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CHAPTER 1

Latin as a source for the

Romance languages
JAMES CLACKSON

1.1 Chronological and spatial scope stylized poetry of Vergil (Publius Virgilius Maro, 70-19 BC),
of Latin Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-68 BC), and Ovid (Pub-
lius Ovidius Naso, 43 BC-17/18 AD) written in quantitative
metres based on Greek models, and sometimes employing
The traditional date for the founding of Rome is 753 BC, but
extreme hyperbaton and recondite vocabulary; through
our earliest records for the Latin language date from around
speeches and historical works written in prose, which can
200 years later. Only a few Latin texts survive from before
combine multiple subordinate clauses to achieve highly
200 BC, but after this date there is a wealth of material, both
elaborate periodic sentences; to dramatic comedies, satires,
through inscriptional sources and transmitted manuscripts
and novels that sometimes appear to imitate different
of literary and sub-literary compositions. The corpus of
speech styles of individual characters. Texts, usually surviv-
surviving Latin texts up until AD 476, the time of the depos-
ing in manuscript form, which treat technical matters, or
ition of Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor in the
instruction manuals, such as medical or veterinary trea-
west, is greater than ten million words, with well over
tises, works on military tactics or land surveying, cook-
100,000 surviving inscriptions. Documents or inscriptions
books, and the like, are usually written in less elaborate
written in Latin have been found throughout the Roman
styles of Latin, and sometimes referred to as ‘sub-literary’
empire, as far north as Hadrian’s Wall in Britain (an import-
texts. Epigraphic and documentary evidence also encom-
ant new source of Latin documents written on wooden
passes a broad range, comprising carefully composed offi-
tablets) and as far south as Philae in Egypt. Texts in Latin
cial inscriptions recording laws or imperial decrees; poorly
have been found in all the regions now populated by
scratched or painted graffiti from walls at Pompeii and
speakers of varieties of Romance in the Romània continua
other Roman settlements; laundry lists, letters, and
and also in other areas, including Britain, north Africa, and
accounts from military camps and the like; and countless
central Europe, where the modern languages do not derive
examples of funerary epitaphs left in memory of patrons,
from Latin. Indeed, many of the most important Latin
relatives, and friends (see Cooley 2012 for a recent survey).
authors of the imperial and later periods were born outside
To add to this, there is a rich tradition of grammatical
the domain of modern Romance languages: St Augustine
literature in Latin, which, though largely prescriptive,
(Aurelius Augustinus, AD 354-430) was a native of what is
sometimes can give insights into the speech of individuals
now Algeria; St Jerome (Eusebius Hieronymus, AD 347-420),
and social groups.
whose translation of the Bible into Latin is still in use, was
born in the Roman province of Dalmatia, probably in what is
now Slovenia; Priscian (Priscianus Caesariensis, fifth–sixth
century AD), author of the most extensive and most import-
ant ancient grammar of Latin, was born in north Africa and 1.2 Classical and vulgar Latin
spent his working life in Constantinople (now Istanbul);
Tribonianus (died AD 541 or 542), one of the compilers of Latin evolved into the Romance languages, and it is natural
the Latin codification of laws under Justinian, was a native to seek antecedents to linguistic developments in Romance
of Side, now in southern Turkey. within Latin. The huge range of evidence for Latin offers
The chronological and spatial spread of Latin is conse- many possibilities to the researcher. In some accounts
quently vast. The corpus of surviving Latin texts also pre- (e.g. Solodow 2010:107, see also other references in Adams
sents an enormous variety of material written in different 2013:7), the Roman world in the last century of the republic
registers. Literary texts range across genres: from the and during the empire is presented as diglossic. According

The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages. Adam Ledgeway and Martin Maiden (eds)
This chapter © James Clackson 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press. 3
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JAMES CLACKSON
to this view, so-called ‘Classical Latin’ was the H(igh) var-
iety, which was also the written form taught at school and
employed by members of the Roman elite. This is the form
in which nearly all literary texts and official inscriptions are
composed. Classical Latin is itself the result of a period of
linguistic standardization which took place some time
between 150 BC and AD 100, and is associated with precepts
and models laid down by authors such as Cicero (Marcus
Tullius Cicero, 106-43 BC) and Caesar (Gaius Julius Caesar,
100-44 BC) (see further Clackson 2011b). Followers of the
notion of a Latin diglossia often use the term ‘Vulgar
Latin‘ to designate the L(ow) variety, which is presumed to
be the spoken idiom of the lower classes (note however that
other scholars attribute other senses to the term ‘Vulgar
Latin’, see Adams 2013:7-27 for a recent survey of some of
the different senses accorded to the term; cf. also §2.5).
Vulgar Latin is held to be the ancestor of the Romance
languages, but, according to the diglossia theory, its subor-
dinate status usually prevented its representation in the
written record. Consequently, in order to access the actual
source of Romance languages, different strategies may be
explored.
First, it is possible to examine texts written before the
process of standardization. The bulk of surviving literary
texts composed during the period before the standardiza-
tion of the Classical language are the comedies of Plautus
(Titus Maccius Plautus, d. c.184 BC) and Terence (Publius
Terentius Afer, d. 159 BC); these are dramatic works often
based on Greek originals. Plautus and, to a lesser extent,
Terence exhibit more variation in their language than later
Classical authors, and consequently some of their linguistic
features have been assumed to have been stigmatized in the
Classical language and to have disappeared from the written
record, only to emerge in Romance languages 1,000 years
later (Pulgram 1958:321). An example from the lexicon is
given in §1.5.
Other possible sources for the pre-standardized spoken
Latin, and also for the vulgar Latin of the regions outside
Rome, have been found in the surviving inscriptions written
in the sister languages of Latin from Italy, especially
Umbrian, attested from a region roughly corresponding to
modern Umbria, and Oscan and the so-called ‘minor dia-
lects’ spoken in central and southern Italy until the first
century BC (see Marchesini 2009 for a recent survey). As
speakers switched from these varieties into Latin during
the Romanization of Italy, it is possible that they continued
to incorporate features of their native phonology into their
pronunciation of their second language; and hence by ana-
lysing these languages, it may be possible to unearth some
detail about the local Latin spoken in Italy in the period
from 200 BC to AD 100. Some of the developments which are
seen in Oscan, Umbrian, and other languages once spoken in
4
Italy also take place in the transition from Latin to Romance
(see Coleman 2000 for a survey of various phonological
changes). These include the palatalization of velars before
front vowels (observable in Umbrian); loss of final conson-
ants (found in Umbrian); the monophthongization of diph-
thongs (again found in Umbrian); and a series of vowel
mergers, including between long e and short i (found in
Oscan, but assumed for Umbrian as well). In §1.3, I shall
discuss in more detail the case of the vowel mergers and the
monophthongization of the diphthong ae.
