Volume 22, Issue 2

In Late Latin, dolus ‘deceit’ expanded its semantic scope and took on the meanings of dolor ‘pain, suffering, grief, anguish’. This article lays out the literary and epigraphic attestations for dolus ‘suffering’ in full and discusses the difficulties in determining whether a change in semantics has occurred. Using digital resources such as Perseus Digital Library and the linguistic corpus LatinISE as the basis for quantitative analysis, suggested routes by which dolus took on the meanings of dolor are evaluated. The article proposes that analogy played an important role and suggests several instances of four-part analogy based around s-stem nouns and adjectives formed from them by the suffix - oso - . It also considers the way in which the prescriptivist rhetoric of ancient authors still shape modern scholarship on Latin. Late Latin features are not evidence of decay or the result of speakers being ill-educated or incompetent, and should not be discussed as mistakes. The article also considers how social hegemonies influence semantics and the study whereof, and how the dominance of certain voices in Latin may skew our understanding of the meaning of words.

Over the history of Latin, a number of ways to express futurity evolve and disappear. Perhaps most notably, the future tense is lost in all Romance languages, replaced generally by periphrases with habeo . I present here the expressions of futurity present in the Latin translation of Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities and Against Apion , conducted in sixth-century CE Italy under the aegis of Cassiodorus. I first examine the use of the synthetic future tense, and then suggest that the translators deliberately avoid using habeo  + infinitive in any sense. This contradicts recent claims that habeo  + infinitive was characteristic of high register usage in Late Latin. I then analyse the use of the present tense to express futurity, the future participle +  sum , gerundives as future passive participles and infinitives, and the curious use of debeo and possum . I show a number of changes in the system from Classical Latin, and suggest a new potential route for the development of debeo to express the future in certain Romance varieties.

This paper will start by focusing on the morphosemantics of a Latin verb lūgeō ‘mourn’, which represents an emotion felt by people mentally excruciated by their loved one’s death. Traditionally, it has been believed that the Proto-Indo-European verbal root * leu̯g - ‘break’ underlies lūgeō , but recently this etymology has been challenged. However, I will support the traditional ‘break’ hypothesis through a novel semantic comparison to doleō ‘feel pain’, a verb also expressing a type of sensation humans often experience. Since its underlying root * delh 1 - means ‘hew, split’, similar to ‘break’, the semantic development of doleō would provide a neat parallel for lūgeō . Having salvaged the connection with * leu̯g -, I will advocate a stative formation (with *- eh 1 - i̯é -) for lūgeō instead of the more commonly presumed iterative reconstruction (with *- éi̯e -). The analysis conducted for lūgeō turns out to be useful for doleō , too; I will propose that the latter verb’s wider semantic range is best explained as the result of the convergence of two formations, a stative form meaning ‘feel pain’ (with *- eh 1 - i̯é -) and an iterative form meaning ‘habitually give pain to’ (with *- éi̯e -, as previously assumed for this verb).

The Tabula Alimentaria Veleiana and the Tabula Ligures Baebiani are two 2nd century tablets which outline the regional implementation and execution of Trajan’s alimentary scheme. These tablets not only provide some of the longest Latin inscriptions from antiquity, but they also offer unique insight into regional linguistic patterns, as one tablet is from northern Italy and the other is from southern Italy. Given that each tablet demonstrates its own consistent patterns of orthographic peculiarities, it is possible that these communities had local epigraphic traditions. This, in turn, could suggest that consistent spelling anomalies reflect regional phonological patterns, such as intervocalic voicing and consonant degemination. This case study builds on recent literature studying sociolinguistic variation in Latin by using tablets from the same time period as regional corpora with which to study linguistic patterns.