Loretum et Codeta

On pg. 473 fn. 47 in my discussion of ō for au I point out that, although the monophthongized rendering of this sound is typically regarded as "non-urban", there are examples of ō for au from Roman inscriptions of the Republican period, some of which are given in fn. 48.  In addition one could add that two old Roman placenames show ō for au.  These are Loretum 'laurel grove', a location on the Aventine (Plin. Nat. 15.138: Loretum in Aventino vocatur ubi silva laurus fuit; CIL I 2, p. 240 IN LORETO ) <—  laurus and Codeta, a part of the Campus Martius where horsetail grew (Paul. Fest. p. 58: ager trans Tiberim quod in eo virgulta nascuntur ad caudarum equinarum similtudinem) <— cauda. These show that the monophthongal pronunciation was quite well established in Rome itself.

See Bertoldi, Vittorio, 1940.  Storia d'un dialettismo nel latino dell'urbe. Rivista di filologia e d'istruzione classica. 18:22–33.

More on Final -d

On pg. 155 VI b, my treatment of the loss of final -d in Latin is much too brief. I wrote there:

-V:d# > -V: in the third century BCE: abl. sg. -ād, -ōd, SENTENTIAD (ILLRP 511 +), POPLICOD (ILLRP 511) >> pūblicō, 36 MED (ILLRP 1197 +) > mē.

And fn. 37 thereto adds:

Archaizing spellings with final -d continue to turn up until the last quarter of the second century BCE especially in official texts.

First, a cross-reference to pg. 222 E. 2 should be added where the earliest epigraphical evidence for loss of -d (241 BCE) is mentioned.  The very consistent use of final -d in the SCdB is obviously an archaizing orthography.  As many have noted, whereas the text of the SC consistently uses final -d, the concluding paragraph about the placement of the actual document omits final -d (IN AGRO TEVRANO).

Second, it should be noted that forms with final -d after long vowels in polysyllabic ablatives are also found in the literary transmission. For example, Naevius wrote (Blänsdorf 5): amborum uxores / noctu Troiad exibant capitibus opertis where Vossius was the first to recognize Troiad in the transmitted Troiade. In Plautus, final -d was not possible even as an archaism in polysyllabic nominal ablatives—there is no trace of the Troiad type in Plautus. 

And yet the monosyllabic accusative and ablative mēd and tēd— but interestingly not sēd—do occur. For example, at Cas. 143 (Hic quidem pol certo nil ages sine med arbitro (ia6)) the manuscripts transmit and the meter requires mēd. Similarly tēd, here the accusative, is read and required at Asin. 299: Le. quot pondo ted esse censes nudum? Li. non edepol scio (tr7). The first line of the Curculio, Quo ted hoc noctis dicam proficisci foras was quoted by Charisius (Barwick 1964²:143.24) and Diomedes (Keil 1.441.18) precisely on account of its d-final form. The forms mēd and tēd do not occur in Terence and the only generally accepted non-Plautine literary mēd seems to be Enn. frg. var. Epicharm. 45 nam videbar somniare med (ms. me et) ego esse mortuum, but others suggested memet with excision of ego.

On the other hand, Plautus also clearly had vowel final allomorphs of the 1st and 2nd sg. pronouns since these form undergo elision, e.g. Pseud. 375 si id non adfert, posse opinor facere me officium meum (tr 7) and Asin. 44 Dono te ob istuc dictum, ut expers sis metu (ia6). This suggests that the loss of d was sensitive to some prosodic factor, presumably the presence or absence of stress.  Since d was always lost in polysyllabic ablatives which never bore the stress on the immediately preceding vowel it must have been after the unstressed variant that -d was lost.

In fact, it is not really clear that vowel length played a significant role in the loss of -d. A recent article by Martin Kümmel has reopened this question. He notes that there are many epigraphical cases of the omission of final -d in perfect 3rd sg. (IOVSI, ILLRP 129, 3rd cent. BCE, Lacus Albanus, etc.) and 3rd pl. forms and argues that the true condition for loss of final -d was after unstressed vowels. Forms like illud, istud, aliud can be explained as analogical to potentially tonic id and quid. The forms sed, ad, apud, and haud might all be explained as proclitics and hence not true instance of word final -d. This account does seem the best way to handle the dental-less 3rd sg. forms.  For the plural forms in -e:ro(n) it is still possible in my opinion that d was not lost but assimilated and then simplified.