Finally, it is assumed that some vulgar Latin forms are
found in Latin texts, because they have ‘leaked’ into the
compositions of particularly unskilled, or undereducated,
individuals, who did not have sufficient competence or
training to manipulate the Classical Latin idiom. Palmer
(1954:149) uses a geological metaphor to convey this view
of vulgar Latin occasionally breaking through the inert
crust of the Classical language: ‘[t]here are, as it were, in
the dead landscape of literary Latin, seismic areas where
occasional eruptions reveal the intense subterranean activ-
ity which one day will make a new world of language.’
The model of vulgar Latin as the ‘submerged’ language is
apparently supported by some Latin texts. Of these one of
the most important is the Satyrica, a Roman novel which
only survives in fragments, written in the first century AD by
Petronius (Gaius Petronius Arbiter, c. AD 27-66). The longest
extant portion of the novel, now known as the Cena Trimal-
chionis, describes in extravagant detail a dinner party hosted
by a wealthy freed slave, Trimalchio. Unusually among
ancient writers of literary works, Petronius represents the
speech of Trimalchio, his wife, and the band of fellow
freedmen at dinner as markedly different, in vocabulary,
sentence structure, and word-endings, from the speech of
other characters in the novel and from the language of the
surrounding prose narrative. This can be illustrated from a
section of a longer speech given by the character Echion,
identified as a collector of rags. In this passage Echion
addresses Agamemnon, a pedantic teacher of rhetoric,
who has been silent up to this point in the dinner:
uideris mihi, Agamemnon, dicere: ‘quid iste argutat molestus?’
quia tu, qui potes loquere, non loquis. non es nostrae fasciae, et
ideo pauperorum uerba derides. scimus te prae litteras fatuum
esse. quid ergo est?
[Agamemnon, you look like you are saying ‘What is this bore
going on about?’ Because you, who can speak, don’t speak. You
are not one of our gang, and so you laugh at the words of us ’umble
folk. We know that you are mad for learning. What’s it all about
then?]
Agamemnon is presented as ‘able to talk’, meaning that
he can speak correct or standard Classical Latin, but holding
back from the conversation, and instead laughing at the

language of the freedmen, who belong to a different social
group. It is certainly true that the narrator of this section is
poking fun at the language of the freedmen, since the
introductions and conclusions to their speeches include
ironic statements about the quality of their language such
as ‘Such sweet conversation . . . ’. It is also true that the
freedmen’s speeches contain infringements of the prescrip-
tions of the grammarians (and deviations from the vast
majority of literary usage). Some of these departures from
the norms are further mirrored in sub-literary documents
and graffiti (see Adams 2003b for a recent collection) and
many of them also win out over the Classical forms in the
later Romance languages. Two of the non-Classical features
of Echion’s speech will suffice to exemplify these features.
First, the word pauperorum is assigned to a different declen-
sion class than is normal in Classical Latin (it should be
PAUPERUM ‘of the poor’ the genitive plural of the third-
declension adjective PAUPER), and we know that the gram-
marians censured this switch of declension (Palladius in Keil
1855-80, IV:83f.) and it appears in the Appendix Probi (on
which see below). Some of the continuations of the word in
Romance languages, such as It. povero (with F povera) show
the same change in declension class (although in other
Romance varieties the change has not taken place: compare
e.g. Sp. pobre). Secondly, Echion conjugates the verb mean-
ing ‘to speak’, LOQUI, as an active rather than deponent
(hence loquere in place of infinitive LOQUI, and loquis in place
of second person singular LOQUERIS). In Romance languages
the marking of verbs with active meaning through passive
morphology was also lost, and the beginnings of the process
are observable in Latin literary and sub-literary texts writ-
ten in later centuries (cf. also §60.3). But the view expressed
by some scholars that the deponent is avoided in spoken
Latin as early as the first century AD (see e.g. Pulgram
1978:223) is open to doubt, since there are in fact very few
examples of the transfer of conjugation of deponent verbs
to the active in the speeches of the freedmen in Petronius.
As Flobert pointed out (1975:308), most ‘vulgar’ writers in
this period are comfortable with deponents, whereas trans-
fers from the deponent to the active are found in authors of
Latin of the highest literary pretension.
The representation of the speech of the freedmen in
Petronius therefore contributes to the conclusion that
some features of Latin were censured by grammarians and
avoided in the literary register, but present in speech. One
grammatical work in particular has also been often cited as
a parallel for Petronius’ apparent direct citations of every-
day speech, the so-called Appendix Probi. This is actually the
third of five grammatical appendices to the Instituta Artium
of Probus, found in a seventh–eighth-century manuscript
now in Naples (and re-edited in Powell 2007). The Appendix
consists of a collection of over 200 word pairs, expressed in
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LATIN AS A SOURCE
the form a non b, i.e. ‘a not b’. For example pauper mulier non
paupera mulier, which might be translated ‘[the correct form
is] pauper mulier “poor woman” not paupera mulier’. The
statement thus indicates that PAUPER is an adjective declined
according to the Latin third declension class, and does not
group with adjectives such as INTEGER ‘whole’, which are
declined in the first/second declension class, with a femin-
ine INTEGRA. The phrase paupera mulier thus indicates that the
adjective has made the same switch of declension class as
that which was seen in Echion’s pauperorum, in the passage
of Petronius cited above. Palmer (1954:154) took the Appen-
dix Probi to be ‘notes on current errors in speech’ and
ascribed it to the third or fourth century AD, and likewise
Pulgram (1958:317), who dated it even earlier. However,
consideration of the full text means that the compilation
dates from the fourth century or later, although some of the
observations may repeat grammatical precepts that have
their origin as far back as the first century BC. More import-
antly, it is clear that the list is concerned not with the
correction of spoken errors but with written forms of
Latin (as already noted by Grandgent 1908:5 ‘a list of good
and bad spellings’, a statement changed in later editions, see
also Clackson 2011c:518f.). Some of the written forms may
also have been castigated when used in speech (as in the
case of paupera mulier), but we cannot assume that the forms
for which replacements are recommended necessarily
occurred in the spoken language, and it is certainly incor-
rect to imagine that all of these items were characteristics
of a single dialect of spoken Latin.
