The history of language is, if anything, even less susceptible to periodization than other kinds of history. The practice of articulating history around key events, such as the conversion of Constantine or the removal of Romulus Augustulus, may play down the fact that these events were the outcome of historical processes lasting centuries, and that many people were doubtless either not aware of these events themselves, or did not feel that they had any particular bearing on their daily lives. Yet this practice continues, no doubt due to the value of these key events as a metonymy for the events leading up to them and the possibility of tracing their implications, however indirect, in later generations.
In tracing the history of a language, such events are much harder to identify. To take a familiar example, the loss of the second person pronoun thou/thee/thy in Standard English may be dated to a period around 1550-1650. But the forms remain in use in (increasingly) high literary language until the later nineteenth century, and are still current in many northern varieties of British English, besides being in residual use as a marker of community among Quakers (until recently at least - the difficulty in identifying a cut-off date to this use exemplifies the wider problem); to say nothing of the fact that such forms may still be heard regularly in other contexts, such as productions of Shakespeare, older liturgies, or Bible translations. In recent years linguists have found more and more evidence for a ‘‘bell curve’’ model of language change: specific innovations become common in small groups, spread rapidly through larger populations, then tail off, leaving remnants of the older, displaced forms in use among small groups of speakers. But the terms in which we have put the debate conceal other problems of describing language: to invoke - as we have - the concept of ‘‘Standard’’ English is to make some kind of judgment about the currency of a particular kind of language that would not necessarily be shared by all speakers of the language. And the distinction between
A Companion to Late Antiquity. Edited by Philip Rousseau © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-11980-1
‘‘innovation’’ and ‘‘language change’’ is something that can be made only after the event; for instance, it is too early to say whether, a hundred years from now, the ‘‘high rise terminal’’ (the practice of ending a sentence on a rising tone, particularly associated with Australian and New Zealand English, and popularized in recent years among younger speakers) will be considered by linguists a ‘‘language change’’ in the proper sense.
The same historical and metahistorical questions confront the historian of the Latin language - the tendency toward periodization, the identification and labeling of the periods, and the extent to which contemporary Latin speakers would have been aware of (and agreed with) such distinctions - and the response of Latinists to these questions has varied. Let us take two distinguished examples from the last century. The editors of the Oxford Latin Dictionary set their limit at around ad 200, while allowing that this is ‘‘necessarily imprecise’’: they include the third-century jurists quoted in the sixth-century Digest of Justinian, but exclude (in parentheses) some significant second-century authors (Minucius Felix, Tertullian) on the ground of their religion: ‘‘(A proposal that the Dictionary should be extended to include Christian Latin had been finally rejected in 1951.)’’ The great Swedish linguist Einar Lofstedt (1959: 1-38) begins his intellectual testament with a lengthy discussion of the problem of periodization, yet even his magisterial account betrays doubts and inconsistencies: ‘‘In literature the great Roman tradition ends with Tacitus. Apuleius, born about 125, is already the representative of a different style; shifting, iridescent, borrowing freely from poetry, deliberately archaizing... Whether we are to make Late Latin start with Apuleius. . . or - perhaps more plausibly - to refer it to the age of Tertullian and the earliest martyrologies. . . is a question of terminology rather than of substance.’’ Yet, few Latinists would deny to Tacitus the ‘‘Apuleian’’ attributes of poetic borrowing and archaism; and if the starting point for later Latin is purely an arbitrary matter of terminology, how can one starting point be ‘‘more plausible’’ than another?
What emerges from this is a variety of nonlinguistic elements - such as confessional or aesthetic considerations - that tend to condition the identification of later Latin. Often these factors are implicitly linked to a wider sense that by the third century we are in the ‘‘late empire,’’ and that therefore - somehow - people should be speaking ‘‘late Latin’’ (for further discussion, see Farrell 2001: 8-13, 85-94). Little would be gained by attempting to impose an alternative chronology or other organizing principle. But it may be worth while noting at the outset, first, the very early date of some ‘‘late Latin’’ phenomena and, second, the mismatch between ancient and modern terminologies, even if this means anticipating some aspects of our later discussion.
