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Latin Linguistics: An Introduction
Latin Linguistics is intended as an overview of the main areas of linguistics geared specifically to the scholar of Latin. The book consists of eight an introduction followed by discussions of phonology, morphology, syntax, variation linguistics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics, with a final chapter discussing texts from three different periods to demonstrate how linguistic analysis can deepen our understanding of Latin.
Most introductions to phonology cover a range of theories, such as Autosegmental Phonology or Optimality Theory; these contribute relatively little to our understanding of Latin as such. On the other hand, a Latinist needs to know how we can reconstruct pronunciation, what the limits of reconstruction are, and how closely orthography mirrors pronunciation. My chapter on phonology deals with these aspects. The same can be said, mutatis mutandis, for the other chapters.
What makes this book unique, then, is the fact that it covers a wide range of topics in a deliberately selective way, tailored to the needs of Latinists.
Most introductions to phonology cover a range of theories, such as Autosegmental Phonology or Optimality Theory; these contribute relatively little to our understanding of Latin as such. On the other hand, a Latinist needs to know how we can reconstruct pronunciation, what the limits of reconstruction are, and how closely orthography mirrors pronunciation. My chapter on phonology deals with these aspects. The same can be said, mutatis mutandis, for the other chapters.
What makes this book unique, then, is the fact that it covers a wide range of topics in a deliberately selective way, tailored to the needs of Latinists.
303 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 18, 2023
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December 15, 2025
Very informative, interesting, and of moderate difficulty.
* Personal notes on what the chapters present.
★ Chapter 1 - introduction 🏺
- modality: realis, potentialis, irrealis
- Metrics: iambic shortening
- Comparative method (indo-European)
- Phonetic transcriptions —> [ ]. Phonemic transcriptions —> / /.
- Sound change is regular —> comparable meanings and sound correspondences. The sounds don’t have to be identical BUT the correspondences must be regular. (Fx: latin pater, greek πατηρ, Old english faeder - latin and greek /p/ is always an old English /f/). If the word matches, but the sound change doesn’t correspond, the word is most likely just a lone word.
★ Chapter 2 - phonetics and phonology 🗣️
- “Ne…..quidem”
- Terentius Scaurus - speaks of errors in Latin
- Errors arise from - “adiectio” when a letter is wrongly added. “detractio” when a letter is wrongly left out. “immutatio” when to near-homophones are confused with each other. “annexio” when a word is divided wrongly (fx: ne-scire ~ nes-cire)
- Also - first a variant in pronunciation has to arise, and then adopted by a larger community = actuation + spread
- Actuation (=Why Lan gauge change occurs) is driven by articulatory (over/under articulation), acoustic (fx mixed up fricatives) or psycholinguistic factors (Grassmann’s law in Greek).
- Rhotacism - *-s- and *-z- becomes an *-r- intervocalically
- Does not affect geminates (dobbeltkonsonanter)
- For indo European stops(=plosives - full stop before making the sound and burst of air), 5 places of articulation: bilabial *b^h, dental *d^h, palatal *g’^h, velar *g^h, labiovelar *g^wh
- Ablaut = vowel alterations that change the morphology of a word (fx tempus, conjugation (sing, sang, sung).
- Coefficients sonantiques - laryngeals (Hermann Møller)
- Laryngeals are kind of unknown reconstructed sounds - kind of like [h](?), voiceless back fricatives, velar [x], glottal [h]
- NB!! Laryngeals are indicated with “H” followed by a number - where the notation of “H” of course isn’t phonetic.
- Diglossia - the educated people speak and write a “high” variety of (in this case) latin and regular people / plebs speak a “low” everyday variety.
- The “low” variety is called “vulgar latin”
- Sound change spreads for sociolinguistic reasons.
- People may chose to imitate another persons sound change, because they may get some sort of “prestige”
- Comparative >< internal reconstruction
- Internal = done with a single language
★ Chapter 3 - morphology 🕊️
- morpheme- smallest meaningful unit of a word
- Just like phonemes have allophones, morphemes have allomorphs!