Petronius is therefore unique for the representation of
non-Classical Latin alongside the Classical variety of his
narrative. Moreover, the evidence of Petronius does not
necessarily support the diglossia model of Classical and
vulgar Latin. Indeed, the freedmen themselves are not rep-
resented as all speaking a uniform dialect: characters
exhibit various different non-Classical features (see the
collection of material gathered by Boyce 1991), and individ-
ual freedmen have idiosyncratic speech styles, such as the
freedman Hermeros, who code-switches between Latin and
Greek (see Adams 2003a:21); Petronius also seems to have
drawn partly on literary models in constructing the speech
of the freedmen (see Leiwo 2010). Furthermore, failure to
follow the precepts of grammarians in speech is not limited
to Petronius’ freedmen, or indeed to any particular class of
Roman society. Several ancient sources remark, for
example, on the impatience of the Emperor Augustus
(63 BC–4 AD) with the precepts of the grammarians (some
are collected at Adams 2007:16f.). Augustus made use of
prepositions with the names of towns and had a preference
for syncopated forms such as caldus in place of CALIDUS
‘warm’. From much later in the history of Latin there is an
explicit statement of a grammarian, Pompeius (late fifth to
5
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JAMES CLACKSON
early sixth century AD) that a phrase in use in speech among
the educated of his day (inimicus tuus est ‘he is your enemy’)
is not Latinus ‘(Classical) Latin’ (see further Adams 2013:13-
15 for this and other examples and discussion).
There is indeed little to support the view that the
language situation during either the Roman republic or
empire was one of diglossia, and statements in the sources
imply that Latin speakers of all classes varied their speech
in different contexts, and that for all classes and at all
periods there may have been a disjuncture between forms
used in the written language and those used in speech.
Cicero, for example, refers in one of his letters to himself
as using sermo plebeius, which can be literally translated as
‘plebeian language’, but this is better translated as ‘collo-
quial style’, and does not refer to a separate Latin variety.
Similarly, Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, c. AD 35-95)
refers to the conversational language of the Roman elite
between friends and family both as ‘everyday speech’
(sermo cotidianus) and as sermo uulgaris, a phrase normally
rendered into English as ‘vulgar Latin’. When Latin authors
of the later empire, including grammarians and Christian
writers such as Jerome and Augustine, differentiate
between educated forms which are used by the uulgus, i.e.
the ‘masses’, with what is Latinus, i.e. Classical Latin, they
may be contrasting social distinctions of language, but they
may also be referring to words found in the written lan-
guage (and not used in speech even by the educated) with
spoken forms.
Since features which were stigmatized by grammarians
were in fact found in the language of all classes of society, it
is necessary to adjust the view that vulgar Latin was the
submerged language of the underclass, driven underground
after the second century BC, and only able to break free from
the veneer of Classical Latin at the end of the Middle Ages. It
is certainly true that some spoken features were avoided in
the written language (most clearly certain vocabulary
items, as will be discussed in §1.5), and that in the later
periods of the language the gap between what was said and
what was written was considerable. However, speakers of all
classes deviated from the written norms of Classical Latin,
and there is no a priori reason to assume that all of the
features in Romance originated as ‘change from below’.
Some of the linguistic developments within Latin may
indeed have begun amongst the more wealthy or better
educated, and spread from there to all speakers; I shall
discuss an example in §1.4. In the words of Adams
(2013:858): ‘ “Submerged” does not necessarily mean “vul-
gar”.’ The conclusion must therefore be that in assessing the
origin of the Romance languages within Latin, it is import-
ant to consider the widest range of Latin texts as possible in
order to gain insight into how the written standard itself
developed over time, and what lay behind it.
6
In the remainder of this chapter I will exemplify these
points by consideration of three different areas in which
attempts have been made to find the origin of Romance
formations within Latin. These will be the changes in the
vowel system (cf. also §4.2.1, §25.1); the development of new
forms of the future tense (cf. also §46.3.2.2); and develop-
ments in the lexicon (cf. also Ch. 32). More detailed work on
these topics, and many other aspects of the origins of
Romance features within Latin can be found in the recent
compendious work of Adams (2013), to which I shall make
frequent reference.
1.3 Changes in the vowel system
from Latin to Romance
Latin distinguished five short and five long vowels, which
will be distinguished in what follows through the use of a
macron on the long variants: i ī e ē a ā o ō u ū. Roman authors
and scribes did not make a systematic distinction between
long and short vowels in writing, although long vowels are
sporadically marked by various devices at different stages in
the history of the language, including doubling of the letter
representing the vowel (e.g. inscriptional paastores for Latin
PASTORES ‘shepherds’), the placement of a small mark called
an apex over the letter, and, in the case of the vowel ī, the
use of an elongated form of the letter in inscriptions. Vowel
length is also revealed through metrical compositions,
which rely on patterned alternations between long and
short vowels. In the earliest Latin inscriptions there is
evidence for a series of diphthongs, including ai, au, ei, oi,
and ou, but a series of monophthongizations from the third
to the first century BC eliminated ei, oi, and ou, which mostly
merged with inherited ī and ū (see Weiss 2009:100-104, 142f.
for details of these changes). By the first century BC, there-
fore, Latin only had two diphthongs attested in a large
number of words, which are written ae and au (with oe, eu,
and ui restricted to a few lexical stems); in Latin verse,
diphthongs were scanned as equivalent to a long vowel.
The vowel system of Latin was to undergo substantial
changes in the Romance languages. Length was lost as a
distinctive feature of vowels, and instead vowel length
became concomitant with the place of the accent (see
Loporcaro 2011a:53-8 and Adams 2013:43-51 for recent
accounts and surveys of the literature). Short vowels appear
to have been lengthened under the stress accent, and
unstressed long vowels shortened. A characteristic set of
mergers takes place for stressed vowels. In general (exclud-
ing individual developments in peripheral areas such as
Sardinia, Sicily, and in the east), ē merges with i and ō

merges with u; neither ī nor ū merges with any other vowel;
the low vowels ā and a merge together. This seems to reflect
a qualitative difference between the long and short mid
vowels which is noted by some ancient writers on language:
the long mid vowels were pronounced more close than the
short mid vowels, and the short high vowels were pro-
nounced comparatively open. A further change was the
monophthongization of the diphthong represented by the
digraph ae, which merged in quality with the short vowel e.
