Classical standard" (p. vi) -- much in the
manner of Horrocks' excellent survey Greek: A History of the Language
and its Speakers (London, 1997). Toward this end, the authors have made
good use of important work by J. N. Adams, including a manuscript
version of what is now published as The Regional Diversification of
Latin 200 BC -- AD 600 (Cambridge, 2007). Indeed, the broader
"regional" context is especially well served by the thorough coverage
in Chapter II of the non-Latin Italic languages of ancient Italy,
especially Oscan, Umbrian, and South Picene (the first two treated only
in cursory fashion by Palmer, and the latter missing altogether, for
good reason at the time); one can only agree with the authors that for
students of Latin and its history, it is "vital to have a good
understanding of these languages of Italy, and the nature of the
relationship between them and Latin" (p. 38).

Perhaps the most attractive feature of the presentation is the
extensive use of sample texts. Each is provided with an interlinear
word-by-word gloss and is followed by a translation and detailed
commentary, focusing on points most germane to the chapter in question.
The texts themselves, moreover, are extremely well chosen. To consider
Chapter V as a sample: many of the standard chestnuts are here, such as
Scipionic elogia, the Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus, the Epistula
ad Tiburtes, the "prayer to Mars" (among other material from Cato), and
selections from Naevius, Ennius, and Plautus. But the discussion of
"official Latin" in the first part of the chapter is developed in an
interesting way via a Greek text that translates a Latin senatus
consultum -- one of a number of useful comparisons with Greek scattered
throughout the book -- as well as apposite selections from two
additional Latin inscriptions not normally used in treatments of this
kind. Particularly noteworthy is the explicit avoidance of material
from Petronius to illustrate "sub-elite Latin in the Empire" (p. 237),
in favor of primary documents on wax tablets, papyri, ostraca, and
stone, for which, once again, the authors naturally rely on recent
studies by J. N. Adams.

Other features of the presentation have been carried out less
successfully:

(a) The bibliographical coverage is sometimes idiosyncratic, and is in
general somewhat skimpy (and rather heavily anglophone). A few examples
must suffice:

(i) The Preface suggests (p. vii) that readers new to historical
linguistics might find it helpful to consult an "introductory volume"
on this subject, citing Schendl 2001 and Hale 2007. But the latter is a
distinctly odd and rather unhelpful choice, as this is primarily a
theoretical study that Hale himself declines to categorize as an
introductory text of the usual sort (see p. ix of his introduction). In
addition to Schendl (and as a supplement to its highly basic coverage),
many more appropriate choices could have been offered, e.g. the
introductory texts by Crowley, Hock and Joseph, Sihler, Trask, or (at a
more advanced level) those by Anttila, Campbell, or Hock.[[4]]

(ii) In a discussion of "current models of PIE syntax" that incorporate
"verb-fronting or right-detached elements" (p. 31), reference is made,
perfectly appropriately, to "Clackson 2007, Ch. 6". Yet there is no
reference to the more accessible treatment of Fortson 2004 (Ch. 8,
especially pp. 144ff. on movement processes); nor, for that matter, is
Fortson's book -- by now the standard introduction to Indo-European
linguistics (which Clackson 2007 is not, by the author's own admission:
p. xii) -- cited anywhere else, not to mention the other widely-used
introductory texts of Meier-Bruegger or Tichy.[[5]]

(iii) Despite a thorough commentary on Cato's "Pro Rhodiensibus"
fragments (pp. 166ff.) and detailed consideration of "the language of
Classical Latin prose" (pp. 215ff. and elsewhere), including stylistic
analyses of passages by Cicero and Tacitus, no reference is made to
relevant sections of von Albrecht 1989 (which covers much of the same
ground); and in this connection, one is surprised not to find any
mention of Reinhardt et al. 2005, despite liberal citation of Adams and
Mayer 1999.[[6]]

(b) The glossary of linguistic terms is an excellent feature; yet some
discussions in the book are couched in linguistic jargon not to be
found in the glossary. E.g.: "anaphoric" vs. "focalized" (p. 215);
"coda position", "syllable coda", "homorganic clusters" (p. 275);
"head-final" and "right-detached" (p. 31), cf. "head-final" again on p.
276, together with "head-first", both discussed again on p. 281 as if
for the first time; "synthetic" vs. "analytic" (p. 276); and within the
glossary itself: "lexeme" (s.v. "paradigm").

