Archaic Latin Research Articles

With or without ut? Full evidence of subjunctive complementation of uolo in Archaic Latin

With or without <i>ut?</i> Full evidence of subjunctive complementation of uolo in Archaic Latin

THE HISTORY OF BILINGUAL DICTIONARIES RECONSIDERED: AN ANCIENT FRAGMENT RELATED TO PS.-PHILOXENUS (P.VARS. 6) AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE

AbstractThis article identifies a papyrus in Warsaw, P.Vars. 6, as a fragment of the large Latin–Greek glossary known as Ps.-Philoxenus. That glossary, published in volume II of G. Goetz's Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum on the basis of a ninth-century manuscript, is by far the most important of the bilingual glossaries surviving from antiquity, being derived from lost works of Roman scholarship and preserving valuable information about rare and archaic Latin words. It has long been considered a product of the sixth century a.d., but the papyrus dates to c.200, and internal evidence indicates that the glossary itself must be substantially older than that copy. The Ps.-Philoxenus glossary is therefore not a creation of Late Antiquity but of the Early Empire or perhaps even the Republic. Large bilingual glossaries in alphabetical order must have existed far earlier than has hitherto been believed.

Study on the Weakening of the Word Final –s Compared to –m in the Epigraphic Corpus

The position of the word final –s, after a weakening in archaic Latin, seems to be fixed in the spoken language in the classical period. Then, it partially disappeared in the Romance languages: in modern languages, it is conserved only north and west of the Massa–Senigallia line, while we cannot find it neither in the eastern regions nor in South Italy. Based on this fact, linguists generally claim that the weakening of the final –s started only after the intensive dialectal diversification of Latin, simultaneously with the evolution of the Romance languages. However, the data of the Computerized Historical Linguistic Database of Latin Inscriptions of the Imperial Age (LLDB) do not verify this generally accepted opinion. We can find almost as many examples of the lack of word final –s as that of –m also from the earlier centuries of the Imperial age. The aim of this paper is to explore the reasons behind the inconsistencies between the scholarly consensus and the epigraphical data.

About Latin &amp;lt;i&amp;gt;Ecce&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt; ‘Behold! Lo! See! There!’ and Some Ancient Languages Presentatives

In this study, which is part of a larger research project on dialogue, the author deals with “little words” (as they are often called). These common and polyfunctional words seldom appear in grammars and are only dealt with within short lemmata in dictionaries. <i>Presentatives</i>, such as Fr. <i>voici</i> / <i>voilà</i>, Lat. <i>ecce</i>, Gr. ἰδού “Here is, lo!”, form an independent grammatical class which needs to be defined, firstly, in a genetic approach. The author starts with the enumeration of ancient languages presentatives, classifies them according to their etymology and goes on to study Latin <i>ecce in particular</i>. This classification shows two structures: most ancient language presentatives come from a grammaticalized form of the imperative form of a verb requiring a visual or tactile perception; other presentatives are based on a demonstrative theme or a particle agglutination. Only Latin <i>ecce</i> remains unclear in spite of the many assumptions that have already been proposed. In addition, while all the other presentatives are often grammaticalized with a second-person pronoun, the sequence <i>ecce + tibi</i> is not attested in archaic Latin and does not even function as a pure presentative: the structure <i>ecce me</i> is used for self-presentation. In reality, while all the other presentatives are allocentric, <i>ecce</i> is egocentric. The author concludes that <i>ecce</i> is related to <i>ego</i> ‘I’. This particularity can help us both reconstruct the etymology of this word and define the presentation it expresses, thus enabling us to understand how <i>ecce</i> fundamentally illustrates the inscription of the dialogue within morphology.