The net effect of these changes is the establishment of a
vowel system with distinctive high-mid and low-mid vowels
in place of one with length distinctions but only three
distinctive vowel heights.
As I mentioned in the previous section, there is good
evidence that developments analogous to the Romance
changes took place in Oscan. In Oscan, vowel length can be
expressed by doubling of the letter used to represent the
vowel, but in native texts the doubling is almost entirely
restricted to initial syllables of words, supporting a hypoth-
esis that all words were stressed on their first syllable, and
that in non-stressed syllables the length distinction was
lost. Non-initial syllables show a three-way contrast in
front vowels, which are represented in the native alphabet
of Oscan by the signs transcribed i, í, and e. The high-mid
vowel, represented by the letter í, derives historically from
both *i and *ē. On the back axis, Oscan also shows merger of
inherited *ō and *u, with both vowels normally written as u,
the accented ú representing the outcome of inherited *o.
Hence, for example, the writing dunúm ‘gift’ < *dōnom. It is
usually assumed that Umbrian has undergone the same set
of vowel mergers as Oscan, although the writing systems
used for Umbrian never innovated a consistent way of
representing the triple distinction of vowel height, and
the picture is obscured by a rule lowering u before nasals
(Meiser 1986:51f., 120-22). As for the diphthongs, Oscan
generally maintained the set which it had inherited from
its parent language (i.e. ai, ei, oi, au, and ou); in Umbrian, all
inherited diphthongs had been monophthongized by the
third century BC.
Similarities between the Sabellian (as the language group
which encompasses Oscan and Umbrian is now known) and
the Romance developments of the vowel system inevitably
lead to the question of whether there is any ground for
connecting the two. Does Romance reflect, in the termin-
ology of Seidl (1994:368), a ‘lingua romana in bocca sabellica’
(‘Roman language in the mouths of Sabellian speakers’)?
Much previous scholarship assumes it does (see Eska
1987:147 for references to those who have accepted the
notion of an Oscan substrate acting on Latin, to which can
be added Coleman 2000). Unlike many other cases where
language change has been hypothesized to reflect periods of
prehistoric linguistic contact, there is better evidence for
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LATIN AS A SOURCE
assessing the impact of Oscan speakers on the Latin
language. This is because of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79
AD, and the consequent burial of several coastal communi-
ties under the volcanic ash and lava flow, which led to the
preservation of large amounts of sub-literary Latin,
scratched or painted on the walls and buildings, or, remark-
ably, preserved in carbonized wax-tablets. There is a great
deal of surviving documentary material, around 11,000
inscriptions in total, including around 8,000 graffiti and
dipinti (as the painted inscriptions are known) from Pompeii
and surrounding areas. It should not be assumed that these
inscriptions present a unified linguistic picture, or that they
were all composed by members of the lower classes (see
Kruschwitz and Halla-aho 2007 and Kruschwitz 2010 for
recent surveys of Pompeian graffiti and their value for the
linguist). However, inscriptions reveal that Pompeii was an
Oscan-speaking town before it became a Roman colony in
the first century BC, and a few Oscan inscriptions from
Pompeii date from the first century AD (Crawford et al.
2011:39; the latest datable inscription appears to have
been written in the decade before the eruption, Crawford
et al. 2011:702f.). Furthermore, the quantity of non-literary
Latin surviving from Pompeii and surrounding areas allows
the researcher to make more widespread use of statistical
techniques than work on historical linguistics normally
allows.
In order to ascertain whether speakers have already
made adjustments to the Latin vowel system, scholars
have looked at what I shall call mis-spellings. If a word
containing the vowel ē is represented in script by a spelling
with i, or the vowel i is represented by the vowel sign used
for e, then this may indicate that the composer of the text
has merged the two vowels in his or her everyday pronun-
ciation. Väänänen (1966:20-22) collected the examples of
such mis-spellings from Pompeii. The picture is complicated
by various orthographic factors. For example, in the cursive
alphabet used for many of the low-level texts in Pompeii,
the letter <e> is often written with two upright strokes, II,
leading to the possibility that a careless or hasty attempt to
write <e> may result in something which is read as <i>.
Furthermore, in some cases writers select archaic orthog-
raphies of words, in which the long high front vowel ī was
spelt with the letter <e>, reflecting an early Latin pronunci-
ation of the outcome of monophthongized *ei (Weiss
2009:101). Once these factors are taken into account, there
are hardly any good examples of mis-spellings of the
expected type within accented syllables. The only good
remaining case is the word for ‘lucky’, FELIX (which is also
frequent as a personal name), which is once written filix for
fēlīx; however, the same word is also attested written felex,
which shows a highly anomalous representation of the vowel
ī by the letter <e>. It is likely that in this word speakers tended
7
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JAMES CLACKSON
to enunciate the two vowels with the same quality, some-
times choosing to repeat the vowel of the initial syllable,
sometimes that of the second syllable. In comparison,
Väänänen found many more examples of the diphthong
ae spelt with a simple <e> in Pompeii, and reverse spel-
lings, with an etymological ē (or ĕ) represented by the
digraph <ae> (Väänänen 1966:24; see also Coleman
1971b:185-90 for a wider collection of such spellings in
Latin inscriptions, and Adams 2013:75-7 for a survey of
other recently discovered evidence for this change from
the early empire).
The conclusion from these spellings would appear to be
that, in the first century AD, the confusion between ē and i
was not yet at a stage where it permeated into speakers’
writing habits (so also Eska 1987; Adams 2013:58f.), whereas
the monophthongization of ae was already under way.
These two developments run counter to the theory of an
Oscan substrate in the Latin spoken around the Bay of
Naples, since Oscan speakers had preserved the diphthong,
but operated with a distinction between high-mid and low-
mid vowels. Indeed, the vowel system of the Latin spoken at
Pompeii seems to be in step with other evidence for the
pronunciation of spoken Latin in other areas of the early
Roman empire. Letters and administrative documents from
Egypt and north Africa, from the Roman forts at Vindo-
landa on Hadrian’s wall (now in northern England), and
from Vindonissa (now in the canton of Aargau in Switzer-
land) also fail to show confusion between accented ē and i
(see Adams 2013:51-8 for a survey). In the same documents,
there is good evidence for the monophthongization of ae
(Adams 2013:73-5). Vowels in final syllables of polysyllabic
words (which were never under the stress accent in
speech) do show alternations in writing between e and i,
but here the merger affects short e and short i, and need
not be related to the changes which will later affect
Romance vowels.