(c) There is a pervasive inattention to cross-referencing -- a
problematic feature for a work that, one imagines, may often be
consulted selectively rather than read cover-to-cover. Some such
instances seem related to the book's division of labor (cf. n. 1): thus
iambic shortening is mentioned on p. 252 and on p. 273, on both
occasions as if for the first time (Chapters VII and VIII; Clackson),
whereas it had already been introduced on p. 134 (Chapter V; Horrocks).
Even within the same chapter, a statement like "[w]e have already
mentioned the Strasbourg oaths" (p. 300) is distinctly unhelpful, when
the previous mention occurred more than thirty pages earlier (p. 268),
and is not even referenced in the index, which cites only p. 300 for
this item (cf. n. 2).

(d) The most pernicious practice is the haphazard (in fact almost
non-existent) marking of vowel length in Latin words cited as
linguistic forms. There can be no justification for this, especially
since the book's potential readership includes "those who have little
or no Latin" (p. vi, a point also made clear by glossary entries like
"ablative", "deponent verb", and the like). Neophyte readers can only
be confused when, in a discussion of quantitative and qualitative
ablaut and laryngeal reflexes (p. 12), Latin forms like dos (sic,
properly do:s) or feci (sic, i.e. fe:ci:)[[7]] appear with
laryngealistic reconstructions which, according to the authors' own
explanation two pages earlier (p. 10), should call for Latin long
vowels; so also for the nonsensical *ple(i)os and its laryngealistic
preform (p. 142). Among other egregious instances: occido 'kill' (p.
93), in a discussion of monophthongizations resulting in long vowels,
an item especially troublesome for beginners (i.e. occi:do: 'kill' vs.
occido: 'fall'); the "'modal' suffix -a-" (sic, i.e. -a:-; p. 99); and,
in a discussion of the pre-Romance "merger of short i and long e:" (p.
301), Old French "sauir for sapere", where the latter form actually
stands for Late Latin *sape:re (second conjugation, unlike its
third-conjugation Classical Latin counterpart). If, as one hopes, the
book is reissued in soft cover at a price that students, scholars, and
cash-strapped institutional libraries can actually afford, the
opportunity to remove the blemishes stemming from this misguided
long-mark policy should certainly be seized.

A rich yet condensed treatment such as this, covering centuries of
linguistic development, inevitably stimulates the age-old reviewers'
caviling instinct, which I have been unable to overmaster. (See the
final footnote below.) Yet no such minor criticisms, nor any of the
more general points noted above, should detract from Clackson and
Horrocks' achievement in providing the most thorough, readable, and
up-to-date history of the Latin language, in a form eminently suitable
as a supplement to advanced undergraduate and graduate-level course
work (including, it should be stressed, graduate survey courses on the
history of Latin literature), and with much to offer professional
Classicists interested in the subject.

Is this, then, a replacement for Palmer? In most respects, yes. Even
where Clackson and Horrocks defer to Palmer's rather more extensive
coverage of lexical matters (p. vii), they sell themselves short, as
the book serves up many good discussions of vocabulary (e.g. pp. 45ff.
on religious and other cultural terms shared by Latin/Italic, Greek,
and Etruscan; p. 223 on lexical features of Latin poetic diction; pp.
283f. on late Latin lexical replacements; etc.).[[8]] Yet in one
important respect, the book is not a stand-alone history of the Latin
language, as it does not provide -- and was not intended to provide --
"a systematic overview of the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the
language" (p. vii). Palmer's presentation of these matters is
hopelessly out of date, but for this material other resources are now
(or will soon be) available, such as (especially for the phonology and
morphology) Baldi 2002, Meiser 1998, Sihler 1995, and (the best of the
lot) Weiss (forthcoming); and for syntax, Baldi and Cuzzolin
(forthcoming).[[9]]

My own practice is clear: at a cover price of $100, the book will be a
trusted item for my course reserve shelf. Perhaps some day, under other
circumstances, I will be able to justify asking students to purchase
it.[[10]]


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Notes:


1.   Primary responsibility is assigned (p. vii) to Clackson for
chapters I, II, VII, VIII, and to Horrocks for chapters III, IV, V, VI.