With or without ut? Full evidence of subjunctive complementation of facio in Archaic Latin

Transactions of the Philological SocietyVolume 118, Issue 1 p. 79-93 Original Article With or without ut? Full evidence of subjunctive complementation of facio in Archaic Latin† Alex Mazzanti Jr, Corresponding Author Alex Mazzanti Jr alexmazzantijr@gmail.com orcid.org/0000-0003-4448-9672 Universidade de São Paulo Alex Mazzanti Jr. Universidade de São Paulo São Paulo SP, Brazil alexmazzantijr@gmail.comSearch for more papers by this author Alex Mazzanti Jr, Corresponding Author Alex Mazzanti Jr alexmazzantijr@gmail.com orcid.org/0000-0003-4448-9672 Universidade de São Paulo Alex Mazzanti Jr. Universidade de São Paulo São Paulo SP, Brazil alexmazzantijr@gmail.comSearch for more papers by this author First published: 20 September 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-968X.12167 † This paper was supported by São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), grants #2015/26060-5 and #2017/06554-9. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their relevant suggestions and corrections. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume118, Issue1March 2020Pages 79-93 RelatedInformation

ЛАТИНСЬКА МОВА В ІНТЕРНЕТ-МЕМАХ: НОВА КОМУНІКАТИВНА ФУНКЦІЯ

The article is devoted to the research of Internet memes as universally precedential cultural phenomena, to determining Latin special role in the construction and functioning of virtual memes. Latin Internet memes are considered as emotionally colored units of cultural information the first source of which are different elements of the knowledge of Latin that are copied and disseminated among Internet users during communication as a text (inscription, reference) or as a text and an icon part (drawing, photo, table). On the base of new virtual units of communication the functions of memes in Internet communication were determined, in particular: game, representative, communicative, phatic, integrative, affective. Local Latin Internet memes served as the material for the research placed on English sites “Classic Latin Memes”, “Dank Latin Memes”, as well as on Russian site “Latine masculino”. Dead Latin within Internet memes renews its communicative function and gains more popularity in the Internet space thanks to its perception as “prestigious” language of communication. By style the majority of Latin Internet memes are ironically marked and motivating, though demotivating memes are also possible. The goal of motivating memes is “to revive”, modernize archaic Latin and make it more accessible and attractive in order to encourage the focus audience to study it. Internet communication via memes’ mediation represents complex mental processes, when the user has not only to perceive a background picture and decode (translate) Latin text, but also to comprehend cultural connotations and associative links which result in comic effect during memes’ perception. The research of Latin Internet memes in pragmatic, communicative and cognitive aspects is of positive perspective both from synchronic and diachronic points of view, since it presents new opportunities for the study of modern evolutionary processes in the history of ancient language, reveals a mechanism of decoding cultural information, contributes to the development of Internet linguistics.

Az archaikus költészet szerepe Ioachimus Vadianus költészetelméletében

The aim of my study is the analysis of the views on the archaic Latin literature in the early modern works based on the theory and practice of poetry, especially in the Swiss humanist’s, Joachim von Watt’s work (De poetica et carminis ratione). The concepts of poeta vates, poeta theologus, and poeta eruditus are commonly used by the Italian authors – who knew the most important authors of the early Roman literature regarding this period ‒ in order to emphasize the moralistic and social morals of the archaic poetry’s lecture. Some of the authors – for example Pietro Crinito ‒ following Suetonius emphasized the historical analysis of the ancient literature in a particular way. The innovation of Joachim von Watt’s work was the adaptation of this view of the Italian authors, and it is not present in the works of other Viennese humanists on poetry in the first half of the 16th century.

Topicalization versus Left-Dislocation in Biblical Latin

AbstractLatin and Old French exhibit a fairly similar range of constructions emphasizing the Topic: Topicalizations and Left-Dislocations. Our aim is to investigate the hypothesis of a continuity from Latin to Romance languages. In this context we look into the data provided by the Vulgate. Indeed Jerome's choices in his translation of the Biblical texts reveal the level of vitality of each construction.Actually Jerome chooses Topicalizations rather than Left-Dislocations, although Left-Dislocations were the usual way of emphasizing Topics in Biblical Hebrew. After a summary of Archaic and Classical Latin constructions, we compare Jerome's strategies on the one hand with the data from Vetus Latina, on the other hand with some contemporary texts, such as Augustine's

-i and -osio genitives in archaic Latin: different markers for different possession types?