If the distinctive merger of ē and i is not attested in the
early empire, what can be said about the loss of distinctive
vowel quantity? As already mentioned above, the Pompeian
spellings sometimes write ae where we expect both etymo-
logical ē and ĕ. Pulgram (1978:229) took this as a clear
indication that in spoken Latin, length was no longer dis-
tinctive, but that the oppositions between vowels were
solely based on quantity. But these criticisms had already
been countered by Coleman (1971b; 1974). In Coleman’s
view, the vowel which resulted from monophthongized ae
shared its length with inherited ē, but agreed with ĕ in its
quality, as a more open vowel than the inherited ē. When
writers chose to replace an original ē with ae, as in aegisse for
ēgisse ‘to have led’, they selected a writing which matched in
length but not quality; but when they wrote ae for ĕ as in
Saecundae for the personal name Sĕcundae they chose a
8
vowel of matching quality. The monophthongization of ae
to a long low-mid e-vowel seems to have been widespread in
Latin judging from inscriptional and documentary evidence.
Knowledge of when to write ae and when to write e appears
to have been a mark of good education in the later empire,
but we cannot be certain whether any speakers aimed to
preserve the diphthong in speech (Adams 2013:80f.).
For the first good evidence for the loss of distinctive
vowel quality in Latin, it is necessary to look at later texts,
and here it is more rewarding to consider the work of
grammarians and other commentators on Latin, combined
with the analysis of the metrical practices found in literary
authors, rather than inscriptional or documentary evidence.
Both Loporcaro (2011a:530-58) and Adams (2013:43-51) treat
this material in far more detail than is possible here, so
I will merely present a couple of pieces of evidence in order
to exemplify what the sources can reveal. First, some
writers on Latin state that there is a tendency to lengthen
short vowels when they are in a stressed syllable. For
example, the fifth-century grammarian Consentius (Publius
Consentius) identifies as a linguistic vice the practice of
African speakers of Latin of pronouncing the word for
‘pepper’, PIPER, with a long vowel in the first syllable, and
elsewhere he castigates the African practice of pronouncing
unaccented long vowels as short, as in the word ŌRĀTOR
‘speaker’, in which the unaccented initial ō was pronounced
short. Since Augustine refers to similar processes of length-
ening of vowels under the accent (although without the
same prescriptivism observable in Consentius), it has been
usual to associate this change specifically with African Latin
(thus Loporcaro 2011a:54f.). But Adams (2013:47-51) cites
the work of grammarians and authors outside Africa to
show that other speakers in the empire were already uncer-
tain about vowel length in the third century AD. Of interest
here is Adams’s reference to the work of Holmes (2007) on
the use of rhythmical endings of periodic sentences
(so-called clausulae) in the author Vegetius (Publius Flavius
Vegetius Renatus, c.400 AD). Vegetius strove to emulate
Classical models by employing a restricted set of clausulae,
but he seems to have been uncertain about which vowels in
open syllables were traditionally scanned long and which
were scanned short. The evidence for Vegetius is significant,
since it involves the work of an elite Roman (Vegetius was
in the imperial administration, and addressed his work on
military organization to the emperor), and thus indicates
that the collapse of length distinctions may have been
widespread among the Latin of all classes by this date.
Of all the different sources for discovering when the
vowel system of spoken Latin moved closer to that of the
Romance languages, inscriptional evidence can only tell us
so much. In the case of the diphthong ae, inscriptional
evidence is particularly useful, since it allows the precise

dating of the early appearance and the spread of spellings
that reflect a change in pronunciation. For the loss of vowel
quantity, however, inscriptional spellings are not as helpful
as explicit statements by grammarians and Latin authors
and the careful analysis of metrical features. It is true that it
is possible to count up cases of metrical inscriptions where
vowel quantities differ from the norm in different areas
(Loporcaro 2011a:56f. cites a study of Herman 1982 which
does exactly this). But here it is not clear whether the
results actually reveal the spread of a phonological phe-
nomenon, or the differing expertise and education of verse
composers in different places and different times. In gen-
eral, such quantitative studies of inscriptional material have
revealed rather less about the changing nature of spoken
Latin than is sometimes claimed (see Adams 2007:629-35 for
a critique of some studies of this sort).
1.4 Development of the future tense
In Classical Latin the four main conjugation classes into
which all regular verbs fall differ in the formation of the
future tense. In the first and second conjugation, and in
early Latin also in the fourth conjugation, the future is
formed through the addition of a morpheme incorporating
b (hence first person -BO, as in AMABO ‘I will love’ formed from
the verb AMARE) to the stem; in the third and fourth conju-
gations, a different formation is used, incorporating a mor-
pheme ē (except in the first person), giving a paradigm REGAM
‘I will rule’, REGES ‘you will rule’ from the verb REGERE. The
Latin future tense was replaced in Romance by a number of
different constructions, all of which have their origin in
periphrases. Thus a periphrasis of infinitive and HABEO
‘have’ is found in most of western Romance, a periphrasis
of HABEO AD ‘have to’ þ infinitive or DEBEO ‘owe, must’ þ
infinitive in Sardinian, and UOLO ‘want’ þ infinitive in Roma-
nian. The change from the Latin future to the Romance future
is one of the perennial topics of the historical development of
Romance (see Adams 2013:652-4 for a short survey of some
recent literature on the topic, as well as §46.3.2.2).
What light can Latin sources shed on this issue? There
are some indications from our sources that Latin speakers in
the early empire were uncomfortable with the future
morphology of Classical Latin. Phonological changes, includ-
ing the changes in the vowel system discussed in the previ-
ous section and the merger in some positions of the voiced
bilabial stop (represented in Latin orthography by the letter
<b>) with the labiovelar approximant (represented by <u>),
had led to an overlap between some forms of the future
with either present or perfect forms. Thus the second
person singular of the future of the verb meaning ‘write’,
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SCRIBES, was, for some speakers, indistinguishable from the
second person singular of the present, SCRIBIS; the third person
singular of the future of the verb ‘to deny’, NEGABIT, overlapped
with the third singular of the perfect, NEGAUIT (see Adams
2013:653f. for references to textual examples using these
exact forms).
