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"Latin language"
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Social Variation and the Latin Language
Languages show variations according to the social class of speakers and Latin was no exception, as readers of Petronius are aware. The Romance languages have traditionally been regarded as developing out of a 'language of the common people' (Vulgar Latin), but studies of modern languages demonstrate that linguistic change does not merely come, in the social sense, 'from below'. There is change from above, as prestige usages work their way down the social scale, and change may also occur across the social classes. This book is a history of many of the developments undergone by the Latin language as it changed into Romance, demonstrating the varying social levels at which change was initiated. About thirty topics are dealt with, many of them more systematically than ever before. Discussions often start in the early Republic with Plautus, and the book is as much about the literary language as about informal varieties.
eBook
Latin : story of a world language
The mother tongue of the Roman Empire and the lingua franca of the West for centuries afterward, Latin survives today primarily in classrooms and texts. Yet this \"dead language\" is unique in the influence it has exerted across centuries and continents. Jürgen Leonhardt offers the story of the first \"world language\", from antiquity to the present.
eBook
Bilingualism and the Latin Language
Since the 1980s, bilingualism has become one of the main themes of sociolinguistics - but there are as yet few large-scale treatments of the subject specific to the ancient world. This book is the first work to deal systematically with bilingualism during a period of antiquity (the Roman period, down to about the fourth century AD) in the light of sociolinguistic discussions of bilingual issues. The general theme of the work is the nature of the contact between Latin and numerous other languages spoken in the Roman world. Among the many issues discussed three are prominent: code-switching (the practice of switching between two languages in the course of a single utterance) and its motivation, language contact as a cause of change in one or both of the languages in contact, and the part played by language choice and language switching in the establishment of personal and group identities.
eBook
Sexing the world
From the moment a child in ancient Rome began to speak Latin, the surrounding world became populated with objects possessing grammatical gender-masculine eyes (oculi), feminine trees (arbores), neuter bodies (corpora).Sexing the Worldsurveys the many ways in which grammatical gender enabled Latin speakers to organize aspects of their society into sexual categories, and how this identification of grammatical gender with biological sex affected Roman perceptions of Latin poetry, divine power, and the human hermaphrodite.
Beginning with the ancient grammarians, Anthony Corbeill examines how these scholars used the gender of nouns to identify the sex of the object being signified, regardless of whether that object was animate or inanimate. This informed the Roman poets who, for a time, changed at whim the grammatical gender for words as seemingly lifeless as \"dust\" (pulvis) or \"tree bark\" (cortex). Corbeill then applies the idea of fluid grammatical gender to the basic tenets of Roman religion and state politics. He looks at how the ancients tended to construct Rome's earliest divinities as related male and female pairs, a tendency that waned in later periods. An analogous change characterized the dual-sexed hermaphrodite, whose sacred and political significance declined as the republican government became an autocracy. Throughout, Corbeill shows that the fluid boundaries of sex and gender became increasingly fixed into opposing and exclusive categories.
Sexing the Worldcontributes to our understanding of the power of language to shape human perception.
eBook
Dynamics of morphological productivity : the evolution of noun classes from Latin to Italian
In Dynamics of Morphological Productivity, Francesco Gardani explores the evolution of the productivity of the noun inflectional classes of Latin and Old Italian, providing a wealth of cleverly organized empirical facts, accompanied by brilliant and groundbreaking analyses.
eBook