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).