Latin Speakers Research Articles

African Latin: The problem of labdacism

AbstractIn late antiquity, there has been a public opinion that African Latin is specific and different from the Latin spoken in other regions of the Roman Empire. Several grammarians also mention – in comparison with the so-called classical Latin – incorrect (linguistic) phenomena, which are associated with the Latin speakers of the African provinces. In my paper, I will examine one of these (perceived?) Africanisms, the wrong use of the l sound/letter (labdacism) through a selection of texts available in the grammatical tradition, and finally, with the inclusion of African epigraphical material, I will discuss the phenomenon of wrong gemination and degemination in African provinces, which might closely be related to the phenomenon called labdacism by grammarians.

Aromanian Cultural and Linguistic Shift to Greek

Aromanian-armân, (Weigand, 1895) is an oral Eastern-Romance language spoken by the Aromanians (armâni, or armãneashti), an ethnic group historically known for transhumance, dispersed over a wide area of the Balkans in what is present-day Peninsular Greece, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Southern Romania, Serbia, and Albania. These people have been noted as Aromanians or Vlachs sometime since the eighth century AD. (Caranica, 1990). Their ethnicity (Eriksen, 2010) is controversial with Greeks believing them Latinised Greeks, Romanians considering them Romanian, others as Balkan natives from Wallachia (Ruzica, 2006). In Greek, the current word for Aromanian is in fact ‘Vlach’ believed to originate from the Latin terms Volcae, Volci (Volks, Wolks) referring to a Celtic tribe from Gaul that had learnt Latin and become Latinized. The Volks-Wolks were the closest neighbors to Germanic tribes in the area, which resulted in Germans referring to all Latin speakers as ‘Volks,’ the same way they did with their language. For clarification, in this study: Aromanian, Vlach (-) Aromanian and Vlach will all be used to refer to this ethnic group and language. The word Volci was adopted by Germanic speakers and took different forms over time: Walachen, Welchland, Wallis, Wallais, Wallons, Wales, Welschme etc. These terms are still visible in different European languages today and refer to ‘Latin speaker.’ The Slavic speakers borrowed the word from the Germans as: Olahy, Olahi, Valachi, Voloh, Vloh whereas the Byzantines borrowed it as ‘Vlachs’ (Tapanikos, 2020). Their isolated modus vivendi, between pastoral valleys and high mountains, confined them to hardship and socio-cultural periphery, and allowed relative immunity from major European conflicts and periods of unrest spanning short of a millennium. From 1975 when the modern Greek Republic is finally consolidated, the ideology of ‘one people, one language’ is an intrinsic part of Greek nationality and nationalism (Moschonas, 2004). Lacking written, standardized forms, Aromanian has been transmitted orally from generation to generation in the Epirus, Macedonia and Thessally regions of Greece. With profound socio-economic changes and rewards, Aromanians left their pastoral lifestyle in large numbers (Beis, 2000) attracted by prospects of a better future in Greek urban centers and Western European countries, USA, or Australia. In modern times, with Greek being the only language of instruction and communication in the wider society (Chomsky, 1971), the generational language-transfer cycle has been broken, and Aromanian is now endangered (Dinas et al., 2011). On the other hand, Aromanian folklore and traditional festivals are very much alive through associations like the Pan-Hellenic Federation of Cultural Associations of Vlachs, while many self-identified Aromanians do not speak a word of their ancestral language, by choice (Kahl, 2004). How did this (apparent) contradiction come to be? What drove Aromanians away from their language and led to the assimilation into Greek society, language, and culture so completely that it will lead to the death of Aromanian in Greece?