- Languages are divided into: isolating (most words are monomorphemic), agglutinative (lengthy words, many morphemes, each morpheme has one meaning), inflectional (morphemes can have several functions at once), polysynthetic (very large number of morphemes, word and sentence may coincide(?)).
- Three main reasons for new word creation/formation: new words for new concepts, syntactic recategorisation, express certain attitudes.
- Compounding - (Sanskrit terminology) dvandva- and bahuvrihi-compounds
- Dvandva: appositional compound words, like “singer-songwriter” - so a person who is both
- Bahuvrihi: exocentric- characterised by a human having, owning or doing something, like “pickpocket” for a thief.
- Derivation - doesn’t add more material necessarily to a word, but changes the word class (fx: noun “praise” —> verb “to praise”)
- Inflection - modifies case, number (nouns) and person, number, tense, mood, voice (verbs)
- Latin has 2 toes of suffixes - layer 1 and 2
- Layer 1 - Latinate suffixes, affect stress patterns and alter stem consonants
- Layer 2 - Germanic suffixes, do not alter stress patterns and stem-final consonants.
- Diachronic linguistics study how has developed and evolved through time.
- Synchronic linguistics aims at describing a language at a specific point of time, usually the present.
3.3 - morphological developments from indo European to Latin 🫒
* Case syncretism - indo European (IE) (later on) had 8 cases like Sanskrit. IE had nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, vocative, and three cases both adverbial functions: instrumental, locative, and separative (and comparative) ablative. In Greek the adverbial cases merged with core cases: Locative merged into dative, then the genitive into ablative, instrumental into dative. In greek the mergers are not result of sound change, but are semantically motivated.
* Aorist and perfect merger - classical Latin has five types of perfect: s-perfect (dico,”I say”, dixi), the reduplicated perfect (parco “I spare”, peperci), the long vowel perfect (edō “I eat”, ēdī), the simple perfect without stem alteration (uerto “I turn”, uerti), the productive u/u-perfect (moneo “I admonish”, monui).
- Present —> present and imperfect; Aorist —> action as a complete whole; perfect —> current state as the result of past action.
- Telicity - verbs can be ‘telic’ (= have a specified endpoint —> formed root artists and derived presents) or ‘atelic’ (= do not have an endpoint —> formed root presents and derived aorists)
- Italic languages merged aorist and perfect = only perfect.
- Reason: many overlapping functions.
* Future perfect and perfect subjunctive merger - partially because of sound change.
- vowel weakening- ended up in -i-
- Osthoff’s law
* Switches in conjugation classes - if speakers haven’t encountered all conjugations of a verb, they may start conjugating it in a different conjugation which could be more frequent.
- Autosegmental phonology
- Optimality theory (NB!! Look more into that!!)
★ Chapter 4 - syntax 🏹
- Generative grammar theories
- Functional grammar theories
- Languages put several semantic verb roles together to form macro-roles —> agent, patient, recipient, beneficiary, instrument, location, time.
- Active >< passive.
- Possessive- and objective genitives
- Sigmatic future verb form - all telic, and might indicate the same as future perfects in subordinate clauses. - So they can be interpreted as perfective (just restricted to the telic verbs).
- Sigmatic futures may have an aoristic origin.
- Clitics - a word that’s phonologically dependent on another word, and can’t stand alone
- Some accusative-and-infinitives could be replaced by “quod” clauses if the main verb was factual, like “gaudere (to be happy)”, but not with verbs of speech.
- Three types of modality discussed (but seems like there are more then): root modality (= concepts like ability and willingness - expressed through modal verbs), epistemic modality (= (im)possibility - expressed through (potential and unreal) subjunctives), deontic modality (=degrees of obligation and necessity - jussive subjunctive).