Indications of this uncertainty over the correct morph-
ology of the future indicative can be seen from attempts to
replace the analytic future tense with other constructions.
Thus Echion, one of the fictional freedmen whose language
is represented by Petronius (part of which was cited at §1.2),
uses the following forms in the course of a long speech:
habituri sumus for HABEBIMUS ‘we shall have’, daturus est for
DABIT ‘he will have’, and persuadeam in place of PERSUADEBO
‘I shall persuade you’. The first two forms make use of a
periphrasis of the verb ESSE ‘to be’ with the future participle,
and the third employs the subjunctive in place of the future
(note that in the third and fourth conjugations, the first
person singular of the subjunctive is identical with the first
person singular of the future, hence REGAM means both ‘I will
rule’ and ‘I may rule’; Echion may have generalized this
pattern to verbs of the second conjugation, into which
PERSUADEO falls). The periphrasis with the future participle
and the verb ‘to be’ is also found in other sub-literary
documents. For example Claudius Terentianus, a Roman
soldier in Egypt whose correspondence is a rich source of
non-standard Latin forms, once writes missurus es in place of
MITTAS ‘you will send’ and once daturus est in place of DABIT ‘he
will give’; Terentianus also twice substitutes the future
tense with a verb conjugated in the present (Adams
1977:49). It is worth noting in passing that, although the
use of the present tense with future meaning is paralleled in
other Latin texts including the comedies of Plautus, it is not
in itself indicative of a socially marked speech variant, but
rather of conversational and colloquial language; and the
use of the present with future meaning in both Plautus and
Petronius can be explained in terms of pragmatics or com-
municative effect (Leiwo 2010:287-91; Adams 2013:666-72).
Despite the apparent avoidance of the Classical Latin
future forms, there is no clear indication in either Petronius,
sub-literary documents and letters, or other texts associ-
ated with a lower register of Latin that the construction of
infinitive þ HABEO was coming to be used in place of the
future. Indeed, the infinitive þ HABEO construction does not
occur with an unambiguous future meaning in any of the
texts collected in Rohlfs (1969b) earlier than the fifth cen-
tury AD. The early seventh-century Chronicon Fredegarii (II 62)
has often been cited for the first evidence for the contracted
form of infinitive followed by the verb habeo in a literary
text. The specific passage involves a folk etymology for the
name of the town Daras, reproducing a fictional conversa-
tion between the sixth-century Byzantine emperor
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JAMES CLACKSON
Justinian and a Persian king (Herman 2000:74). The Persian
king says to Justinian non dabo ‘I will not give [up the town]’
employing the Classical Latin synthetic future DABO, but
Justinian replies daras ‘you will give [it up]’ i.e. the result
of a contraction of DARE HABES ‘give.INF have.2SG.PRS.SBJV’. The
contracted form of the future occurs only once, in this
instance, in all literary Latin of the period, where it is
necessary for the sake of the pun—and, incidentally,
where it occurs in a citation of supposed direct speech.
The use of the contracted form here suggests however
that it was recognized and employed by speakers of all
classes by this time; it is appropriate in the mouth of an
emperor.
Although the infinitive þ HABEO construction does not
appear in texts normally considered to be ‘vulgar Latin’
with future meaning, it is not entirely absent from all
Latin texts before the fifth century AD. Indeed, it is found
as early as Cicero in Classical Latin, but here with a different
meaning (and in both orders infinitive þ HABEO and HABEO þ
infinitive). In Cicero, a phrase such as HABEO DICERE ‘I.have say.
INF’ (more common in Cicero with the infinitive placed after
the modal than in the order DICERE HABEO) means ‘I can say’
(Adams 1991:155f.). In later authors the construction can
also mean ‘I have to say’ or ‘I must say’. Indeed, Adams
(1991) detected a pattern in the order of the constituents in
the fifth/sixth-century AD grammarian Pompeius, who has
38 examples of the infinitive þ HABEO construction in his
commentary on the Ars of the earlier grammarian Aelius
Donatus. Pompeius uses the order HABEO þ infinitive when
the context supports an interpretation of either possibility
or obligation, but when he has the order infinitive þ HABEO,
the context usually excludes a reading of possibility, and the
construction must be understood to mean ‘have to’ or
‘must’. The link between obligation and futurity is found
in many languages (the Sardinian future is an obvious par-
allel for a former modal verb expressing obligation becom-
ing grammaticalized as a future exponent; cf. §17.4.2). States
of affairs which are obligatory must come into effect at a
future point in time, and hence there is a natural slide from
verbs which express obligation to markers of futurity. It is
not surprising that some of the examples from Pompeius
can also be rendered into English by a future tense.
Indeed, it appears that in other grammarians there are
much earlier examples with the HABEO þ infinitive construc-
tion (in this order) having a meaning which can only be
translated by a future. Pinkster (1987:207) cites a passage of
the third-century grammarian Sacerdos (Marius Plotius Sa-
cerdos) discussing the difference between the past, present,
and future. There are some people, Sacerdos says, who deny
that the present tense exists because everything has either
been done or will be done: aut factus esse aut habere fieri (Keil
1855-80, VI:432.13). Although the constituents are not in the
10
same order as in the later Romance futures, Sacerdos pre-
sents perhaps the earliest incontestable example of the
construction with a future meaning in Latin; but there are
parallels from the third century onwards, in other educated
and generally high-status authors. In the words of Adams
(2013:657f.) ‘the periphrasis seems to have had some cur-
rency among the educated as an exponent of deontic and
alethic modality when it was convenient to convey an
ambiguity, with an idea of futurity also present’.
The infinitive þ HABEO construction is therefore instruct-
ive for the researcher into the sources of Romance within
Latin. Although the texts gathered under the label of ‘vulgar
Latin’, particularly in the early empire, may reveal aspects
of the breakdown of the Classical Latin system of expressing
futurity, they give no indication of the construction which
would eventually win out in Romance. Indeed, the best
source for this construction is not found in sub-literary
documents or texts written by or intended for those with
little education, but is found in the works of grammarians
and others who are usually thought of as linguistic purists.
If the construction did exist in the speech of the uneducated
and illiterate, it was evidently not stigmatized by grammar-
ians, but was also present in their written and presumably
in their spoken language too (see Adams 1991:135 on Pom-
peius’ composition technique and style, and for the conclu-
sion that ‘his treatise is bound to preserve characteristics of
the spoken language’).