Émigrés: French Words That Turned English

Etymologies are often entertaining, but it is not always obvious what they mean. Take the case of Old Frankish *sal, meaning a single-roomed dwelling. The word was taken over by speakers of Vulgar Latin as sala, and by 1100 CE it had become a word of Anglo-Norman French, since in The Song of Roland it crops up as sale, meaning the living area of a castle. Some time later, it wandered into Italian. Renaissance architects wanted to make a new word for the increasingly grandiose spaces they were designing, so they added an augmentative suffix, producing salone. In the seventeenth century, French translations of Italian works on architecture reproduced the new term, only dropping the final e so as to keep the masculine gender of the Italian. French salon came into English in the early eighteenth century, initially as a word for a large and lofty room; but as French speakers applied it more and more to social functions occurring in such spaces, English speakers did so too. Then came a fork: a phonological adaptation produced saloon, which drifted off as a fully naturalized word of English toward hotels, carriages, bars, and cars; but salon persisted nonetheless. By retaining the stress pattern and marginally nasal final vowel of its source language, the doublet has remained in use as a xenism—a word of English understood to be not English, but understood in English all the same.How many such words are there? Hundreds, maybe thousands. Coupé, du jour, fuselage, pizza, paparazzi, sauerkraut, Zeitgeist—all signal their foreignness either by nonstandard pronunciation of written consonants (s, g, j, z), the presence of foreign diacritics, or irregular tonic stress. These are the kinds of loanwords that Scholar calls “émigrés,” but he gives us not thousands or hundreds or even a dozen of them: his chapters deal only with four: à la mode, ennui, naïveté, and caprice. The histories of these words do not really teach us any more about the cultural, social, and political relations between England and France than do saloon and salon, which is not much at all, or any other set of loanwords that retain phonetic or orthographic signs of foreignness. Scholar nonetheless does his level best to put his favored four at the heart of early modern English culture. Lengthy accounts of a play by Dryden, a famous work of Schiller's, an essay by Raymond Williams, Caribbean notions of creolization, and a John le Carré novel, learned though they all may be, do not really make the argument more persuasive, or even clear. By the end of this beautifully produced and floridly written book, the reader (or at least this reader) is not quite sure what it was really about. The very title of Émigrés repurposes a xenism which in regular usage is associated with high social status (we never talk of émigré workers, for example), thus exhibiting what I suppose the whole field ought to demonstrate: the ways in which new, hard, or nonnative words are always used to establish pecking orders between speakers, between their interlocutors and between their worlds. In Bourdieusian terms: not to make distinctions, but to create distinction.

Les dévots latinophones de Mithra disaient-ils leurs ‘mystères’—et si oui, comment ?

Abstract Studying the epigraphic testimonies of Mithraists should be a suitable approach to our task of tracing the mysteries in Latin, because Roman worshippers of Mithras were Latin speakers in their vast majority. Moreover, a certain proportion of them had their origin in the Greek-speaking Mediterranean, where mysteria were known. And yet there is almost no lexicon of ‘mysteries’ in these texts, although a Latin lexicon was available for talking about the mysteries. A close study of the few terms that might be related to an eventual expression of the ‘mysteries’—sacratus/a, consacranus/a, fratres, syndexi—produces results less convincing than is usually thought. However, at the end of the fourth century in Rome there does seem to be a shift in the way in which the entry into each grade (traditio) is expressed. In the end, this kind of lexical analysis reveals less about the ‘mysteries’ of Mithra than it does about the profoundly Roman nature of the organization of these religious groups.

Comprehending Comprehensible Input (CI): Some Observations

AbstractMost people who use the word ‘Latin’ as the name of a language in antiquity (not Medieval or Neo-Latin therefore) seem unaware that Latin was a continuum made up of many different varieties, Classical Latin (which they identify with Latin) being only one of them. So when they talk of spoken Latin they mean spoken Classical Latin, no other variety from antiquity being available that is suitable to be spoken. This is ironic on two counts. First, the overwhelming majority of native Latin speakers did not speak Classical Latin at all. Secondly, the small minority of people who did speak it did not do so routinely as a language of everyday conversation, but only on certain formal occasions and in certain public situations. They spoke routinely the appropriate form of their first language, the form that was used by a social, cultural and educational elite. This was not Classical Latin, which was not an acquired form of Latin but one that was learned as if it were a second language. What the language they did speak routinely was like we do not know, and no doubt it comprised several different registers, as languages do. Whether they realise it or not, people who engage in informal conversations in formal Classical Latin today are not re-enacting any authentic experience that was to be had in the ancient world.

CAN FIGURES PERSUADE? ZEUGMA AS A FIGURE OF PERSUASION IN LATIN

AbstractUse of rhetorical figures has been an element of persuasive speech at least since Gorgias of Leontini, for whom such deliberate deviations from ordinary literal language were a defining feature of what he called the ‘psychagogic art’. But must we consider figures of speech limited to an ornamental and merely stylistic function, as some ancient and still many modern theorists suggest? Not according to contemporary cognitive rhetoric, which proposes that figures of speech can play a fundamentally argumentative role in speech by evoking a level of shared meaning between speaker and listener, and simultaneously by affording the possibility of reorganizing this common ground. This paper argues that, in Latin literature, zeugma—the ‘linking together’ of two elements (usually nouns or prepositional phrases) with a third (usually a verb) that is semantically compatible with only one of them—can and very often does operate argumentatively, and that it does so by surfacing figurative relationships that normally remain below the conscious awareness of Latin speakers and by imparting a certain structure to these relationships. What very often motivates the selection of elements within zeugma—and what makes zeugma more than simply a stylistic device—are in fact metaphorical structures that are highly conventionalized in Latin's semantic system. In tapping into symbolic associations that are deeply entrenched in the language and thought of Latin speakers, zeugma therefore provided a ready-made device for constructing arguments in context.

