HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

History of the language and its speakers

Hurrian is an ancient Near Eastern language widely spoken in the northern parts of the Fertile Crescent (present-day northern Iraq, northern Syria, southeast Turkey) from at least the last quarter of the third millennium BC on until the end of the second millennium BC. It survived for another half millennium in small pockets in the mountainous areas north of ancient Assyria.

A cognate language of Hurrian is Urartian (see Ch. 10) which is attested in texts from the late ninth to the late seventh century BC. Apart from Urartian, Hurrian is an isolated language without a genetic relation to any other known ancient Near Eastern language. A genetic relation between (reconstructed) Proto-Urarto-Hurrian and (reconstructed) Northeast Caucasian has been argued for, but it is not generally accepted. If the connection could be demonstrated, it would be a rather distant one.

Hurrian is first attested in a few words and personal or place names mentioned in Akkadian texts of the Akkade period (twenty-third to twenty-second centuries BC). The term Old Hurrian (herein abbreviated OH) has been coined for the language of a royal inscription most likely to be dated to the Ur III period (twenty-first to twentieth centuries BC), but it is also used for the more archaic dialect(s) of the second millennium.

INTRODUCTION

The Carthaginians were driven out of Spain in 206 BC by P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus. By 205 ‘Rome held a narrow east coastal strip (Hispania Citerior) carrying the main road south to Carthago Nova, and beyond it a territory (Hispania Ulterior) including the south-east coast and the Baetis (Guadalquiuir) valley’ (M. I. Henderson, OCD2 s.v. ‘Spain’). In 197 two new praetors were created for Spain. Both provinces were gradually extended inland amid protracted fighting, and after the Lusitanian (155–139 BC) and Celtiberian (155–133 BC) wars about two-thirds of the peninsula was in Roman hands. Spain was thus one of the earliest territories occupied by the Romans, and this fact underlies the main issue that has arisen in the discussion of Spanish Latin. Ibero-Romance is said to be ‘conservative’ or ‘archaic’, and such ‘archaism’ is thought to reflect the character of the Latin language when it first reached the peninsula in the late third and early second centuries BC (for details of this theory see the next section).

A theory of this kind is based on the assumption that Latin took root in Spain in this early period and was in continuous use thereafter. But is the assumption reasonable? For decades after 218 the main group of Latin speakers in Spain would have been soldiers, and military units constantly came and went.

INTRODUCTION

It has been said that as many as forty languages or language varieties have been identified in Italy of the period before Rome spread its power over the whole peninsula. Problems of definition and identification are considerable, but the linguistic diversity of republican Italy was on any account marked. Latin, spoken originally in the small area of Latium Vetus, which contained Rome, was just one of numerous languages. The first traces of habitation at the site of Rome date from the end of the Bronze Age (c. 1000 BC), and these communities ‘were similar to other hilltop settlements that have been identified throughout Latium Vetus, whose cemeteries provide evidence of a distinct form of material culture known as the cultura laziale’ (T. J. Cornell, OCD3, 1322). The people of Latium Vetus are generally known as the Latini, who from ‘very early times … formed a unified and self-conscious ethnic group with a common name (the nomen Latinum), a common sentiment, and a common language’ (Cornell, OCD3, 820). The Latin that they spoke begins to turn up in fragmentary form around 600 BC, but it is not until the end of the third century BC that literary texts appear. Already in the plays of Plautus, however, there are represented numerous registers which show that, even if writing had had little place in Latin culture hitherto, the language had evolved a considerable variety, with different styles appropriate to different circumstances already well established.

No reader of Cicero and Martial, however attentive and learned, could possibly tell from their Latin that the one came from Arpinum in the Volscian territory and the other from Spain. It has sometimes been thought paradoxical that Latin of the Roman period seems to lack regional variations yet was able to generate in little more than a millennium a diversity of Romance tongues that are usually classified as different languages. Was the language at first uniform but subject in late antiquity to some catastrophic event that caused it to split up into numerous varieties? Or was regional diversity there from the beginning, obscured perhaps by standardised forms of writing? These questions have long been of interest, particularly to Romance philologists keen to identify the genesis of the different Romance languages. The study of regional variation by Latinists suffered a setback more than a hundred years ago when the supposed discovery of African features in certain African literary texts was exposed as misguided, but even among Latinists an interest in the subject has never entirely faded away. Several of the great names in Latin philology have addressed the subject, not infrequently lamenting its difficulty, and expressing frustration that the variations that common sense and their experience of other languages told them must be there, could not be found.

In this book it will be shown that Latin had regional variations from the earliest period, first within Italy itself and later across the provinces.

THE COMING OF LATIN TO BRITAIN

Latin reached Britain earlier than might be thought. Britain was occupied by the Romans in AD 43, but there are signs that British rulers had acquired some Latin before the conquest. The evidence is to be found in local Iron Age coin issues. I draw here on several persuasive articles by Williams (2000, 2001, 2002, 2005). The coins of a certain Tincomarus, probably a king, whose correct name has only recently been established from the discovery of a hoard of gold coins at Alton, Hampshire, are of particular interest. His name has the Latin -us nominative inflection rather than the Celtic -os, but what is more striking is a coin type which has a Latin filiation, abbreviated, COM · F (= Commi filius), on the obverse. By contrast gold coins bearing the name of the apparent father have the legend COMMIOS, with the Celtic ending. There has been a switch of languages between the time of father and son. The gold coins of Commius, according to Williams (2001: 8), tend to be dated to the 30s or 20s BC. Elsewhere, commenting on Tincomarus, Williams (2002: 143) remarks that the dates of the named kings of Iron Age Britain are ‘probably less secure than we like to think’, but adds that ‘the most sensible convention … places Tincomarus and Tasciovanus … around the end of the 1st c. B.C. in a loosely defined period between c.20 B.C. and A.D. 10’.

AFRICITAS

‘African Latin’, often referred to as Africitas and ascribed a component called tumor Africus, has had a bad name since Kroll (1897) delivered his attack on the material adduced by Sittl (1882: 92–143) to demonstrate features of the Latin of the province. Sittl's material is indeed unconvincing, but that does not mean that African Latin was without regional features. We have already seen testimonia which show that in antiquity itself African Latin was perceived as having distinctive characteristics. If one looks beyond the high literary texts discussed by Sittl and others as supposedly exemplifying Africitas to more mundane works such as medical texts and non-literary documents, one finds that it is indeed possible to attribute certain texts to Africa on linguistic grounds, and to identify some of the features of the local Latin. We will see, for example (3.4), that a medical text recently published for the first time (the so-called Galeni liber tertius) can with some confidence be assigned to Africa. Brock, who surpassed Kroll in the detail with which she demonstrated that Sittl's ‘Africanisms’ were nothing of the sort (1911: 186–229), went too far in concluding from her review of the evidence that ‘African Latin was practically free from provincialism’ (1911: 257), a phenomenon which she put down to the spread of education and rhetoric in Africa (257). She also asserted that African Latin ‘was the Latin of an epoch rather than that of a country’ (1911: 260).