See Kümmel, Martin J. 2007. The third person endings of the Old Latin perfect and the fate of final -d in Latin. In K. Jones-Bley et al. eds., Proceedings of the 18th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference. Washington D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man, 89–100.

Will the typos never cease II?

More corrections from Gregory Mellen:


On pg. 521 in the chart for 2nd person singular pronouns V. A. 2, the Italian reflex of Latin te, used as the stressed form of the pronoun, should be te, not ti.


On pg. 525–7 I have been inconsistent in my treatment of the stage of Italian represented in the tables. On pg. 525 I give under the label OITAL. the Old Italian forms of canto with reference to the modern standard forms in the alphabetical footnotes to the table.  But on pg. 526 I give the modern standard Italian forms under the label OITAL. with reference to Old Italian forms in the footnotes. The simplest correction would be to simply relabel this column as Italian.


On pg. 522 fn. 35, discussing the distribution of the lo form of the masculine definite article I say it occurs—among other places—before ʃC, but that is wrong.  lo occurs before ʃ,  as in lo sciopero, and ʃ does not combine with any other consonant in Italian.


On pg. 546 in the Bibliography, under Guastella, read  "La voce delle dita" for "La voce della dita".


Thanks,  Gregory.  Keep, dear readers, the corrections coming!

Will the typos never cease?

Gregory Mellen, who attended the class I taught last summer at the Leiden IE Summer School and is now studying at Oxford, alerts me to the following typos/mistakes:

On pg. 246 fn. 22, in the quote from Aul. Gell. 13.21, read insubidius for insupidius. 

  

Incidentally, Aulus Gellius is almost our sole source for information on this adjective and its apparent family.  At 19.9.11 Antonius Iulianus quotes some erotic verses of a certain Valerius Aedituus:

Dicere cum conor curam tibi, Pamphila, cordis,

  Quid mi aps te quaeram? verba labris abeunt,

Per pectus manat subito subido mihi sudor

  Sic tacitus, subidus, dum pudeo, pereo.

When, Pamphila, I try to tell my love,

What shall I ask of you?  Words fail my lips,

A sudden sweat o'erflows my ardent breast;

Thus fond and silent, I refrain and die. 

[Translation  John C. Rolfe, Loeb edition]

Aside from this passage with two instance of subidus, Aulus Gellius uses insubidus  (also Aul. Gell. 7.1.2 ("nihil est prorsus istis," inquit, "insubidius,") 12.2.11 (inepti et insubidi hominis), 18.8.1 (quam sint insubida et inertia), 19.9.9 (tamquam vastos quosdam et insubidos)) and its adverb insubide (Aul. Gel. 1.2.4 (intempestive atque insubide)) multiple times. The only other example I've been able to find outside of Gellius is Lampridius Vit. Commod. 47 (= Scr. hist. Aug. 1.99.8) fuit vultu insubido ut ebriosi solent.

The adjective subidus is usually related to the verb subō, -āre 'be in heat', but I have to say that if subidus means 'horny'  it contrast rather oddly with the apparently restrained tone of the poem. But perhaps that is the point. In any case the negated forms to judge from context mean 'foolish' or 'lame' (in the modern metaphorical sense).  The semantic are also odd 'not-horny' > 'foolish' and perhaps a partial semantic contamination with the family of sapiō is responsible.

In that same footnote change Varro (L. 8.67) to Varro (L. 8.66).

On pg. 474 B. 2 for praetor read pretor.  

The point of the the Lucilius line is the monophthongization of the diphthong ae in both the name of the office and the office-seeker.  The complete line Cecilius pretor ne rusticus fiat is put together from two quotations: one by the grammarian Diomedes (Keil 1.452.17–18) omits the name Cecilius and specifically comments on the fact that the letter a was removed from the word pretor (detracta littera a); the other from Varro L. 7.96 omits the word praetor but transmits the name Cecilius in the ms. F (Codex Florentinus, 11th cent.) and here to0 the context is about the variation between  ae and e.  All in all there is no doubt that the line should read Cecilius pretor ne rusticus fiat.

More corrections to come in a subsequent post.