★ Chapter 5 - dialects 🏛️
- mutually intelligible variations of the same language
- Reasons why speech communities drift a past so a dialect is created: 1) when a language spreads, it may be acquired by a community whose first language is different, and their first language could get mixed with the new one. 2) when an area retains an archaism that other areas give up. 3) when an area innovates (fx hypercorrections, (= occurred when people assumed, because of the monophtongization of -ae, that som Greek loan words already went through the monophtongization, and wanted to sound more correct)) and others do not. 4) usages of phrases can spread or shrink.
- Code-switching
- Bilingualism - especially between Latin and Greek.
- Sondersprachen “language apart” - specific communities that speak a language can make their own variations of it. An example of this is Christian Latin.
★ Chapter 6 - pragmatics ✨
- Pragmatics focus on the meaning in language/sentences, by looking beyond the literal meaning in what’s being said, and also taking other social cues into account, like the tone and body language.
- Deixis “pointing”
- Personal deixis - specifying the one who’s speaking (?)
- Aposiopesis - breaking off the sentence mid sentence, in order to emphasise and express intense feelings
- Rhetorical questions are actually statements in question form, and can have syntactic consequences. In Latin the syntactic consequences in indirect speech are, that genuine questions become indirect questions in the subjunctive and rhetorical questions rhetorical questions are turned into accusative and infinitives, just like regular statements (p. 211).
- Grice’s maxims
★ Chapter 7 - sociolinguistics 🌍
- language in its social context - how societal norms and expectations shape the language and expressions.
- The studies of phonetics, phonology and morphology can be considered and studies sociolinguistically - but the overlap with pragmatics is especially significant.
- Sociolinguistics could almost be called ‘applied pragmatics’. For instance, the attitude towards accents or differences in male and female speech.
- When dialects are determined by social class and not locality, it’s a sociolect.
- In first century BC Greek had become a prestige language, and the Roman upper class started to use more Greek loan words —> sociolect.
- Catullus’ funny comment about Arrius who couldn’t aspirate correctly when he spoke Greek.
- Varro - De lingua Latina
★ Chapter 8 - three texts 🪷
- in these texts we’ll look at how the previously given linguistic insight can be applied to further understanding of the texts.
1. Early Faliscan text (7th century BC)(dialect or language very close to Latin) - Early orthography lacks /g/. Etruscan had no /o/. Archaic genitives -ās, in first and second declension. The problematic text… ‘pro’ should be combined with an ablative, but not here, so maybe another case was allowed back then. Faliscan couldn’t differentiate between /b/ and /p/. In Greek *m- becomes β before a liquid (r or l).
2. Bellum hispaniense “the Spanish war” (classical period) - About one of Caesars wars but not written by him. The writer tried to imitate Caesar, and the differences are examined here.
3. Gellius’ Attic nights (2nd century AD)
* Personal notes on what the chapters present.
★ Chapter 1 - introduction 🏺
- modality: realis, potentialis, irrealis
- Metrics: iambic shortening
- Comparative method (indo-European)
- Phonetic transcriptions —> [ ]. Phonemic transcriptions —> / /.
- Sound change is regular —> comparable meanings and sound correspondences. The sounds don’t have to be identical BUT the correspondences must be regular. (Fx: latin pater, greek πατηρ, Old english faeder - latin and greek /p/ is always an old English /f/). If the word matches, but the sound change doesn’t correspond, the word is most likely just a lone word.
★ Chapter 2 - phonetics and phonology 🗣️
- “Ne…..quidem”
- Terentius Scaurus - speaks of errors in Latin
- Errors arise from - “adiectio” when a letter is wrongly added. “detractio” when a letter is wrongly left out. “immutatio” when to near-homophones are confused with each other. “annexio” when a word is divided wrongly (fx: ne-scire ~ nes-cire)
- Also - first a variant in pronunciation has to arise, and then adopted by a larger community = actuation + spread
- Actuation (=Why Lan gauge change occurs) is driven by articulatory (over/under articulation), acoustic (fx mixed up fricatives) or psycholinguistic factors (Grassmann’s law in Greek).