2.   An index that catalogues "Bu Njem" (the location in the Libyan
desert, mentioned on p. 256, where certain late Latin texts were
unearthed) has evident pretensions to inclusiveness; yet there are
regrettable omissions, e.g. the important stylistic terms concinnitas,
inconcinnitas (pp. 218-19), or the linguistic term "mora" (discussed
pp. 133ff.); the reader interested in "South Picene" is directed only
to pp. 49-53, yet South Picene material is treated far more extensively
(important mentions occur on pp. 39f., 57, 67); etc.

3.   It must be added that proofreading was indifferently performed: I
have collected a little more than three dozen typographical errors and
similar small problems -- not a good score for a book of this length
(or one priced so high). Of these, the most serious are "first
millennium BC" (sic, for "first millennium AD", p. 4) and "infectum
stem" (sic, for "perfectum stem", p. 56); and, while high standards of
accuracy are generally on display with the primary textual material,
Pre-Samnite fufuod (cited on p. 61) does not exist -- the text in
question has both fufuwod and fufwod (a highly interesting bit of
linguistic variation), but not fufuod. (A detailed list of errata is
available from the reviewer, on request.)

4.   H. Schendl, Historical Linguistics (Oxford, 2001); M. Hale,
Historical Linguistics: Theory and Method (Oxford, 2007); H. H. Hock
and B. D. Joseph, Language History, Language Change, and Language
Relationship: An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics
(Berlin/New York, 1996); A. L. Sihler, Language History: An
Introduction (Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2000); T. Crowley, Introduction
to Historical Linguistics, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1997); R. L. Trask,
Historical Linguistics (London/New York, 1996); R. Anttila, Historical
and Comparative Linguistics (Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1989); L.
Campbell, Historical Linguistics: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Cambridge
[MA], 2004); H. H. Hock, Principles of Historical Linguistics, 2nd ed.
(Berlin/New York, 1991).

5.   J. Clackson, Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction
(Cambridge, 2007); B. W. Fortson IV, Indo-European Language and
Culture: An Introduction (Oxford, 2004; a revised second edition is in
press); M. Meier-Bruegger, Indo-European Linguistics (Berlin, 2003, and
earlier German editions); E. Tichy, A Survey of Proto-Indo-European
(Bremen, 2006, and the original German edition, 2000).

6.   M. von Albrecht, Masters of Roman Prose from Cato to Apuleius:
Interpretative Studies (Leeds, 1989); T. Reinhardt, M. Lapidge, and J.
N. Adams (eds.), Aspects of the Language of Latin Prose (Oxford, 2005);
J. N. Adams and R. G. Mayer (eds.), Aspects of the Language of Latin
Poetry (Oxford, 1999).

7.   Instead of macron, for typographical convenience I here mark Latin
long vowels with a following colon, according to the standard
linguistic practice also used on occasion by Clackson and Horrocks.

8.   In view of this coverage, a word index would have been easy to
justify, and seems a desirable enhancement for subsequent re-editions.

9.   P. Baldi, Foundations of Latin (Berlin/New York, 2002); G. Meiser,
Historische Laut- und Formenlehre der lateinischen Sprache (Darmstadt,
1998; I have reviewed this work in Kratylos 46 [2001] 118-26); A.
Sihler, New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (Oxford, 1995; see
the review by M. Weiss, AJP 117 [1996] 671-5); M. Weiss, Outline of the
Comparative Grammar of Latin (forthcoming from Beech Stave Press, Ann
Arbor); P. Baldi and P. Cuzzolin (eds.), New Perspectives on Historical
Latin Syntax, Vol. 1: Syntax of the Sentence (forthcoming from Walter
de Gruyter, Berlin/New York).

