Early Latin: Constructs, Diversity, Reception

Description

This is the most detailed and comprehensive study to date of early Latin language, literary and non-literary, featuring twenty-nine chapters by an international team of scholars. 'Early Latin' is interpreted liberally as extending from the period of early inscriptions through to the first quarter of the first century BC. Classical Latin features significantly in the volume, although in a restricted sense. In the classical period there were writers who imitated the Latin of an earlier age, and there were also interpreters of early Latin. Later authors and views on early Latin language are also examined as some of these are relevant to the establishment of the text of earlier writers. A major aim of the book is to define linguistic features of different literary genres, and to address problems such as the limits of periodisation and the definition of the very concept of 'early Latin'.

J. N. Aadams CBE, FBA was the author of many books and articles on the Latin language, including The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (1982) and Bilingualism and the Latin Language (2003). He was awarded the Kenyon Medal of the British Academy in 2009. Anna Chahoud, FTCD is Professor of Latin at Trinity College Dublin. She is the author of C. Lucili Reliquiarum Concordantiae (1998) and various articles on Republican Latin and on the grammatical tradition, and has co-edited, with E. Dickey, Colloquial and Literary Latin (Cambridge, 2010). G. Pezzini is Fellow and Tutor in Latin at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has published extensively on early Latin language and literature, Roman comedy, ancient philosophy of language and fiction theory, including Terence and the Verb to-be in Latin (2015) and a forthcoming commentary on Terence's Heautontimorumenos.