The Phonemic Interpretation of Late Latin Orthography

Abstract

Robert A. Hall Jr. is to be thanked for his interesting programmatic statement on the reconstruction of Proto-Romance.1 I find myself in complete agreement with many of the points set forth in Hall's article, especially with his insistence on the necessity for reintegrating synchronic analysis into historical linguistics and his proposal that all available linguistic methods be used for the reconstruction of past linguistic stages. I should like, however, to take exception to one point which appears very minor in the overall representation of Hall's arguments, but which, if consistently maintained, may defeat precisely that program of a combined use of all linguistic methods on which Hall is insistent. Hall refers to the written material available from the Late Latin period as 'so confused and untrustworthy that it would be unrealistic to interpret it literalistically and consider it a faithful reflection of popular speech'.2 As a result, he concludes that this material cannot be used in his program of reconstructing Romance speech. Now it is of course perfectly true that Late Latin documents appear confused at first glance, and it is also true that they should not be interpreted literalistically. But this does not mean that the existing confusion, especially in the orthography of these documents, cannot be analyzed and reduced to principles. Unfortunately, in the United States those linguists who are most interested in a phonemic approach have shown little concern for Late Latin documents, while those who have studied these documents-myself3 included-have often failed to make their findings convincing and meaningful for lack of a statement of the linguistic principles underlying their analysis. In this article I shall attempt to bridge the gap between the two groups by formulating the main principles with which to interpret the apparently confused orthography of the Late Latin period. I. The first and most obvious principle governing the orthographic practice of the Late Latin scribes is that of SUBSTITUTION. If a Classical Latin phoneme a in certain of its occurrences (in certain positions) has been replaced in Late Latin by a different phoneme b, such that b was already a phoneme in Classical Latin, the new occurrences of b are written with the symbol used for b in Classical Latin. Thus, when Classical Latin voiceless stops become voiced, they come to be written with letters denoting voiced stops: marcadus (T 44),4 vigo (T 67), elidigatas (T 43).