10.   A garland of selected cavils, by chapter and page number: (I.24,
27, 98-9) it is unfortunate that the authors repeatedly purvey (even
with the qualification on p. 24) the flawed (and at best highly
controversial) Rixian theory that the Italic a:-subjunctive goes back
to the PIE thematic optative; (I.27) among various problems with the
chart here, the preform supplied for the Latin imperfect is impossible
as such, or (if meant as a formulaic shorthand) highly confusing at
best (*bhuh2- cannot yield Lat. -ba:-), as well as anachronistic (i.e.
with "late IE" *e: beside PIE palatal *g' and *h2); (I.29-30) it is
misleading and inaccurate, both in terms of semantics and etymology, to
gloss OLat. MITAT 'gives' (in the Duenos inscription and the Tibur
Pedestal Inscription) with Class. Lat. mittit; (II.65-6) the question
of the Proto-Italic status of the "pius-Gesetz" is more complex, given
the likelihood that "Sab. *pi:o-" (p. 65) is contradicted by South
Picene pui'h, in the attractive interpretation of this form as
equivalent to Lat. (adv.) pie: (I.-J. Adiego Lajara, Proto-Sabelio,
osco-umbro, sudpiceno [Barcelona, 1992] 90ff.); (II.68) Lat. via and
its Italic cognates probably have nothing to do with Eng. way and its
cognates (see M. de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the
other Italic Languages [Leiden, 2008] 673f.); (III.85) Lusitanian is
clearly IE, even if its Celtic affiliation remains unsupported;
(III.86) Sidetic is for some reason kept separate from languages
"related to ancient Hittite"; (IV.100) the historical explanation
offered for the OLat. passive infinitive suffix -ier is entirely
unsatisfactory (see rather Meiser 1998 [n. 9 above] p. 225, following
Garci/a Ramo/n); (IV.102) Mello-Voza 139 should now be cited as CIL
I(2) 3152; (IV.112ff.) the presentation of the 4th-century BC
Marsian-Latin text CIL I(2) 5 is based on unpublished work by Michael
Crawford (non vidi), which evidently includes a series of fascinating
new readings -- but in that case, it is unfortunate that so little
detail about these is provided (e.g.: is the Clackson-Horrocks
transcription EN VRBID, vs. traditional ENVRBID, significant? an
oversight? cf. their discussion of INALTOD, pp. 109-10); (IV.119) the
argumentation about the alleged "topic-comment structure" of the
sentence beginning MENERVA SACRV in CIL I(2) 365 is specious, given the
purely formulaic status of such text structures (as evidenced, in part,
by their characteristic layout, as I discuss elsewhere: Studies in
Archaic Latin Inscriptions [Innsbruck, 1993] 106ff., 108 for this
text); (IV.127) LVBS in this text (CIL I(2) 62) should not be referred
to as "simply an abbreviation for lubens", since for such words,
"abbreviations" (in the usual sense of the term) are not found in
3rd/2nd c. BC texts (somewhat better p. 118 on LVBS and DEDRO/DEDROT in
terms of "abbreviated spelling", though this is still unclear parlance
for what is normally referred to as "syllabic notation"); (IV.127) the
discussion of CIL I(2) 60 includes a rare example of attention to
lettering (the details of which, including the development of the Latin
and native Italic alphabets, are largely ignored throughout the book,
cf. above on syllabic notation), but everything that is said here about
the notation of velars in this text is incorrect (see Studies ...
291f., 295); (V.132ff., 137-8) the lengthy presentation of J. Parsons'
account of the Saturnian meter serves little purpose in such a book
(despite what the authors imply ["With this background, we are ready to
examine ...", p. 138], it is not actually made use of in the subsequent
treatment of Scipionic elogia), and Parsons' theory has in any case
been superseded by the much more sophisticated treatment of A. Mercado
(The Latin Saturnian and Italic Verse, UCLA Ph.D. dissertation, 2006;
in preparation as a book); (V.178) the eyebrow-raising assertion that
Lat. secta 'path' is unrelated to sequor 'follow' should have been
provided with a reference, or at least some minimal explanation.