The Blackwell History of the Latin Language (review)

The book in hand is an introduction to "Latin historical linguistics" (vi) designed, so the authors tell us, to overcome shortcomings in Palmer's The Latin Language. True, Palmer's book remains "a readable account of the history of the language" (vi), but that fine book is now rather out of date. Clackson and Horrock's work is grounded in a newer view of both Indo-European and Latin linguistics, and it contains many newly found inscriptions. This is not to say, however, that the book will replace Palmer, who gives a clear and well written history of the language, and whose brief thumbnail grammatical sketch of Latin—which closes the book—is still extremely useful for graduates and undergraduates in Classics approaching the technical question of Latin historical phonology and morphology for the first time.

The Blackwell History is text-based, so much so, that aside from the brief overview of Indo-European in the first chapter, there is no single freestanding sketch of Latin as in Palmer's book. Each chapter contains a number of texts (mostly, but not entirely, inscriptional) with intermittent digressions on points of historical phonology, morphology, and syntax added throughout. Each text is given with interlinear glosses and morphological parsings. In certain cases where the inscriptions are especially difficult, an interlinear (Classical) Latin translation is also added.

The book is divided into eight chapters, the first of which, "Latin and Indo-European" (1–36), gives a very brief overview of Indo-European and lays out some of the basic linguistic changes in the formation of Latin. To introduce the syntactic discussion, the authors give a couple of lines of poetry and a half dozen very early Latin inscriptions (including the famous Manios inscription, which the authors duly note may be a forgery). This introductory material continues in the second chapter, "The Languages of Italy" (37–76), which describes the useful concept of a "Central-Italic-Koiné" (used in a number of recent studies of Italic and Etruscan) to describe the strong cultural contacts between different linguistic groups in pre-Roman Italy. Especially noteworthy in this regard are the following: the similar typology of inscriptional material, the similar onomastic systems, the similar religion, and apparently some linguistic convergence such as the apparent accent shift that affected many of the early Italic languages. The chapter closes with a discussion of the Sabellian languages with examples from South Picene, Umbrian, and Oscan.

The next three chapters, "Background to Standardization" (77–89), "Old Latin and its Varieties in the Period c. 400–150 B.C." (90–129), and "The Road to Standardization: Roman Latin of the Third and Second Centuries" (130–182), give a thorough overview of Old Latin, again with a discussion centered around inscriptional material. Here we find extensive discussion of the Scipio epitaphs (132–142), the Senatusconsultum de Bacchanalibus (142–146), and a number of other early inscriptions. A few early literary texts such as Cato's Hymn to Mars (160–166) are also described here.

More than half way through the book, in the sixth chapter, "Elite Latin in the Late Republic and Early Empire" (183–228), we are finally introduced to standard Classical Latin. Here rather than focusing on inscriptional material, we are given passages from classical authors, but again with linguistic commentary on the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the text before us. Especially nice is the comparison of two short passages from Cicero and Tacitus (215–222) which describes in great detail the different syntactic approaches of these two authors and grounds this discussion into the broader context of what these authors believed proper style should be.

The final two chapters "Sub-Elite Latin in the Empire" (229–264) and the "Latin in Late Antiquity and Beyond" (265–304) describe, respectively, Vulgar Latin and the development of Romance. The book closes with a glossary of linguistic terms, an IPA chart, a two-page bibliography (supplementing the bibliographic material at the end...