AbstractThis contribution offers a concrete, textually based account of the functional possibilities for the expression of different types of possession (exclusive and inalienable “ownership” versus “accidental belonging,” established by convention or on an occasional event) in Archaic Latin. This account is based on the competition between the genitive-marking morphemes -

Les emprunts gaulois dans la littérature latine archaïque

Gaulish Loanwords in the archaic Latin Literature. This paper mainly attempts to highlight the technical and methodological difficulties encountered in the analysis of the texts by Latin authors documenting the language and culture of the old Celtic world. It is then suggested that a novel reading of these texts should be supported by the linguistic analysis of the data considered or to be considered Celtic.

14. Perizonius, Niebuhr and the Character of Early Roman Tradition

‘The famous Ballad theory of Niebuhr of which we seldom hear now except in connexion with Macaulay's lays’ … These are the words of Mr. Last's tutor—W. Warde Fowler. When he wrote them, in 1912, Warde Fowler was apparently not aware that the ballad theory had been revived a few years before by an Italian historian who was to exercise a deep influence on Mr. Last. But the ballad theory involves other names—such as Perizonius, Vico, Niebuhr, Schwegler, Mommsen—which have been ever present in Mr. Last's mind and have often recurred in conversation. In more recent years the ballad theory has lost nothing of its prestige in Italy; two pupils of De Sanctis, A. Rostagni and L. Pareti, have made it the cornerstone of their interpretation of archaic Latin literature and historiography. Indeed, the theory has again found favour in England.

Funny Words in Plautine Comedy (review)

Reviewed by: Funny Words in Plautine Comedy Alison Sharrock Michael Fontaine . Funny Words in Plautine Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. xvi + 311 pp. Cloth, $74. It is a well-known fact that anyone addicted to jokes based on wordplay deserves to be punished. My mathematician father was such a one. A mathematician friend of his, never previously known to display any signs of possessing a sense of humor, once wholly redeemed himself in the eyes of my revered parent by telling how, on a recent trip to China, he had been reminded of his colleague when seeing a sign giving a shop owner's name: Yu Pun Wong. To elucidate so subtle, elusive, and unstable a linguistic game as this from a culture so far from our own as the archaic Latin theater is a task requiring a high degree of, in almost equal measure, philological expertise, creative imagination, and generous readership (which is willing to grant the benefit of the doubt). Fontaine brings the first two desiderata to this book; on the whole, I am inclined to bring the last. Fontaine's thesis is that Plautus' work contains a significant number of puns which for various reasons (archaic spelling, very early missing of the point, loss of colloquial vocabulary) became barely visible almost as soon as the plays moved from being theater scripts into being literary texts. Exegesis (one is inclined to say, extraction) of these wordplays has a number of effects: not only the production of humor, which is likely to be the most accessible, but also a reflection on the nature of the audience (elite, sophisticated, and bilingual, at least in part), clarification of character and plot, and rectification of the supposedly false view of Plautine comedy as surreal buffoonery in a Greco-Roman never-never land. It is this last point with which I find it hardest to agree. Even if we accept Fontaine's arguments that there are no Latin names in Plautine comedy (all those you are thinking of are shown in fact to be Greek names with Latin jokes momentarily or lastingly attached), and that Plautus is not only interested in buffoonery, the argument for a Plautus who is simply Graecum magis ("a more Greek thing," cf. Pl. Men. 9), just another Hellenistic poet, rather than one for whom being Graecum magis, in Latin, in Rome, is a great joke and a remarkably astute act of commentary on contemporary culture, strikes me as an unnecessary simplification. Many of the puns and similar jokes that Fontaine identifies are not immediately [End Page 510] obvious from the text alone, while some of them, once explained, would come into the category of "painfully obvious," the joke which is funny by not being funny. Fontaine makes the suggestion that such jokes might be indicated in performance by sound or gesture, in the manner of modern performance in which a "drum roll and cymbal crash [to] coincide with the collective groan of the audience" (41). One of my teenage sons often uses a mimed version of this, somewhat ironically, to acknowledge attempts at humor in others. Fontaine calls these "rimshot" jokes. Since we are regularly told that we miss so much by having only the text of a Plautine play rather than the total performance, the proposition seems plausible. It is worth bearing in mind the likelihood of such visual and aural clues, if the reader finds him or herself thinking the likelihood rather small that the audience would pick up on so complex a pun as those suggested by Fontaine. A good pun needs more than just complete or partial homophony of two words, but must be linked back in by some further element in meaning or suggestion. A potential problem with some of the puns identified by Fontaine is that they seem almost to go too far in the direction of additional complexity, such that two or even more hidden steps are required in order to link the elements together. One example is in the short section entitled "Follow the Money" (164-68) on lucre in Amphitryo. The analysis opens with a nice reading of the nomen-omen in Merc-ury's connection with merc...

