![]() ![]() This leads us to the natural conclusion that Paul’s archetype already contained amosio. Secondly, considering Paul’s attitude when he epitomizes Festus, his diligence, his most common mistakes, 3 the creation of a monstrous form amosio is not likely to be the fruit of his work while he was preparing the fair copy of his Epitome. 2 In fact, they could have well been copied directly from Paul’s original. First of all, it is transmitted by all the extant manuscripts of Paul the Deacon’s Epitome, of which the oldest are geographically and chronologically close to Paul’s redaction of his work. The previous proposals: a critical assessmentĥBefore discussing the solutions proposed in the past, an important disclaimer is in place: from a strict philological perspective the form amosio is secure. Our gloss amosio is found precisely in Paul the Deacon’s Epitome, yet it can safely be assumed that it once belonged to Festus’ De Verborum Significatu. AD epitome realized by the Lombard monk Paul the Deacon for his king Charlemagne. As a consequence, part of Festus’ work can only be read through an 8 th c. ![]() Before offering our own account of the facts, we will proceed to a brief evaluation of the previous proposals and their soundness from both a philological and a linguistic perspective.ĤIt must be added that the only extant manuscript of Festus, the Festus Farnesianus, is terribly damaged and it contains only the letters M-T. The focus of this work will be exactly on one of these glosses which can shed light on the prehistory of Latin, namely the previously understudied and misunderstood gloss amosio (Fest., p. 78ģFurthermore, it preserves dialectal variants of Latin (sometimes even forms belonging to other languages of ancient Italy) or rare and archaic Latin words which would never have otherwise survived until the present day. It contains forms which have not undergone the characteristic Latin sound changes, precious words which could otherwise only be reconstructed using the comparative method. Festus’ book is a mine of information concerning the shape of pre-Classical Latin. 2ĢThere is, though, another important source for the study of early Latin, namely the glosses contained in works such as the De verborum significatu, compiled by Sextus Pompeius Festus ( floruit 2 nd c. Unfortunately, we do not possess a Latin analog to Mycenaean: when it comes to acquiring information regarding the prehistory of Latin, one has to rely on the very few extant documents at our disposal. Ancient Greek, for instance, is documented as early as the second half of the 2 nd millennium BC thanks to the Mycenaean tablets. However, our knowledge of the earliest phases of this language is scanty in comparison to other Indo-European traditions. 1 The emendation amosio > annosio was first suggested by Francesco Burroni while he was writing his s (.)ġDefining Latin as the best documented and longest-lived among the ancient languages is no overstatement. ![]()
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