The Regional Diversification of Latin: 200 BC-AD 600 (review)

The book is a monumental event in scope, in depth, and in the perspectives it closes and opens. It peers through the ornamental brocade of literary Latin to uncover the language as it was spoken and as it evolved in various regions of Italy and throughout the Empire. To employ the distinction of Ferdinand de Saussure (whom Adams does not invoke), we descend from language to speech, from homo scribens to homo loquens. But homo scribens also comes up in many varieties—high, low, and specialized—on parchment, papyrus, and stone. At one end there stands archaic Latin; at the other, an array of Romance idioms. It is an exciting journey, fraught with surmises, and only a scholar who had explored all and sundry nooks and crannies of Latin could dare to undertake it. Adams entered upon the path toward Diversification with two remarkable studies of vulgar (an unfortunate but entrenched denomination) Latin texts: The Text and Language of a Vulgar Latin Chronicle (Anonymus Valesianus II) (London, 1976) and The Vulgar Latin of the Letters of Claudius Terentianus (P. Mich. VIII, 467–72) (Manchester, 1977). In due course he produced three treasures of information, instruction, and linguistic enjoyment: The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (London, 1982); Pelagonius and Latin Veterinary Terminology in the Roman Empire (Leiden, 1995) (see the glowing review by David R. Langslow in BMCR 97.4.1); and, particularly dear to the heart of this writer, Bilingualism and the Latin Language (Cambridge, 2003). Then there is a plethora of articles, among them some personal favorites: the pieces on "The Uses of Neco" (Glotta 58 [1990]: 230–55 and 59 [1991]: 94–123); and on "Words for 'Prostitute' in Latin" (RhM 126 [1983]: 321–58) (cf. Jerzy Linderski, Roman Questions II [Stuttgart, 2007], 197–98, 278–80, 332–35).

The architecture of the book is easy to describe but its content arduous to digest. Its eleven parts, subdivided into some 220 sections and subsections, many of which can be read as separate articles, bear upon us crammed with an astonishing mass of detail. Lexicography, phonology, orthography, and geography are all there, and the seemingly unfathomable well of sources: inscribed stones surrounded by erudite vignettes; a long line of literary, grammatical, medical, agricultural, and subliterary texts, with names like Consentius, Marcellus, Polemius Silvius, Anthimus, or Cassius Felix more prominent than Sallust or Virgil.

Parts 2 to 10 present the material. They fall into two symmetrical blocks: part 2 (37–113) is devoted to Republican inscriptions and corresponds to part 10 (624–83), devoted to imperial inscriptions; parts 3 and 4 deal with "Explicit Evidence for Regional Variation" in the Republican period (114–87) and under the Empire (188–275), and offer a linguistic tour of Italy, Spain, Gaul, and Africa. Parts 5 to 10 (276–623) treat of "Regionalisms in Provincial Texts" and take us again on a new tour but this time also to Britain. The guides in the first tour are the Romans themselves who comment on the spoken Latin as they heard it around them; the guides in the second tour are modern philologists and linguists who strove to uncover local peculiarities in written texts.

The first impression of the reader, who would open the book here and there and read a few pages, might be an image of an immense collection of linguistic shards strewn over a vast area and over the centuries. How the vase of the classical Latin was broken and reassembled into Romance vessels is the question. Here we have to turn to the introduction (part 1, 1–36), which sets up a theoretical framework for such an investigation, and the conclusion (part 11, 684–732), which assesses the results.

The high literary Latin is of no help. The first sentence of the book (in the preface) pointedly delineates the problem: "No reader of Cicero or Martial, however attentive and learned, could possibly tell from their Latin that the one came from Arpinum in...