This book is intended as an introduction to linguistics geared towards students of Latin, but perhaps it would be better to say it is an introduction to what an undergraduate taking a course on Latin linguistics needs to know about linguistics. There is, as de Melo says in his introduction, no current book that shares this aim (the similarly titled Latin: A Linguistic Introduction by Renato Oniga and Norma Schifano, is aimed at those familiar with the generativist school of linguistics but not Latin). [1] The division of the book into chapters, which can be read as stand-alone accounts of phonetics / phonology, morphology, syntax, dialectology, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics, will ensure its inclusion on reading lists and in introductory surveys. Although the book is not intended to be comprehensive, it ranges over the whole span of Latin, from Faliscan inscriptions dating from the seventh century BC to the sixth-century AD epic poet Corippus. Throughout the book Latin words and texts are given with u not v and long vowels marked (although sometimes ‘hidden quantity’ is missed, for example indignum and for indīgnum and uexāuit for uēxāuit on p.169). All Latin words and passages are given idiomatic English translations, but there are no word-by-word glosses.
The frequent engagement with actual Latin texts is one of the most attractive features of the work. Plautus, Varro and the grammarians feature prominently, as one might expect from de Melo’s previous publications, but there are also frequent references to and discussions of Cicero and authors of the Augustan age, as well as special sections on Christian Latin and texts written by or attributed to female authors. The final chapter includes several longer discussions of texts. The last two of these are excellent: chapter 4 of the Bellum Hispaniense, with a comparison of a section of Caesar’s De bello Gallico, and Gellius’ Attic Nights 1.23, paraphrasing a lost speech of Cato. The other texts examined in this chapter are two very early Faliscan inscriptions found scratched on a wine jug. One of these texts, beginning with the sequence propramom, is notoriously obscure, despite having attracted numerous explanations. De Melo boldly offers a new proposal: his translation begins ‘may a flowing forth make the pitcher flow forth.’ He himself is sensibly reluctant to call this ‘convincing’ (p. 261).
De Melo’s ideal readers are students well-versed not just in Latin, but also familiar with Greek (which is given without transliteration) and accents of British English, who are happy to take modern European languages in their stride. The tone of the book throughout is entertaining and lively, with frequent illustrations from modern languages as well as Latin, and occasional asides revealing the author’s various likes (which include Dutch spelling and Harry Potter) and dislikes (optimality theory and The Guardian newspaper). One can imagine that this is very much what it would be like to be in a lecture given by de Melo. Some of the examples and texts discussed here will be familiar from de Melo’s back catalogue, both from published articles and blogs in the online journal Antigone, including discussions of faxo forms in Plautus and Terence, gender variation and Latin regional accents. Although some of the material may be familiar, the writing is always fresh and the choice of new examples or discussions of textual passages enlightening.
The ambition for this book to serve both as an introduction to linguistics as well as the diachrony and synchrony of Latin, taking in historical developments from Indo-European to Romance, inevitably means that there are areas where some might be left wanting more detail or more nuance in the presentation. I wondered how far the neophyte with no linguistic knowledge would get in Chapter 2, on Phonetics and Phonology, which covers articulatory phonetics, the sounds of Latin and Latin orthography, sound change and the history of Latin sounds both from Proto-Indo-European to Latin and from Latin to Romance, all in under fifty pages (with six pages devoted to a rather speculative account of phrase accentuation based on the distribution of nē … quidem). What is more, readers keen to expand their knowledge of fill in the gaps are referred to the German language handbook of Gerhard Meiser (Meiser 1998)[2] or Szemerényi’s idiosyncratic introduction to Indo-European (Szemerényi 1996)[3] rather than the excellent Outline of Michael Weiss,[4] which is more recent, more accessible and comprehensive.
There are some minor typographical errors in the book, but nothing concerning in the Latin that I spotted. The glosses of some words in languages other Latin are sometimes misleading: Greek τλᾱτός does not mean ‘lifted’ (p. 58’), French mettre does not mean ‘to send’ (p. 63) nor Italian cagione ‘opportunity’ (p. 64). These are, however, minor qualms, and I would not wish to detract from the many attractive features of this book. The cover price means that it is unlikely to find its way onto the bookshelves of undergraduates or even graduates but students at institutions with access to de Gruyter online will find much that is useful for their understanding of Latin texts and current approaches to the Latin linguistics.
Notes
[1] Oniga, Renato (2014) Latin: A Linguistic Introduction. Edited and translated by Norma Schifano. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[2] Meiser, Gerhard (1998) Historische Laut- und Formenlehre der lateinischen Sprache. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
[3] Szemerényi, Oswald (1996) Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
[4] Weiss, Michael L. (2020) Outline of the Historical and Comparative Grammar of Latin. Second edition. Ann Arbor: Beech Stave Press.