The present tense with future meaning in the accusative and infinitive construction in Plautus and Terence

AbstractIn the accusative and infinitive construction in Archaic Latin, both present and future tense infinitives can be found if there is future meaning; semantic differences cannot be detected. Various scholars have tried to show that the present infinitive is colloquial here or that the alternation between the two tenses has to do with semantic differences in the governing verbs. However, on closer examination of the data such theories cannot be upheld. In this paper, I shall demonstrate that the present infinitive is restricted to telic events. Moreover, it is particularly frequent if the subjects of the superordinate and subordinate verbs are identical. The present infinitive of the verb ‘to give’ occurs more often than present infinitives of other verbs. Finally, we can observe how such present infinitives become less frequent if we compare Plautus and Terence.1

Introduction: Ennius and the Traditions of Epic

The challenges involved in writing about Ennius's Annales hardly need restating. Of the works of Ennius (and he was apparently a prolific writer), we have only a list of titles and some fragments—for the Annales approximately 600 full or partial lines—that have been preserved mostly by later authors, especially grammarians.1 Add to this our patchy knowledge of the social, political, and cultural context in which the Annales was produced, and it becomes evident that any study of this epic will be more likely to raise questions and problems than to give clear and straightforward answers. The reader is thus entitled to ask why we should take the trouble to bring together a collection of papers about an author and a poem the study of which will inevitably involve a significant amount of guesswork. When we organized the panel "Ennius and the Invention of Roman Epic" for the annual meeting of the American Philological Association in San Francisco in January 2004, our intent was clear. The last twenty years have witnessed a renewed, if still somewhat tentative, interest in the study of archaic Latin literature, spurred, in the first instance, by the appearance [End Page 397] of Otto Skutsch's authoritative edition of the fragments of the Annales. In itself the culmination of a scholarly career with its roots in a great tradition,2 the work of Skutsch, along with the important textual studies of Sebastiano Timpanaro and Scevola Mariotti, which represent the best of Italian philology,3 have enabled investigations that look beyond metrics and stylistics, beyond arguments about placing fragments in their correct context, and beyond source hunting and influence tracing—all concerns that rightly dominated the study of the fragments of Ennius at one time. The fruits of these advances are now being reaped in an array of studies that, by the application of new theories and new methodologies, many of them influenced by intellectual currents in fields beyond classics, test conventional assumptions and traditional readings of early Roman literary production. It seemed to us, then, that the time was ripe for bringing together a number of specialists in the field of archaic Latin literature and Roman cultural studies in order to reassess Ennius's epic. In all the papers that follow, reassessment of the Annales results, above all else, from approaching the poem within a specifically Roman frame that encompasses the analysis of the Annales' relationship with older Latin preliterary traditions, the social and cultural context in which the text was produced, its role in the articulation of a historical consciousness in the life of the Roman community, and, eventually, its varied reception. The contributors to this volume will give different and, at times, incompatible answers to the question of where Ennius's Annales stands today. Studies of the Annales, and of archaic Roman literature generally, are not defined by a unity of approach and methodology. To fashion a completely coherent and unified picture would mean denying the true state of affairs and giving up a real source of vitality for studies of this period. For this reason, in our role as editors, we have not attempted to hide disagreement or to reconcile differences. On the contrary, the purpose of this volume is to present the reader with the complex variety of approaches and readings that best characterize contemporary scholarship on the Annales. The eight [End Page 398] papers collected here represent a sampling of the work being done both by younger scholars and by established voices in the field. Five of the papers are revised and expanded versions of presentations made originally at the meeting in San Francisco. The three other papers, by Habinek, Rüpke, and Wiseman, were commissioned specifically for this volume in order to carry the discussion beyond the constraints imposed on the original group by the conference-panel format and into the specific areas of expertise of...