The genitive of 5th declension nouns in Cicero

On pg. 255 fn. 22 I mention that Aulus Gellius (9.14) claims to have found 5th declension gen. sg. forms in -es in the manuscripts of Cicero (he quotes Sest. 28 equites vero daturos illius dies poenas) and—to state it more accurately than I did in the book—affirms his trust in those who claim that a manuscript in Vergil's own hand had dies as a gen. sg. at Georg. 1.208. At Sest. 28 the manuscript tradition does not apparently preserve any trace of the readings Gellius preferred, but at Georg. 1.208, according to the ap. crit. in the Hirtzel OCT, the manuscript known as π, the 9th century Codex Pragensis, is reported by Kvičala to preserve the reading dies. 

There is at least one possible case of the 5th declension gen. sg. in -es found in the transmission of Cicero.  Brent Vine points out to me that at Cael. 80 the reading plenam spes is found in B vs. the plenam spei of most mss.  B is the name of the excerpts made by Bartolommeo Di Montepulciano from the lost manuscript of Cluny lent him by Poggio Bracciolini, which often preserves ancient readings.

Missing gloss

On pg. 169 at the top the form gnīxus > nīxus should have been identified as the synchronic past participle of the verb nītor 'I kneel, lean'.

Meters to be named later

On pg. 165 under 4 I quote two Plautine verses to illustrate the typical placement of "anaptycted" forms of the suffix -clo- at verse end. I should have named the meters. Capt. 740 is an iambic senarius (ia6) and Tri. 726 is a trochaic septenarius (tr7).

Numasioi Vindicated? Maybe not.

In a previous post I mentioned the discovery of an Etruscan form numasianas which seems to match the Praenestine Fibula's from NVMASIOI. I further argued that "the form numasianas supports Numasios and makes it certain  that Numasios is unconnected with numerus," but an email from Michiel Driessen, the author of the best etymology of urbs (JIES 29, 2001, p. 41-68), has made me reconsider at least the second half of this claim.  He points out that the medial a of the Etruscan form may be the result of weakening and points to the parallel of the praenomen Avile <— avil 'year' which also appears as Avule, and—significantly from Caere—as Avale (Cr. 3.23, 5th cent.) The aryballos in question dates to the second half of the 7th century, but weakening is found in the archaic period, so we cannot exclude the possibility that the a is a weakening product.  Note too that 7th century forms of the NumVs- name are found with a medial e-vowel, e.g. Numesiesi (Ta 3.1). Further since the name numasiana- is a derivative in -na and since the base is well attested as ending in -sie, we would expect the last three syllables to be -siena.  Hence the second a of numasianas is a weakening product and this strengthens the case for the first a being unoriginal. Thus there is no real objection to deriving the Etruscan forms from an Italic, probably Sabellic, source *nomesiyo-.

So is numasianas totally uninformative in regard to NVMASIOI?  I would say not, since it gives a possible source for the always problematic a of the Praenestine form, i.e. a re-borrowing from a form with Etruscan weakening. 

Bibliographical Addendum

Add Bock 2008 to the bibliography for the prehistory of the 3rd conjugation on pg. 404—5.


Bock, Bettina, 2008. Die einfach thematischen Präsentien in der dritten Konjugation des Lateinischen. Graz: Leykam.

News from Satricum

To the brief list of Very Old Latin inscriptions on pg. 22 add a reference to the 6th century BCE inscription on a fragment of a clay vessel found during excavations of the Acropolis of Satricum in 2002. The text was first edited by Colonna and Gnade in 2003, but a forthcoming article by Béla Adamik, brought to my attention by Brent Vine, and mentioned here with the author's permission, has offered the first plausible interpretation of the fragmentary text. There are two fragmentary texts. Text A written boustrophedon reads:

[---]IAMAMARC|OMPLACIOM[ (boustrophedon)

and Text B reads

]LOUCIOSx[ (i.e. Loucios + trace of another letter)

Adamik suggest a number of possible restorations, e.g. [esom ser]ia Mamarcom Placiom[que..] but the most important insight is that Mamarcom and Placiom are to be interpreted as genitive plurals of names, or in the case of placiom possibly of an adjective. The overall structure of the text would be very similar to Brent Vine's reading of the Garigliano bowl as ESOM... AVDEOM DVOM. Text B might be the remainder of a signature of the artist or commissioner, e.g. Loucios C.[ f. med feced] vel sim. 

Adamik, Béla, forthcoming. Zu den archaischen lateinischen Inschriftfragmenten auf Bruchstücken eines Tonfasses von Satricum. Proceedings of the International Colloquium of Latin Linguistics, Innsbruck.

A Hungarian version of the Adamik paper is available:
Adamik, Béla, 2009. Új archaikus latin felirat Satricumból. Antik Tanulmányok 53:239–52.