THE PHONETICS OF NASAL‐FRICATIVE SEQUENCES IN LATIN

AbstractInscriptional material and descriptions by grammarians from the classical period indicate that vowels were regularly lengthened before‐ns‐and‐nf‐sequences in Latin, e.g.,cōnsulandīnfēlīx. Additionally, nasals were often lost in this environment. The nasal deletion was driven by articulatory mechanisms, namely the difficulty of articulating a nasal directly before an anterior fricative. Diverting air to the nasal cavity reduces oral air pressure; however, the articulation of fricatives requires high air pressure at the point of constriction in order for frication of the air stream to occur. Speakers of Latin reduced the articulatory burden of these sequences by reducing nasal air flow, and over time the nasals were deleted. Preceding vowels were then lengthened to compensate for the lost mora associated with the deleted nasal. The articulatory explanation for the development of nasal‐fricative sequences will be supported by the facts of sociolinguistics: the reintroduction of nasals in‐ns‐and‐nf‐sequences is associated with elite speech and formal contexts, where the coarticulation between these two segments can be closely monitored by speakers.

No venimos del lat�n by Carme Jim�nez Huertas (review)

Reviewed by: No venimos del latín by Carme Jiménez Huertas John M. Ryan Carme Jiménez Huertas. No venimos del latín. Las Sandalias de Mercurio Press, 2016. 160p. No venimos del latín's scholarly analysis argues against the traditional position that Latin was the progenitor of the modern Romance languages. Following Christina Bescan's Foreword, Jiménez Huertas explains the "influence" of Latin and asserts that it was primarily a written, rather than spoken, language, with both the Iberian and Latin writing systems coexisting throughout the Peninsula well into the second century CE. Chapter 1 concludes that the first Roman settlers of Hispania were decidedly not Latin speakers, many of whom were mercenaries foreign to Rome, speakers of other Italic languages, or even Iberian locals. The subsequent chapter underscores that internal linguistic changes are necessarily slow. It reasons that morphosyntactic changes, thought to have occurred between Latin and the Romance languages in the very narrow window of 400-500 years, could not have taken place, based simply on the notion that people speak the way they think, and could not possibly change the way they think in such a short span of time. In Chapter 3, Jiménez Huertas denies the simultaneous existence of a written "Classical" Latin alongside a spoken "Vulgar" Latin. Drawing on the historic proclamation of the Council of Tours of 813 CE and select early texts, such as the San Millán Glosses, the Strasberg Oaths, and the Valpuesta Charters, the author proposes instead a scenario in which written Latin existed alongside not the purported Vulgar Latin, but rather a variety of several "other" languages, be they Italic or not. The chapter ends with the assertion that due to distance, isolation, and separate evolution, the various Romance languages should have manifested many more differences than they currently exhibit, and instead, that many of the characteristics that they share were not in fact features of Latin. The remaining four chapters address certain shared characteristics [End Page 70] at the levels of phonetics, lexicology, and morphosyntax, respectively. Chapter 4 showcases common sound patterns and processes such as palatalization and diphthongization, as well as suppression and addition of sounds. It also makes more general comparisons between syllable structure, vowels, and consonants in Latin and modern Romance languages and pays particular attention to stops, fricatives, affricates and sonorants. Chapter 5 on lexicon points out that several words shared among the different Romance languages did not arise from Latin words used for the same concepts, concluding with a discussion of toponyms and etymologies. Chapter 6, the longest chapter, discusses the nature of Romance morphosyntax and its differences from Latin. This includes generalities among the inflected grammatical categories on the one hand, consisting of nouns, adjectives, pronouns, determiners and verbs, and uninflected forms, such as adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions, on the other. It closes with a discussion of the generalized loss of grammatical case markers, change in word order, and the formation of interrogatives. The book's conclusion, in the form of an unnumbered final chapter, poses the overarching question as to origin of the Romance languages and proceeds to explain that they come from no one place in particular. Rather, it suggests that they were already in existence at the time of Roman conquest and that they definitively did not arise from Latin, but probably from some combination of Oscan, Umbrian, and Sabellic languages. The author adds that the case of Rumanian as an outlier language serves as strong additional evidence against the idea of a Latin origin, asserting that modern Rumanian is spoken throughout the entirety of Rumania despite the fact that the Romans only occupied a fourth of this region. According to Jiménez Huertas, this lends credence to the notion that Latin was not a mother tongue at all for the Romance languages but rather a sibling. The author calls for additional research into the language spoken by the Iberian substrate in order to have a better idea of the true origins of Ibero Romance. She suggests that current evidence from its writing system of two sibilants, consonant lenition, dual rhotic sounds, and vowel distribution similar to Ibero Romance varieties make it a promising...

