Colloquial and Literary Latin

Eleanor Dickey, Anna Chahoud

Cambridge University Press, Jul 22, 2010 - Foreign Language Study

What is colloquial Latin? What can we learn about it from Roman literature, and how does an understanding of colloquial Latin enhance our appreciation of literature? This book sets out to answer such questions, beginning with examinations of how the term 'colloquial' has been used by linguists and by classicists (and how its Latin equivalents were used by the Romans) and continuing with exciting new research on colloquial language in a wide range of Latin authors. Each chapter is written by a leading expert in the relevant area, and the material presented includes new editions of several texts. The Introduction presents the first account in English of developments in the study of colloquial Latin over the last century, and throughout the book findings are presented in clear, lucid, and jargon-free language, making a major scholarly debate accessible to a broad range of students and non-specialists.

Contents

• Introduction: 3
• Roman authors on colloquial language: 12
• Idioms and literariness in classical literary criticism: 42
• Preliminary conclusions: 65
• Possessive pronouns in Plautus: 71
• Greeting and farewell expressions as evidence for colloquial: 100
• Colloquial and literary language in early Roman tragedy: 127
• The fragments of Catos Origines: 154
• Hyperbaton and register in Cicero: 163
• Notes on the language of Marcus Caelius Rufus: 186
• Syntactic colloquialism in Lucretius: 203
• style grammar and philosophy: 229
• The style of the Bellum Hispaniense and the evolution: 243
• the literary uses of the quotidian in Horace: 255
• divine discourse in Virgils Aeneid: 266
• Petronius linguistic resources: 281
• Parenthetical remarks in the Silvae: 292
• Colloquial Latin in Martials epigrams: 318
• Current and ancient colloquial in Gellius: 331
• Forerunners of Romance mente adverbs in Latin prose: 339
• the influence of sources on: 357
• The tale of Frodeberts tail: 376
• Colloquial Latin in the Insular Latin scholastic colloquia?: 406
• Conversations in Bedes Historia Ecclesiastica: 419
• References: 441
• Subject index: 473
• Index locorum: 489

About the author

Eleanor Dickey is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Exeter. She is the author of numerous books and articles on the Greek and Latin languages and linguistics, including Ancient Greek Scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica, and Grammatical Treatises, from their Beginnings to the Byzantine Period (2007); Latin Forms of Address: From Plautus to Apuleius (2002) and Greek Forms of Address: From Herodotus to Lucian (1996).

Anna Chahoud is Professor of Latin at Trinity College Dublin. She is a member of the editorial board of The Bryn Mawr Classical Review, and the author of Lucilii Reliquiarum Concordantiae (1998).

Bibliographic information

• Title: Colloquial and Literary Latin
• Editors: Eleanor Dickey, Anna Chahoud
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2010
• ISBN: 113948852X, 9781139488525
• Subjects: Foreign Language Study / Ancient Languages; History / Ancient / General; Language Arts & Disciplines / Linguistics / Historical & Comparative; Literary Criticism / Ancient & Classical