Colonna, G. and M. Gnade, 2003. Dolio con iscrizioni Latine archaiche da Satricum. Archeologia classica 54:1—21.

More on som

The form som is apparently attested in Portuguese dialects. Leite de Vasconcellos 1970:116 says "Dans le "districto" de Coïmbre, on conserve la forme archaïque são (et som) à la 1re pers. Dans l'Algarve: som," and Rip Cohen points to the following passage in Fernan de Oliveira, Grammatica da lingoagem portuguesa, Lisbon, 1536, the first grammar of Portuguese:

& mais o verbo sustantivo o qual huns pronunicam em om como som & outros em ou como sou & outros em ão como são e tambem outros que eu mais favoreço em o pequeno como so

"And also the verb to be, which some pronounce in –om, i.e. som, and other in –ou, i.e. sou, and others in -ão, i.e. são, and yet others, whom I approve of, in short –o, i.e. so."

I have not yet been able to track down an indisputable Galego-Portuguese, i.e. old, example.

Leite de Vasconcellos, J. 1970. Esquisse d'une dialectologie portugaise, 2nd ed updated on the basis of notes of Leite de Vasconcellos by Maria Adelaid Valle Cintra. Lisbon: Centro de estudos filólogicos.

Galego-Portuguese 1st singular of the verb 'to be'

On pg. 427 in note b to the table listing the Romance reflexes of the paradigm of sum I write that Old Portuguese has som or sõ. But this is not quite right. First, my usage is to refer to the language of the oldest texts not as Old Portuguese but as Galego-Portuguese and second, my friend and esteemed teacher Rip Cohen provides the following correction:

In thirteenth century manuscripts of Galego-Portuguese lyric (compositions spanning the period c. 1220 to c. 1300), the regular form of the first person persent indicative of the verb to be (seer < sedēre) is sõo < *sono (cf. It. sono). The nasalization represented by the til on the õ is a vestige of the final -m of sum.  The form soon also appears, but less often, in those manuscripts, and it may represent a different pronunciation, but at any rate it is still bisyllabic. The forms son and sõ, which appear in early sixteenth century copies of thirteenth and fourteenth century poetry must nearly always be corrected to sõo or soon on metrical grounds. And we sometimes find soo where the nasal must be added: sõo. To my knowledge, the form sou does not appear until well after 1350.

Thank you, Rip!

Intereā etc.

On pg. 354 E in discussing the adverbial forms in -ā like inter-eā ‘meanwhile’ I suggest that these forms are most probably old feminine instrumental ablatives, but I failed to mention another attractive possibility proposed by J-L García Ramón that these forms are old feminine instrumentals < *-eh2(e)h1.  If that is correct then these would constitute an addition case of the retention of final -ā in Latin.

García Ramón, José Luis, 1997. Adverbios de dirección e instrumental indoeuropeo. In E. Crespo and J. L.García Ramón eds., Berthold Delbrück y la sintaxis indoeuropea hoy, Madrid/Wiesbaden:Reichert, 113-141.

Corrigendum

Professor Michael Johnson of Vanderbilt, a former student of mine at UNC, points out this error:


on pg 484 A.1.c. for "with any value" read "without any value".


Thanks, Michael! He also passes along a number of corrigenda corrigendorum, which I have silently fixed.

Monosyllabic Lengthening

In regard to the discussion of monosyllabic lengthening on pg. 41, fn. 48 Brent Vine draws my attention to the recent Ph.D. dissertation by M. Kapović, Reconstruction of the Balto-Slavic Personal Pronouns, Zagreb 2006, which has an extensive treatment of the subject (pp. 147–153). Reference to Kapović's work should also be added to the bibliography cited on pg. 325, n. 1.

VIne Corrigenda

Professor Brent Vine of UCLA has been kind enough to send along his list of typos, corrigenda, and addenda. I will post all the simple typos here and post the more complicated issues in separate postings. Thanks, Brent!