Bilingual Epigraphs in Rome Translation, Coexistence and Trascriptions between Greek and Latin

Greek/Latin bilingual inscriptions of Rome provide us with the opportunity to study the interaction/overlapping and linguistic mixtures between Greek and Latin speakers in the multiethnic Roman population from different points of view. By studying such texts as a whole (heterogeneous for typology, production, destination, chronology) I was able to distinguish various expressions of bilingualism: translation, transliteration, code-switching, juxtaposition of the two languages, isolated Greek words in Latin contexts and vice versa. The relationship between Latin and Greek is detectable through both epigraphic and linguistic style (layout, hierarchy, lexicon, morphological and phonetic facets).

Epigrafi bilingui a Roma

Greek/Latin bilingual inscriptions of Rome provide us with the opportunity to study the interaction/overlapping and linguistic mixtures between Greek and Latin speakers in the multiethnic Roman population from different points of view. By studying such texts as a whole (heterogeneous for typology, production, destination, chronology) I was able to distinguish various expressions of bilingualism: translation, transliteration, code-switching, juxtaposition of the two languages, isolated Greek words in Latin contexts and vice versa. The relationship between Latin and Greek is detectable through both epigraphic and linguistic style (layout, hierarchy, lexicon, morphological and phonetic facets).

Teaching ‘correct’ Latin in late antique Rome

ABSTRACT Roman grammatici taught formal registers of Latin language through reading Latin poets. By late antiquity, there was an ever widening gap between ‘correct’ formal Latin and the language which students used in daily contexts. Equally, the texts used in schools were centuries old and written in highly contrived literary registers. In addition, students at even the most traditional and elite schools in Rome may well have come from all over the empire, and were not necessarily native Latin speakers. One grammaticus, the late antique teacher and writer Servius (fl. 390–410), has left a vast commentary which indicates some of the approaches he used in teaching ‘correct’ Latin usage. We can tell, from his commentary, the linguistic difficulties his students seem to have encountered with Latin. In this paper, I examine how Servius addressed multiple purposes: reading Latin verse, daily communication and ‘correct’ formal Latin. I show instances in which Servius addresses students of differing linguistic backgrounds, although he only uses the target language in his Commentary, and perhaps in his classroom.

On Cicero’s fine-grained perception of the prosodic features in Latin

AbstractThe long tradition of philology and comparative linguistics acknowledges the distinctive value of vowel length in Latin phonology. However, to think of Latin as a spoken language, and not only as a literary one, implies the adoption of a sociolinguistic perspective based on the idea of variation, at all levels of grammar. In this view, with due caution, it is possible to argue that vowel length was unstableab antiquoin spoken Latin, at least in the low diaphasic and diastratic levels. In this view, the paper analyzes some passages by Cicero often interpreted as testimonies in favor of the maintenance of contrastive vowel length in the phonological competence of Roman speakers. In those passages, Cicero compares the performance of the orators in theforumto the one of the actors in the theater. This comparison is based on the idea that the competence in the phonetic and prosodic elements of language could determine the success of the locutory act in both communicative contexts. The detailed analysis of the texts suggests that the whistles of the audience in the theater of which Cicero speaks to us might refer to prosodic errors concerning the length of the verse rather than that of the vowel. Therefore, those testimonies could not be considered an evidence in favor of the fine-grained perception of vowel length by all the speakers of Latin.