1.5 Lexicon
The final area of Latin and its continuation into Romance
that I shall consider is the lexicon. In many respects the
lexicon is a straightforward area of language to track his-
torically, since it is possible to isolate individual words and
detect their first (or last) appearance in the written record,
and digital corpora make it possible to search quickly
through millions of words of text for lexical items. Contrast
with this the domain of syntax, where much more labour is
required in order to search for and detect changing patterns
over time; the researcher also needs to take into account a
host of other factors, for example, the disruption of natural
word orders through the metrical constraints imposed by
verse or by clausulae in prose (discussed in §1.3). However, it
is no surprise that the maxim ‘every word has its own
history’ (or ‘chaque mot a son histoire’) is usually attributed
to the Romance linguist Jules Gilliéron (1854-1926) (although
it does not appear in his published work; see Christmann
1971). Lexical developments from Latin to Romance are
extremely varied, with many idiosyncratic and unparalleled
developments of individual words, alongside wider, more

general patterns of semantic change and replacement (see
Stefenelli 2011 and Dworkin 2011 for recent surveys of
lexical stability and lexical change from Latin to Romance,
as well as Ch. 32).
In the investigation of the origins of the Romance
vocabulary, it is important to consider all the evidence
from Latin sources, and not focus in on certain registers or
text types; prior assumptions about the nature of vulgar
Latin (as discussed in §1.2) can be misleading. Indeed, the
replacement of lexical items is also still frequently seen in
terms of the vulgar Latin of the lower classes winning out
over Classical Latin forms used by the elite (see e.g.
Stefenelli 2011:583 for a recent expression of this view), or
of colourless terms being replaced by those which were
more ‘expressive’ (so Stefenelli 2011:572f.). These views
can be bolstered by lists of lexical winners and losers: TESTA
‘pot’, generally replaces CAPUT with the meaning ‘head (Fr.
tête, It. testa, but in Naples and surrounding dialects testa still
means ‘earthenware pot, vase’, and the word for ‘head’ is
still capo); PORTARE ‘carry a burden’ and LEVARE ‘lift’ oust FERRE in
the meaning ‘carry’ (It. portare, Fr. porter, Sp./Pt. portar, Sp.
llevar, and Pt. levar); CABALLUS ‘workhorse’ becomes the every-
day word for ‘horse’ as opposed to EQUUS (It. cavallo, Fr. cheval,
Sp. caballo, Pt. cavalo, Ro. cal; note that Lat. EQUA ‘mare’
survives in some languages, e.g. Sp. yegua, Ro. iapă; cf.
discussion in §33.3.3); CASA ‘hut’ wins out against DOMUS or
AEDES in the meaning ‘house’ (Ro. casă, It./Sp./Pt. casa) and
many others (see the useful material gathered in Stefenelli
2011). However, in some of these cases alternative explan-
ations are possible. Already 60 years ago, Benveniste
(1954:256) argued that in late Latin TESTA could be used in
medical texts as a term for the skull (compare English
brainpan), and that the medical sense may be the origin of
the Romance term, although of course the semantic shift
from a meaning ‘container’ to ‘head’ can be widely paral-
leled (Dworkin 2011:590f.).
It is certainly the case that one feature of Classical Latin
was the avoidance of words which could be associated with
certain registers, and that some lexical items that occur in
early Latin are systematically avoided by writers of the
Classical period. In Clackson (2011b: 52f.) I discussed two
examples. First, the Latin word meaning ‘a punch’ or ‘a
thump’: COLAPHUS (also spelt COLAPUS), which was to give the
standard word for a ‘blow’ or ‘hit’ in Romance languages
(e.g. Fr. coup, It. colpo). The Latin word originates as a loan
from Greek, and came into the language probably through
the speech of slave traders from the south of Italy, where
Greek was the lingua franca (Adams 2003a:351 n.100). Plau-
tus and Terence and other comedians use the word freely,
especially in the description of beatings given to slaves.
However, Cicero and other writers in the first century BC
employ other Latin terms, ICTUS or PLAGA, to refer to blows,
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even when discussing punishments to slaves. In the first
century AD, COLAPHUS reappears in literary texts, but there it is
generally associated with the language of the underclass. In
the works of Quintilian, it only appears in a piece of
reported speech, deemed ‘unworthy of a gentleman’, and
in the narrative section of Petronius it occurs with the
original field of reference when describing the beating
administered to a slave. It is also evident that the word
had also by this time come to have a wider sense in the
spoken language, since Petronius has one of the freedmen
utter a derived form, the verb PERCOLOPABANT, which is on its
way to becoming the general word for ‘hit’ (Adams
2007:439). The second example is a word for ‘mouth’ (on
which see now also Adams 2013:782; cf. also §32.3.4). In
Classical Latin BUCCA is restricted to the meaning ‘cheek’,
but it replaces the Classical Latin term OS ‘mouth’ in western
Romance (It. bocca, Sp./Pt. boca, Fr. bouche, etc.). The mean-
ing ‘mouth’ is however attested in the Latin sources, once in
the speech of a freedman in Petronius, and the biographer
Suetonius (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, c. AD 69–22) reports
that the emperor Augustus used the term in his letters.
Furthermore, something close to the meaning ‘mouth’
appears to lie behind the phrase IN BUCCAM UENIT ‘come to
mind’ which occurs even in the correspondence of Cicero.
These examples show that, although some words may
have gained an association with lower registers, and seemed
to have been either unconsciously avoided in high-register
compositions or to have been actively stigmatized and ridi-
culed (as the statements of Quintilian and Suetonius sug-
gest), they were still used by some members of the educated
classes in writing as well as speech, and could be deployed
for effect even in a written literary work. The spoken and
written language were part of a single continuum, and there
was no gap between the two. It is important to note also
that the patterns of word avoidance in Classical Latin are
not always shared across all literary genres. Thus for
example, as Housman (1930) noticed, Latin poets do not
generally use ASINUS to refer an ‘ass’ or ‘donkey’, but instead
prefer the diminutive ASELLUS (or a Greek term); and ASINUS is
indeed the term which wins out in Romance (It. asino,
Fr. âne, Sp./Pt. asno, etc.), with ASELLUS surviving in Italian
with the sense of ‘woodlouse’, asello. But the avoidance of
ASINUS only takes place in Latin poetry. In historical prose,
ASINUS is attested, even in the stylist Tacitus (Publius Cornelius
Tacitus, AD 56-117), whose delicacy is such that he notoriously
prefers to use a periphrasis rather than call a spade a PALA
‘spade’, instead referring (at Annals 1. 65) to ‘that by which
earth is tilled or turf is cut’ (as noticed by Palmer 1954:142).