• pg. 26, n. 13, l. 6: read “to indicate” for “to indicated”

• pg. 38 C 5: read “sonorant consonants” for “sonorants consonants”

• pg. 40, n. 46, ad fin.: read “pp. 158–9” for “pp. 158”

• pg. 121 mid., middle of A.1.: read gifroran for giforan

• pg. 127, n. 16, mid.: read “into the Classical period” for “into Classical period”

• pg. 133, n. 52: read “forms” for “form”

• pg. 134, Cat. 85.1: missing macrons in quārē

• pg. 143, n. 47: read “may be dialectal” for “may dialectal”

• pg. 160, B.1.: Read "-" for “e” + superscript dot and tilde in *ap-weriō

• pg. 163, n. 18: The cross-ref. should be pg. 156, not pg. 163

• pg. 177, n. 9: read “called” for “call”

• pg. 198 n. 25, 1st word of last sent.: read “Others” for “Other”

• pg. 334, n. 25: read “a reduction” for “an reduction”
•pg. 360, c.ii., 3rd line fr. bot. of page: For “superlative” read “comparative”
• pg. 368, n. 17, 2nd line: missing “close [single] quote” at the end of the gloss of *tri-sth2o/i-
• pg. 549, Jasanoff 2009: Wrong order of editors; should be “Kazuhiko Yoshida and Brent Vine”

Lesser-known Historical Grammars of Latin XIV

Emilia Ndiaye, De L'indo-européen au latin et au grec. Initiation à la grammaire comparée du latin et du grec, avec excercices corrigés, tableaux synthétiques et lexiques was published in 2009 (Brussels: Éditions Safran).  The level is very introductory, and there are mistakes, but the book has abundant exercises, which look well designed, and it also has a convenient list of Greek and Latin cognates arranged alphabetically according to the Latin reflex.  In the top right of the picture you can see a drawing of the text of TI V.

Tocharian B Love Poetry

On pg. 22 I quote the famous love poem (Krause and Thomas 1960–64:2.72) as a text sample of Tocharian B:

[mā] ñ[i ci]sa noṣ śomo ñ[e]m [wno]lme [l]āre tāka, 

mā ra postaṃ cisa lāre mäsketär-ñ

But the translation I offered there (No person was dearer to me than you previously, nor will any be afterward) was not very precise. Pinault 20083:32 offers a more accurate rendering: "D'être vivant portant le nom d'humain, il n'en fut pas auparavant de plus cher pour moi que toi, et il n'en sera pas non plus dans l'avenir de plus cher que toi pour moi." śomo ñem wnolme literally means "a being (wnolme) the name (ñem) human (śomo)" and is the Tocharian reflex of the construction familiar from Skt. (āsīd rājā Nalo nāma) and elsewhere. Notice that Tocharian, like many languages, has no distinct comparative form of the adjective but just uses the positive form plus the standard of comparison in the perlative (ci-sa 'than you').

The genitive plural of mare

On pg. 242 I give a complete paradigm of mare as an exemplum for the neuter i-stems, but Erica Bexley of Cornell has called my attention to the fact that the expected genitive plural marium is never attested in all of Classical Latinity. I couldn't believe it at first, but it is true. The absence of the the oblique plural forms of mare was noted by the Grammarians. The 4th-century CE Charisius (p. 38.6 Barwick) wrote: 

maria tamen quamvis dicantur pluraliter, attamen ne marium nec maribus dicemus.

(Followed by Ars Bobiensis (M. De Nonno 1982: 29, 22):  quamuis maria dicitur nec marium nec maribus... accipimus and [Augustinus] Regulae: mare maria: sed pluraliter tres casus habet tantum, nominatiuum accusatiuum et uocatiuum, genitiuum datiuum et ablatiuum non habet: non enim dicimus in genitiuo horum marium aut in datiuo his maribus aut in ablatiuo ab his maribus.)

Priscian (2.351 Keil) gave an actual example of the supposedly nonexistent ablative plural maribus from Caesar and quote a line of Naevius with the genitive plural marum, not marium: 

et sciendum tamen, quod rarissime haec, quae in solam i finiunt ablatiuum, syncopam patiuntur i per genetiuum pluralem. inueni marum pro marium, qui tamen in rarost usu genetiuus, apud Naeuium in carmine belli Punici (Blänsdorf 9): 

senex fretus pietatei     deum adlocutus

summi deum regis      fratrem Neptunum 

regnatorem  marum

pro marium. eius ablatiuum Caesar in V belli Gallici (5.1) ponit: paulo latiores quam quibus in reliquis utimur maribus.

Basically the word seems to have been defective in the plural.  The form marum is surprising since we are confident that this word has been an i-stem for a very long time having an exact morphological match in Old Irish muir 'sea' < *mori.  It must be analogical.

It's unbelievable that I could have lived 45 years and written a book on Latin historical grammar without knowing this!