The Greek Transliteration and Pronunciation of the Latin Consonant U

The use of the letter β in Greek transliterations of the Latin consonant u was not a development of the Augustan period. Both literary and epigraphic evidence attest that in certain positions β was a viable option for Greek authors and stone cutters by the end of the 3rd century B.C.E., and that its use spread to other positions in the succeeding generations. The increasing β/u substitutions in turn demonstrate a shift in the pronunciation of Latin u from [w] to [β] that occurred among Greek speakers of Latin over the same period.

Let Us Make the Effort: Science into Latin in Antiquity

AbstractScientific writing initially came to ancient Latin speakers as a foreign discipline. Greek-language sources, in the form both of written texts and of living speakers, brought a wide range o...

Arabic Linguistic Identity and the Tribal Confederacy of the Ghassan on the Eve of the Islamic Conquests

In 528/9 AD, al-Harith, the leader of a tribal confederation known as the Ghassan, was recognized as Rome’s ally on the eastern frontier. This alliance established the Ghassan, despite following a heretical Christian sect, as the principal authority in what is modern-day Syria and Jordan. This alliance also secured the Ghassan’s right to collect taxes independently and to mobilize against the Empire’s enemies. Moreover, Ghassanid leaders received distinguished epithets which had previously been reserved largely for the Roman aristocracy. A recently discovered mosaic in northern Jordan suggests that these titles were being used by the Ghassan not in isolation but as stratified ranks for their ruling class. Furthermore, this mosaic, along with significant epigraphic evidence, suggests that the Ghassan spoke Arabic well before the Islamic conquests, despite many scholars’ belief that the Ghassan spoke Christian Palestinian Aramaic. Although it is difficult to define an Arab identity prior to the Islamic conquests, the Arabs of South Arabia would have shared at least a common language with the Ghassan to the North. Additionally, it cannot be doubted that the Ghassan would have had direct contact with Muhammad’s ancestors through trade routes such as Wadi Sirhan. Early adherents to Islam may have seen this Arab group in the North, which had been able to achieve a semi-autonomous existence on the Roman frontier, despite neither following the orthodox faith nor being native speakers of Greek or Latin, as a potential model for a new Arab polity.

Standard And Non-Standard Latin

Readers would do well to keep in mind at all times the following distinctions when reading this article: standard/classical and non-standard; native and non-native speaker; literate and illiterate. I use ‘second’ and ‘foreign’ interchangeably of a language, as any distinction that may be made is not relevant in the context of a world in which there were no nation-states (or notions of political correctness). If I were to prefer one to the other it would be ‘foreign’: native speakers of Latin regarded everyone else but Greek-speakers as foreigners, or, as they called them, barbari. The foreigners came to have a higher regard for Latin than the native speakers of Latin had for their languages; but unlike the British in more recent times the latter never sought to impose their language on the former, nor even to encourage its adoption by them.

ДИГЛОССИЯ СРЕДНЕВЕКОВЫХ ГЛОССАТОРОВ: ЛИНГВОКУЛЬТУРОЛОГИЧЕСКИЙ АНАЛИЗ ДРЕВНЕВЕРХНЕНЕМЕЦКО-ЛАТИНСКИХ ГЛОССАРИЕВ VIII-X вв

The article deals with the linguistic-culture analysis of the Old High German glossaries of VIII-X c. and the bilingualism of their authors. It is known that main culture, science and religion language in Middle-Age Europe was Latin that was more “prestige” in the society. The Old High German and Middle High German later were in the subordinate status in comparison with the Latin. The bases of this research are glossary “Abrogans” of 750 year (in Aleman dialect of Old High German), St. Gallen glossary (in Aleman dialect too), Kassel glosses (in Bavaria dialect, IX c.), Paris manuscript (in Middle Frank dialect, X c.). These glossaries were aimed both at German Latin speakers and at Romanic traveler arrived in German. The linguistic-culture basic concepts of the remodeling of the Middle-Age glossator linguistic identity are given on the basis of the analysis of the glossaries and the cultural situation represented in those texts.

Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome by Anthony Corbeill

Reviewed by: Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome by Anthony Corbeill Benjamin H. Dunning Anthony Corbeill Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015 Pp. 216. $45.00. In Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome, classicist Anthony Corbeill delves into an aspect of gender and sexuality in antiquity that has received relatively little discussion, especially in early Christian studies: the role that grammatical gender—masculine, feminine, neuter—played for ancient people in organizing the world according to categories of sexual difference. Against the commonplace that “[t]he grammatical gender of inanimate objects . . . is a convenient linguistic convention, having no correspondence with any sort of imagined sexual characteristics of those objects in the real world” (1), Corbeill deftly demonstrates the degree to which rhetorically astute Latin speakers engaged the sexual connotations carried by grammatical gender, both shaping their speech in ways that exploited it and, in turn, producing speech always already shaped in accordance with its parameters. The larger story that the book recounts is a diachronic one, though told primarily from the perspective of Roman grammarians of the late Republic and the Empire such as Marcus Terentius Varro. Chapter One explores a problem that worried the Roman grammarians: instances of Latin nouns displaying variable or uncertain gender in texts of the received tradition. In most cases, ancient perceptions of the “nature” of a given noun (i.e., its natural sex) combined with indications from morphology and usage were enough to settle the matter. But in cases where ambiguity stubbornly persisted, the grammarians recurred to a fourth and more elusive category—auctoritas. Here, Corbeill argues, ancient Latin scholars imagined a time of primeval origins in which the gender of nouns was fluid and only came to be fixed via the wise authority of the ancestors (maiores). More contemporarily, that authority persisted in the work of the poets; thus [End Page 160] “certain poets, in particular Vergil . . . can use an uncommon gender of a noun without being accused of either ignorance or error” (38). Chapter Two explores this peculiar license of the poets in more detail, surveying a range of explanations, both ancient and modern, for the practice. Corbeill’s own proposal reinforces the previous chapter’s argument, suggesting that the poets themselves were “hoping to recall this era when genders of nouns had an inherent instability” (63)—and thereby to demonstrate a certain mastery in continuity with the more ancient ancestral authority. Chapter Three tests this hypothesis against a series of case studies. These are poetic passages (drawn from Plautus, Virgil, Catullus, and others) in which nouns are gendered in seemingly fluid or anomalous ways, evidence of “poetic exploitation” (101), so Corbeill argues, to specific semantic and other literary ends. By contrast, the remainder of the book posits a decided movement away from this earlier fluidity, charting instead a subsequent “calcification of gender boundaries” and with it “the development of a literally heterosexual worldview” (71). Chapter Four proposes an analogy to these changing attitudes towards grammatical gender—but one that “evolved in tandem” (133)—whereby archaic Roman deities of fluid or androgynous sexual status gave way (perhaps historically, but at least in the imagination of later ancient scholars) to strictly dichotomous sexed divinities. Chapter Five traces a similar narrative with respect to the figure of the hermaphrodite, this time one in which the fate of human sexual irregularity is to lose the prodigious status that it carried in the republic, becoming in the empire simply a legal problem to be managed and situated, one way or another, with respect to the increasingly rigid binary of male and female. Scholars of gender and sexuality in early Christianity will benefit from the uniquely positioned set of questions that Corbeill poses with respect to grammatical gender and its relationship to sexual difference across a range of registers (biological, social, literary, political), none of which, he compellingly shows, can be neatly separated. At the same time, things may not have been quite as straightforward throughout every corner of the ancient world as the book’s diachronic presentation could lead one to believe. Indeed, the very complexity of...

Лексика письменных текстов как сокровищница культуры носителей языка и источник ее повышения

The article focuses on the origin of and studies obligatory written textswhich are regarded as a source of knowledge about the culture of native speakers of ancient Indian, ancient Chinese, classic Greek and Latin as well as Arabic and eastern Slavic languages.Much attention is paid to the theory of “correctness” as regards the necessity for native speakers to improve their cultural and linguistic literacy. This article shows the necessity of identifying a specific field within lexicology, i.e. “glossology”, which focuses on analyzing semantically difficult lexis (obsolete words, terms, neologisms, etc.) in obligatory written texts.As a result of a theoretical study of such lexemes, a special field within lexicography, i.e. “glossography”, was identified; this field deals with studying and developing the theoretical and practical basis for creating dictionaries of lexical-semantic difficulties in written texts.

COLUMNAR TRANSLATION: AN ANCIENT INTERPRETIVE TOOL THAT THE ROMANS GAVE THE GREEKS

Among the more peculiar literary papyri uncovered in the past century are numerous bilingual texts of Virgil and Cicero, with the Latin original and a Greek translation arranged in distinctive narrow columns. These materials, variously classified as texts with translations or as glossaries, were evidently used by Greek-speaking students when they first started to read Latin literature. They thus provide a unique window into the experience of the first of many groups of non-native Latin speakers to struggle with reading the classics of Latin literature.