Los patronímicos en los grammatici Latini. La adaptación de una categoría importada

Este artículo analiza la doctrina de los nombres patronímicos (nomina patronyma) en los grammatici Latini, doctrina adaptada de la gramática griega. Las considerables diferencias entre el sistema onomástico latino y el griego ocasionaron, en palabras de Denecker y Swiggers (Denecker, Tim y Pierre Swiggers. 2018. The articulus according to Latin grammarians up to the early Middle Ages: The complex interplay of tradition and innovation in grammatical doctrine. Glotta 94. p. 130), “situaciones de negociación” al momento de trasladar el sistema de una lengua a la otra – por ejemplo, los sufijos – y de ofrecer latinos para ilustrar fenómenos originalmente griegos. Los diferentes grammatici no lidiaron del mismo modo con estas situaciones, y, como resultado, hay una clara diferencia entre la doctrina de los patronímicos de las artes grammaticae “occidentales” y de las “orientales” – i.e., las elaboradas en la parte occidental y oriental del Imperio respectivamente –. A través de un recorrido de la doctrina gramatical de los patronímicos – de Dionisio Tracio a Prisciano –, este artículo analizará cómo los grammatici adaptaron, según su origen, tradiciones y destinatarios, esta categoría a la lengua latina.

Does Prenestinian fhe⋮faked actually exist?

After more than a century since its discovery, the mystery of the Fibula Praenestina has been definitively solved. The artifact and the inscription are both authentic beyond any reasonable doubt. Complex spectrographic analyses published a few years ago have confirmed that the Fibula is not a forgery. However, quite paradoxically, an Early Latin reduplicated perfect fefaked is still implausible from a morphological point of view. This form continues to disturb the Early Latin linguistic framework, which can be reconstructed thanks to the available data at our disposal. The article presents a new reading of the text, which on the one hand confirms the congruity of the preterite morphology (not a reduplicated form of the root *d h ē- / d h ǝ-, but an ancient aorist similar to Faliscan făced / făcet) and on the other gives an account of the abnormal use of punctuation between <whe> and <wha>.

Negative adjectival morphology in Latin. Some reflections

In the present paper the evaluation of a new etymology for the word uirgō ‘virgin’ serves as occasion for an overview of the morphological prefixes by means of which Latin encodes negation on adjectives and nouns. Using the theoretical framework, whose origin ultimately goes back to Aristotle, three varieties of negation will be described: contrariety, contradiction, and privation. As will be shown, all these varieties, and privation in particular, require some theoretical refinement: in some cases, instead of contrariety, some more adequate conceptualizations are preferable such as neutralization or reverse. In this paper the seven prefixes used to encode negation on adjectives and nouns – dē-, dis-, ex-, in-, nĕ-, sē-, uē- – will be described also diachronically, and for each of them their original function will be tentatively identified.

Romanization and Latinization of the Roman Empire in the light of data in the Computerized Historical Linguistic Database of Latin Inscriptions of the Imperial Age

The present study demonstrates that the process of linguistic Romanization, i.e. Latinization of the Roman Empire, is traceable by the data of the Computerized Historical Linguistic Database of Latin Inscriptions of the Imperial Age (LLDB). A multi-level analysis of linguistic and non-linguistic data in the LLDB has shown that Latinization, i.e. the spread of spoken or vulgar Latin, became more and more intensive over time in all concerned provinces (i.e. Lusitania, Gallia Narbonensis, Venetia et Histria, Dalmatia, Moesia, Pannonia, and Britannia), although to a varying degree in each. What is more, in many aspects of the investigation, it was possible to find differences between the selected provinces of the Roman Empire corresponding mostly to the future Romance (both negative and positive) outcomes of the respective areas. All in all, the analysis of data of the LLDB database can contribute to solving the complex problem of Latinization, and is a lot more appropriate for this purpose than a simple comparative analysis of epigraphic corpora of the selected provinces.

Ancient Latin grammarians on suppletion

The term “suppletion”, introduced by Osthoff (1899. Vom Suppletivwesen der indogermanischen Sprachen. Heidelberg: Universitätsbuchdruckerei Hörning), was traditionally used to refer to an inflectional paradigm containing forms based on two or more etymologically different stems. In the last decades, however, it has been argued that etymology does not contribute to our understanding of the phenomenon, and it should be strictly defined on synchronic terms: simply as the peak point on the formal irregularity scale, regardless of the actual origin of the irregularity. Under this approach, all forms reported by speakers as two potentially different lexical items are considered to be suppletive. To be able to determine what users of a living language consider to be a case of suppletion, it is possible to analyze data collected from speakers. The situation is considerably more difficult for dead languages, which however have played an important role in the debate and provided many of the canonical examples. As a closest equivalent to eliciting the required information from a native speaker, the informed but from the present-day perspective naïve expressions of linguistic introspection in the works of Late Latin Grammarians, namely their use of specific terms (defectivum, anomalum, inaequale) to refer to different degrees and lexical examples of irregularity, are highly valuable, as it also may reflect the difficulties confronted by non-native learners.

Patterns of interpredictability and principal parts in Latin verb paradigms: an entropy-based approach

This paper provides a fully word-based, abstractive analysis of predictability in Latin verb paradigms. After reviewing previous traditional and theoretically grounded accounts of Latin verb inflection, a procedure is outlined where the uncertainty in guessing the content of paradigm cells given knowledge of one or more inflected wordforms is measured by means of the information-theoretic notions of unary and n-ary implicative entropy, respectively, in a quantitative approach that uses the type frequency of alternation patterns between wordforms as an estimate of their probability of application. Entropy computations are performed by using the Qumin toolkit on data taken from the inflected lexicon LatInfLexi. Unary entropy values are used to draw a mapping of the verbal paradigm in zones of full interpredictability, composed of cells that can be inferred from one another with no uncertainty. N-ary entropy values are used to extract categorical and near principal part sets, that allow to fill the rest of the paradigm with little or no uncertainty. Lastly, the issue of the impact of information on the derivational relatedness of lexemes on uncertainty in inflectional predictions is tackled, showing that adding a classification of verbs in derivational families allows for a relevant reduction of entropy, not only for derived verbs, but also for simple ones.

Piissimus and pientissimus: two nonexistent superlatives of pius?

The combined analysis of epigraphic, literary and grammatical sources allows light to be shed on linguistic problems concerning the two superlatives of pius, piissimus and pientissimus, which have been mostly overlooked by scholars to date. Regarding the first superlative, Cicero says that it does not exist in Latin (CIC. Phil. 13.43.9), whereas the second form is exclusively attested in epigraphy, with no occurrences in ancient literary or scholarly texts. Moreover, the morphology of pientissimus cannot be explained according to Classical Latin rules, since the only verb which is semantically related to pius, piare, belongs to the first conjugation (it also does not fit semantically). In the present paper, we will try to demonstrate that piissimus was generally avoided in the literature of the Classical age based on linguistic purism, though it was probably used in colloquial Latin, and definitely normalized as a standard form in the Post-Classical age, as can be seen in both the literary and epigraphic instances of this word. In the case of pientissimus, this may have initially spread in the epigraphic domain, and subsequently entered so-called Vulgar Latin.