The case of ASELLUS and ASINUS is further noteworthy, since
ASELLUS is in origin a diminutive of ASINUS, and therefore offers
a counterexample to a widespread pattern whereby a
diminutive replaces its base noun, which has led scholars
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JAMES CLACKSON
to think that ‘[d]iminutives must have been not only widely
used but thought of as a colloquial feature’ (Herman
2000:99). It is true that in high registers of Latin diminutives
are frequently avoided, and they sometimes surface in texts
that are often thought of as more low-level or colloquial.
However, not all diminutives in Latin, even those which are
found only in low-level texts, are destined to survive into
Romance. Consider, for example, the class of diminutive
adjectives that occur in Cicero’s letters. The adjective BELLUS
‘fine, pretty’, in origin a diminutive form of BONUS ‘good’, is
attested 24 times in Cicero’s correspondence, but only 13
times in his more voluminous prose speeches and philo-
sophical works, and it does not occur in high-register poetry
or the Latin historians. Both BELLUS and BONUS survive into
Romance (It. bello, Fr. beau, etc.; Ro. bun, It. buono, Fr. bon,
etc.), and generally with the same meanings as in Latin.
Cicero also uses other diminutive adjectives in his letters:
INTEGELLUS ‘unharmed’ (beside CLat. INTEGER ‘whole’), LONGULUS
‘long’ (beside LONGUS ‘long’), and even BARBATULUS ‘a bit
bearded’ (beside BARBATUS ‘bearded’) (see Leumann et al.
1977:308 for these formations). However, unlike the adjec-
tive BELLUS, none of these forms is continued into Romance.
Furthermore, some of the lexical items that occur in appar-
ently more colloquial or everyday registers, such as letters,
but not in more literary works need not necessarily reflect
the spoken language that would win out in the end. Here
again the equation between ‘colloquial’ or ‘vulgar’ and the
material that is to survive into the Romance languages is far
from adequate.
Despite the caveats of the preceding paragraphs, many
words which were to become winners in Romance scarcely
appear at all in the record of written Latin, whether in
literary, sub-literary, or inscriptional genres. Some of the
finds of ‘new Latin’ in the last 30 years, such as the docu-
ments written on wood from the Roman fort at Vindolanda,
or papyrus or ostraca from north Africa and the Near East,
have revealed how patchy our record of the Latin which was
in day-to-day use actually is. Adams (2013:777) cites three
words now attested from texts from Roman Britain around
100 AD, baro ‘man’, uectura ‘wagon’, and cimusa ‘cloak’, which
are scarcely attested in any other source for Latin with
these meanings before the fourth century AD, and even
thereafter largely avoided in Latin texts of all types. All
three of these words have reflexes in Romance, and it is
likely that they continued in use throughout the Roman
empire, but were largely avoided in all genres with any
pretence of literary merit. Since the Roman educational
system taught literacy largely through the inculcation of
Classical literary texts and models (see Clackson
2011b:241f.), anyone who had learned how to write became
accustomed to avoiding terms which were not found in
literary works. If there were a greater surviving portion of
12
documents such as those from Vindolanda, which included
lists of everyday items, no doubt more such terms in use in
the spoken language would be found.
1.6 Sources of the Romance languages
Latin speakers of all classes during the empire, and probably
during the last centuries of the republic, did not write
exactly as they spoke. Even Cicero, the model for later
language purists, states that he would rather say posmeri-
dianus ‘in the afternoon’ with omission of the medial t in the
written Classical form POSTMERIDIANUS (Orator 157, cited by
Adams 2013:153). Anyone writing down Latin was in some
sense actually ‘writing up’ (to borrow the term of Langslow
2000:412)—that is to say, using literary or educated models
for the spellings, syntactic constructions, and vocabulary.
Although inscriptions and graffiti may reveal clues about
divergent phonological developments, learning how to
write was also a process of learning how to spell, and it is
important not to confuse the author of a ‘misspelt’ Latin
text with an ancient amateur phonetician, attempting to
record precisely the sounds of speech. Some sub-literary
texts abound in deviations from the classical norm, but
these were also the result of a meeting between everyday
speech and a literary education. Even the female author of
the Itinerarium Egeriae (known in older scholarship as the
Perigrinatio Aetheriae), a chatty account of a trip to the Holy
Land written in the fourth century AD (Väänänen 1987:8),
long prized as a treasure trove of ‘vulgar’ forms’, wrote up
her Latin in the hope of emulating the norms of her day
(for which the model was probably the Latin Bible trans-
lation rather than Cicero). Thus Egeria employs parti-
ciples, the ablative (and in some cases accusative or
nominative) absolute construction, and subordinating
or complement clauses which she has little control over,
but which reveal her desire to make her account more
‘literary’ (see Clackson and Horrocks 2007:286-92 for fuller
discussion).
Given that all surviving Latin is mediated through a
written form, and that the origins of the Romance languages
lie in the (irrecoverable) spoken language (with, of course,
occasional feedback from educated norms or ‘corrections’
incorporated into speech), there will always be a mismatch
between the Latin sources and the parent of the Romance
languages. However, there is a great deal of surviving Latin,
written over a long timescale and across a wide geograph-
ical spread, in very disparate genres and registers. In this
chapter I have shown some case studies of what can be
learned from careful consideration of the totality of the
written evidence, without preconceived notions about

which are more likely sources for the Romance languages.
Inscriptional evidence, such as the surviving graffiti and
dipinti from Pompeii, may be helpful in establishing chron-
ologies of sound change, but should be combined as far as
possible with other sources. The non-Latin native languages
of Italy do not seem to have had a major impact on the
spoken ancestor of Romance. Literary and sub-literary
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texts, both those that are traditionally classed as ‘Vulgar’
and those from higher or more technical registers, are
essential for the understanding of developments in morph-
ology, syntax, and lexicon. But in some cases, such as the
infinitive þ HABEO construction, or in the history of individ-
ual lexical items, the sources may not (yet) reveal what was
actually taking place in ancient speech.
13