- Rhotacism - *-s- and *-z- becomes an *-r- intervocalically
- Does not affect geminates (dobbeltkonsonanter)
- For indo European stops(=plosives - full stop before making the sound and burst of air), 5 places of articulation: bilabial *b^h, dental *d^h, palatal *g’^h, velar *g^h, labiovelar *g^wh
- Ablaut = vowel alterations that change the morphology of a word (fx tempus, conjugation (sing, sang, sung).
- Coefficients sonantiques - laryngeals (Hermann Møller)
- Laryngeals are kind of unknown reconstructed sounds - kind of like [h](?), voiceless back fricatives, velar [x], glottal [h]
- NB!! Laryngeals are indicated with “H” followed by a number - where the notation of “H” of course isn’t phonetic.
- Diglossia - the educated people speak and write a “high” variety of (in this case) latin and regular people / plebs speak a “low” everyday variety.
- The “low” variety is called “vulgar latin”
- Sound change spreads for sociolinguistic reasons.
- People may chose to imitate another persons sound change, because they may get some sort of “prestige”
- Comparative >< internal reconstruction
- Internal = done with a single language
★ Chapter 3 - morphology 🕊️
- morpheme- smallest meaningful unit of a word
- Just like phonemes have allophones, morphemes have allomorphs!
- Languages are divided into: isolating (most words are monomorphemic), agglutinative (lengthy words, many morphemes, each morpheme has one meaning), inflectional (morphemes can have several functions at once), polysynthetic (very large number of morphemes, word and sentence may coincide(?)).
- Three main reasons for new word creation/formation: new words for new concepts, syntactic recategorisation, express certain attitudes.
- Compounding - (Sanskrit terminology) dvandva- and bahuvrihi-compounds
- Dvandva: appositional compound words, like “singer-songwriter” - so a person who is both
- Bahuvrihi: exocentric- characterised by a human having, owning or doing something, like “pickpocket” for a thief.
- Derivation - doesn’t add more material necessarily to a word, but changes the word class (fx: noun “praise” —> verb “to praise”)
- Inflection - modifies case, number (nouns) and person, number, tense, mood, voice (verbs)
- Latin has 2 toes of suffixes - layer 1 and 2
- Layer 1 - Latinate suffixes, affect stress patterns and alter stem consonants
- Layer 2 - Germanic suffixes, do not alter stress patterns and stem-final consonants.
- Diachronic linguistics study how has developed and evolved through time.
- Synchronic linguistics aims at describing a language at a specific point of time, usually the present.
3.3 - morphological developments from indo European to Latin 🫒
* Case syncretism - indo European (IE) (later on) had 8 cases like Sanskrit. IE had nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, vocative, and three cases both adverbial functions: instrumental, locative, and separative (and comparative) ablative. In Greek the adverbial cases merged with core cases: Locative merged into dative, then the genitive into ablative, instrumental into dative. In greek the mergers are not result of sound change, but are semantically motivated.
* Aorist and perfect merger - classical Latin has five types of perfect: s-perfect (dico,”I say”, dixi), the reduplicated perfect (parco “I spare”, peperci), the long vowel perfect (edō “I eat”, ēdī), the simple perfect without stem alteration (uerto “I turn”, uerti), the productive u/u-perfect (moneo “I admonish”, monui).
- Present —> present and imperfect; Aorist —> action as a complete whole; perfect —> current state as the result of past action.
- Telicity - verbs can be ‘telic’ (= have a specified endpoint —> formed root artists and derived presents) or ‘atelic’ (= do not have an endpoint —> formed root presents and derived aorists)
- Italic languages merged aorist and perfect = only perfect.
- Reason: many overlapping functions.
* Future perfect and perfect subjunctive merger - partially because of sound change.
- vowel weakening- ended up in -i-
- Osthoff’s law
* Switches in conjugation classes - if speakers haven’t encountered all conjugations of a verb, they may start conjugating it in a different conjugation which could be more frequent.
