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  • The Regional Diversification of Latin 200 BC–AD 600
The Regional Diversification of Latin 200 BC–AD 600 J.N. Adams Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xx + 828, ISBN 978-0-521-88149-4

Editors' Note: J.N. Adams' Regional Diversification of Latin is a long and self-evidently important book, with too many facets for one reviewer to cover. The editors have therefore taken an exceptional decision to print two complementary reviews by Danuta Shanzer and Roger Wright. Although both reviews touch on topics of interest to readers of this journal, the first concentrates on the consequences of Adams' research for Latinists, the second on long-standing debates about the origin of vernaculars out of regional Latin.

  • The Regional Diversification of Latin 200 BC–AD 600
  • Danuta Shanzer
The Regional Diversification of Latin 200 BC–AD 600 J.N. Adams Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xx + 828, ISBN 978-0-521-88149-4

Latin was spoken over a huge geographical area for a very long time. Even today it is less dead than many think. During the Republican period it spread from the center and interacted with various substrate languages in Italy and the provinces. Eventually it produced daughters, the living Romance vernaculars, as well as other offspring that died during the Middle Ages, and some, in North Africa and Britain, that failed to survive Late Antiquity. But how and when did Latin develop into Romance? How early can one document regional variation? And can one do so from purely written evidence (much of that subject to the vagaries of transmission too)? The sociology of the Latin language, particularly the status of literary Latin and the normative influence of grammarians, the custodes historiae, was unfavorable to the survival of authentic regionalisms.

The debate about the regional diversification of Latin attracted considerable attention in 1882 with the publication of Karl Sittl's Die lokalen Verschiedenheiten der lateinischen Sprache. Sittl claimed to have isolated Africitas or "African Latin." His arguments, however, were almost immediately discredited by Kroll and others: he had not used controls from other areas, and what he thought "African Latin" was really Late Latin. The problem Sittl aimed to solve remains, however, both very real and important. Common sense and the experience of dialect geographers, sturdily cycling from parish to parish, show that geographical variation always exists. Considerable ancient metalinguistic evidence for regional variation in the form of comments about the speech of individuals or inhabitants of a given area suggests prima facie that no thèse unitaire advocating late differentiation of regional Latins can be correct. (Regional pronunciations of vowels or consonants, for example, are characterized as "rich" [pinguis = "open"] or "thin" [tenuis = "close"].) Yet, at the same time the curious uniformity of epigraphic Vulgar Latin and empire-wide common misspellings caused one scholar satirically to imagine stonemasons giving lessons in rustic orthography as they traveled the empire, peddlers lugging their stone-blocks with them. [End Page 176]

The existence of regional varieties of Latin was naturally connected to a second major question, of less interest to classicists, but of crucial importance for Romance philologists. When did the Romance languages evolve? Were they directly related, albeit with a long chronological separation, to ancient regional varieties of Latin? Or did they emerge much later, in the early Middle Ages, from a comparatively uniform Vulgar Latin attested across the whole empire? These polarized positions have divided Romance philologists for years. Muller's "late emergence" theory obviously matches the counterintuitive theory that there was no regional differentiation of Latin. On the other hand, the "monogenetic" theories that derive modern Romance vernaculars directly from ancient regional varieties of Latin will, as we shall see, likewise prove untenable.

This astonishingly wide-ranging and learned mega biblion by one of the world's leading Latinists (and arguably its most interesting one) addresses the first huge and messy question, about Latin, but, in the process, has much to say about the second, namely Romance. Adams specializes in Vulgar, technical (including veterinary), sexual, and non-standard Latin of many sorts from all around the empire. Late antique scholars should be familiar with his work on the language of the Anonymus Valesianus...

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