A few remarks on the habeo + object + passive perfect participle construction in archaic Latin, with special reference to lexical semantics and the reanalysis process

SummaryIn this paper I focus on the contexts that might have favoured the reanalysis process which leads the sequence

‘In the interstices of procedure’

Summary “Ancient law is hidden in the interstices of procedure” (Sir Henry Sumner Maine). We examine three Indo-European linguistic and cultural analogs form the sphere of legal language, each illustrating a different approach to comparative Indo-European Law. 1) structural: The forms of oath for the three non-servile castes in Hindu law, satyena, vāhānayudhaih, gobījakāñcanaih (Mn.8.113) reflect the hierarchy of Dumézil’s idéologie des trois functions. Parallels for the second and third are noted in Old Norse, Old Irish, and archaic Latin oaths. 2) lexical: Cretan Greek (peuthen), Germanic (*beudan) and Old Irish (ad-boind) agree in attesting forms of the root *bheudh- in the meaning ‘give legal notice (of), announce, proclaim.’ This meaning is inherited and part of the semantics of Indo-European active transitive *bhunédh-ti (*bhunéddhi). 3) institutional: The ‘Pecularly Roman’ opposition of res mancipi/res nec mancipi reflects a traditional hierarchy in the categories of property which is of Common Indo-European origin: large cattle, man, land. Indian law in the sanctions of false witness (Mn. 13.14–16) and Old Iranian law in the classes of contract (Vd. 4.1–4) both make reference to the identical hierarchy of the categories of property, as a traditional ‘yardstick’. By the tenets of the comparative method, these three traditional hierarchies, all equally arbitrarily within their own culture, require the postulation of a common original.

Parallelism in Plautus

This article begins by noting that in classical Hebrew poetry there is parallelism of three distinct kinds which were first discussed by Robert Lowth in 1753: synonymous parallelism (the commonest type), consisting in the simple repetition of the same thought in slightly different words; antithetical parallelism, produced by contrasting the first member with the second; synthetic parallelism, in which the first member is developed or completed by a similar thought in the second (or third, when it is triplets which are in question). This phenomenon of Hebrew poetry is found frequently in early Latin poetry but has not yet been specifically recognised. The article examines two plays by Plautus and quotes numerous other instances at large from archaic Latin poets to establish the point.

A propósito del hapax etrusco &lt;i&gt;patara&lt;/i&gt; y su posible reflejo en latín

In an Etruscan graffito on a small ceramic bowl the term patara occurs, which has been interpreted as a «gentilizio» hitherto unknown. The entire graffito would then mean: ‘I (belong to) Laris Patara’; and this represents a well-documented type of epigraph. It is suggested here that patara is a common noun corresponding to Latin patera , attested also in the form pat(h)ara , certainly an archaic Latin form. The following translation is then proposed: ‘I (am) the bowl of Laris’, a fairly common type of epigraph in Etruscan.

Notas al léxico jurídico latino. Sobre escit = erit y sarpta = putata

From Festus on the existence of archaic Latin escit = ‘erit’ and sarpta = ‘putata’ is accepted. According to this article, escit is a misreading for essit = esit and sarpta for carpta . Both forms would stem from an easily explainable confusion between s and c .

La ciudad invisible de los clásicos. Entre Aulo Gelio e Italo Calvino

La formulación de classicus para hablar sobre los mejores autores nace en el siglo ii de nuestra era. Surge a partir de un uso metafórico que adopta el sentido arcaico del término, pues classicus está referido en principio a una antigua división social establecida en Roma durante los tiempos del rey Servio Tulio sobre la base de la solvencia económica. Así pues, el uso metafórico designa a los mejores autores latinos arcaicos, como si fueran habitantes ideales de una antigua Roma literaria. El término va a sufrir muchas modificaciones, no ajenas al propio devenir de la Historia, hasta llegar a la última gran formulación, la de Italo Calvino, ya a finales del siglo xx. En pocas palabras, se evoluciona desde una concepción jerárquica a una abiertamente personal de la idea de “clásico”. A pesar de todos estos cambios, entre la primera y la última formulación hay, casualmente, un sorprendente hilo conductor: una ciudad invisible y un autor latino que habita en ella.