No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
VARRO ON ADJECTIVE GRADATION: DE LINGVA LATINA 6.59 AND AELIUS STILO'S AVOIDANCE OF NOVISSIMVS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2019
Extract
Varro's De lingua Latina (= Ling.) is a treasure trove of information. Of the originally twenty-five books, six have come down to us more or less complete. Among these, Books 5–7 give us many hundreds of etymologies, and Books 8–10 discuss the question whether Latin morphology is regular or not. What Varro rarely comments on is sociolinguistic variation. The sociolinguistic comments in Varro's work can almost be counted on one hand. For instance, in 5.162 Varro remarks that cenaculum, from cena ‘dinner’, means ‘attic’ in Roman Latin, but that the original meaning was, as one might expect, ‘dining-room’, a meaning preserved in the non-Roman dialects of Latium, Falerii and Corduba in Spain; the meaning also lives on in religious uses in Lanuvium. In 7.96, Varro tells us that some words are pronounced with -ae- by some, but with -ē- by others. We know that non-Roman varieties of Latin monophthongized -ae- earlier than the Roman dialect did. Varro mentions pairs like scaena / scēna ‘stage’, a loan from Greek σκηνή, which shows that -ae- is hypercorrect here. Interestingly, only in one such pair is the variant with -ē- ascribed to country people, in the name Maesius / Mēsius, and this is indeed the only pair where the diphthong -ae- is original rather than the result of hypercorrection.
- Type
- Shorter Notes
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Classical Association 2019
References
1 I am grateful for the generous support from the Leverhulme Trust, which has enabled me to work on my edition of Varro's De lingua Latina and to write this article. I would like to thank Costas Panayotakis and Panagiotis Filos for their helpful comments on this paper, and Luis Alfonso Hernández Miguel for sending me his translation of the passage.
2 See Kent, R.G., Varro: On the Latin Language, with an English Translation, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1938), 1.xv–xviiGoogle Scholar; and now my Varro: Latina, De Lingua. Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2019), 6–7Google Scholar.
3 Kent (n. 2), 1.226–7.
4 Riganti, E., Varrone, De lingua Latina libro VI: testo critico, traduzione e commento (Bologna, 1978)Google Scholar, ad loc.
5 Flobert, P., Varron, La langue latine, livre VI: texte établi, traduit et commenté (Paris, 1985), 137Google Scholar.
6 Kühner, R. and Holzweissig, F., Ausführliche Grammatik der lateinischen Sprache, vol. 1: Elementar-, Formen- und Wortlehre (Hannover, 1912 2), 566–7Google Scholar.
7 See also Lyons, J., Language and Linguistics: An Introduction (Cambridge, 1981), 44–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar for reasons why grammaticality judgements need to be treated with caution.
8 I am pleased to see that Hernández Miguel has a carefully hedged footnote that is in broad agreement with my analysis; see Miguel, L.A. Hernández, Varrón: La lengua latina, libros V–VI, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1998)Google Scholar, ad loc.
9 Krebs, J.Ph. and Schmalz, J.H., Antibarbarus der lateinischen Sprache: Nebst einem kurzen Abriss der Geschichte der lateinischen Sprache und Vorbemerkungen über reine Latinität (Basle, 1905 7)Google Scholar, s.v.