Consider, for instance, the famous epitaph on Lucius Scipio, consul in 259 BC:
L. Cornelio L. f. Scipio | aidiles cosol cesor honc oino ploirume cosentiont R[omane] duonoro optumo fuise viro Luciom Scipione. filios Barbati consol censor aidilis hic fuet a[pud vos]
Hec cepit Corsica Aleriaque urbe dedet Tempestatebus aide mereto[d]
{CIL 1. 2 (2nd edn. 1918), fasc. 1. 8, 9, p. 379)
Lucius Cornelius Scipio, son of Lucius, aedile, consul, and censor. This man is agreed by most at Rome to have been the best man among the good: Lucius Scipio. The son of Scipio Barbatus, he was consul, censor, and aedile among you; he captured Corsica and the city of Aleria, and dedicated a temple to Storm-gods, as he should. [This and all other translations my own.]
This is not the place for an exhaustive commentary on all the features of this text, many of which are indeed typical of earlier Latin rather than any later period. Some of them, however, deserve attention. The letter n is omitted before s in cosol, cesor, cosentiont (though not in the more ‘‘classical’’ consol, censor). We know from explicit statements in later authors that this was a genuine feature of ordinary pronunciation; but the classical habit of writing the n seems to have generated a spelling pronunciation in which the missing sound is restored (compare the variation between Italian pensare ‘‘to think’’ and pesare ‘‘to weigh,’’ both from pensare). The final m is almost always omitted (‘‘duonorum optumo fuise viro | Luciom Scipione’’ for classical ‘‘bonorum optimum fuisse virum | Lucium Scipionem’’). The weakness of the final /m/ is well known, not least through its loss before initial vowels in later poetry; but this poetry also suggests a stronger pronunciation before consonants which is simply not attested here. Noteworthy is also the presence of the letter e in the unstressed syllables of aidiles, fuet, dedet, Tempestatebus where we would expect a short /i/ (classical aedilis, fuit, dedit, Tempestatibus); this too anticipates developments usually associated with the later language. What has happened is that the enormous interest (which we find in the first century bc) in standardizing the Latin language has imposed some very traditional patterns of orthography, effectively reversing, at least in formal educated speech, some very well-established speech habits. The same can be seen in the vocabulary ofclassical Latin, as compared to that found in earlier and later forms of the language. Thus modern Latin students are compelled to learn the highly irregular verb ferre ‘‘to carry’’ (perfect tuli ‘‘I carried,’’ past participle latus ‘‘carried’’). This verb is absent from the modern Romance languages, being completely displaced by reflexes of classical (and completely regular) portare, a verb that seems to have been mildly stigmatized in the classical language (rather like English to get, perhaps), while evidently remaining current in the popular speech. Another example often cited is the early Latin verb ‘‘to chat,’’ fabulari; effectively absent from classical Latin, it resurfaces in the later language (as an archaism? or a vulgarism?) and goes on to give the Spanish and Portuguese verbs ‘‘to talk’’ (hablar, falar).
This phenomenon, sometimes known as the ‘‘classical gap,’’ is one reason why speaking of ‘‘late Latin’’ is so problematic: so many ‘‘late’’ features appear so early. This in turn should lead us to consider the appropriateness of our terminology. There is rather a tendency to regard the phrase ‘‘late Latin’’ as referring to something whose existence and nature is not in doubt. In English, this tendency is reinforced by the convention of capitalizing the adjective; but Romance-speaking scholars also seem to have this inclination, even though the adjective in latin tardif, latin tard'io, and so on, could be taken as qualifying rather than definitive. German Spatlatein has the same drawback as ‘‘late Latin.’’ For this reason, it may be helpful to refer to ‘‘late’’ or ‘‘later’’ Latin, terms that are preferred here. They have their disadvantages: while ‘‘later’’ invites the question, ‘‘later than what?’’ (answer: earlier Latin), ‘‘late’’ suggests a language that is moribund, if not actually dead - a description which is highly questionable, and unlikely to occur to actual speakers of the language. But they are at least recognizably close to the familiar terminology, and can be used without making any tacit assumptions about the homogeneity of the language in question.
World History
