Date: 23-Jul-2008 From: Daniel Davies <ddaviescambridge.org> Subject: The Regional Diversification of Latin 200 BC - AD 600: Adams E-mail this message to a friend
Title: The Regional Diversification of Latin 200 BC - AD 600
Published: 2008
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
http://us.cambridge.org
Author: J. N. Adams
Hardback: ISBN: 9780521881494 Pages: 848 Price: U.S. $ 220.00
Abstract:
Classical Latin appears to be without regional dialects, yet Latin evolved in little more than a millennium into a variety of different languages (the Romance languages: Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese etc.). Was regional diversity apparent from the earliest times, obscured perhaps by the standardisation of writing, or did some catastrophic event in late antiquity cause the language to vary? These questions have long intrigued Latinists and Romance philologists, struck by the apparent uniformity of Latin alongside the variety of Romance. This book establishes that Latin was never geographically uniform. The changing patterns of diversity and the determinants of variation are examined from the time of the early inscriptions of Italy, through to late antiquity and the beginnings of the Romance dialects in the western Roman provinces. This is the most comprehensive treatment ever undertaken of the regional diversification of Latin throughout its history in the Roman period.
Part I. Introduction; Part II. The Republic; Part III. Explicit Evidence for Regional Variation; Part IV. Explicit Evidence; Part V. Regionalisms in Provincial Texts; Part VI. Spain; Part VII. Italy; Part VIII. Africa; Part IX. Britain; Part X. Inscriptions; Part XI. Conclusions.
Linguistic Field(s):
Historical Linguistics
Sociolinguistics
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