- Autosegmental phonology
- Optimality theory (NB!! Look more into that!!)
★ Chapter 4 - syntax 🏹
- Generative grammar theories
- Functional grammar theories
- Languages put several semantic verb roles together to form macro-roles —> agent, patient, recipient, beneficiary, instrument, location, time.
- Active >< passive.
- Possessive- and objective genitives
- Sigmatic future verb form - all telic, and might indicate the same as future perfects in subordinate clauses. - So they can be interpreted as perfective (just restricted to the telic verbs).
- Sigmatic futures may have an aoristic origin.
- Clitics - a word that’s phonologically dependent on another word, and can’t stand alone
- Some accusative-and-infinitives could be replaced by “quod” clauses if the main verb was factual, like “gaudere (to be happy)”, but not with verbs of speech.
- Three types of modality discussed (but seems like there are more then): root modality (= concepts like ability and willingness - expressed through modal verbs), epistemic modality (= (im)possibility - expressed through (potential and unreal) subjunctives), deontic modality (=degrees of obligation and necessity - jussive subjunctive).
★ Chapter 5 - dialects 🏛️
- mutually intelligible variations of the same language
- Reasons why speech communities drift a past so a dialect is created: 1) when a language spreads, it may be acquired by a community whose first language is different, and their first language could get mixed with the new one. 2) when an area retains an archaism that other areas give up. 3) when an area innovates (fx hypercorrections, (= occurred when people assumed, because of the monophtongization of -ae, that som Greek loan words already went through the monophtongization, and wanted to sound more correct)) and others do not. 4) usages of phrases can spread or shrink.
- Code-switching
- Bilingualism - especially between Latin and Greek.
- Sondersprachen “language apart” - specific communities that speak a language can make their own variations of it. An example of this is Christian Latin.
★ Chapter 6 - pragmatics ✨
- Pragmatics focus on the meaning in language/sentences, by looking beyond the literal meaning in what’s being said, and also taking other social cues into account, like the tone and body language.
- Deixis “pointing”
- Personal deixis - specifying the one who’s speaking (?)
- Aposiopesis - breaking off the sentence mid sentence, in order to emphasise and express intense feelings
- Rhetorical questions are actually statements in question form, and can have syntactic consequences. In Latin the syntactic consequences in indirect speech are, that genuine questions become indirect questions in the subjunctive and rhetorical questions rhetorical questions are turned into accusative and infinitives, just like regular statements (p. 211).
- Grice’s maxims
★ Chapter 7 - sociolinguistics 🌍
- language in its social context - how societal norms and expectations shape the language and expressions.
- The studies of phonetics, phonology and morphology can be considered and studies sociolinguistically - but the overlap with pragmatics is especially significant.
- Sociolinguistics could almost be called ‘applied pragmatics’. For instance, the attitude towards accents or differences in male and female speech.
- When dialects are determined by social class and not locality, it’s a sociolect.
- In first century BC Greek had become a prestige language, and the Roman upper class started to use more Greek loan words —> sociolect.
- Catullus’ funny comment about Arrius who couldn’t aspirate correctly when he spoke Greek.
- Varro - De lingua Latina
★ Chapter 8 - three texts 🪷
- in these texts we’ll look at how the previously given linguistic insight can be applied to further understanding of the texts.
1. Early Faliscan text (7th century BC)(dialect or language very close to Latin) - Early orthography lacks /g/. Etruscan had no /o/. Archaic genitives -ās, in first and second declension. The problematic text… ‘pro’ should be combined with an ablative, but not here, so maybe another case was allowed back then. Faliscan couldn’t differentiate between /b/ and /p/. In Greek *m- becomes β before a liquid (r or l).
2. Bellum hispaniense “the Spanish war” (classical period) - About one of Caesars wars but not written by him. The writer tried to imitate Caesar, and the differences are examined here.
3. Gellius’ Attic nights (2nd century AD)
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