Introduction

This volume comprises J.N. Adams' final article and four responses to it, three by Latinists and one by a specialist in French linguistics. First comes Adams' posthumous piece—submitted in June 2021, just 4 months before his death—on the question whether Classical Latin of the late Republic was a ‘standard language’. There follow, in direct and more-or-less critical response to various aspects of Adams' material and his argument, four shorter papers by respectively Maria Chiara Scappaticcio, Beppe Pezzini, Nick Zair and Wendy Ayres-Bennett. It is important to stress at the outset that Adams did not live to see even the journal's referees' reviews of his paper, let alone the pieces commissioned in response to it. The version of his paper here printed has been copy-edited only, and regrettably lacks the corrections and acknowledgements that Adams would surely have included in his final revision. Adams' long paper characteristically combines a bold and controversial approach to a large and fundamental question with minute analysis of a large quantity of detail. Of the 97 pages, 9 introduce the broad topic of language standardisation—the history of the question in Latin and in general linguistics, and Adams' particular aims here—and 50 pages, more than half of the remainder, address points of Latin orthography, especially the spelling of dated official inscriptions from the first century BC (plus some later and earlier official inscriptions and a few contemporary literary documents). Statements about aspects of the Latin language, transmitted by copyists in literary works, feature prominently in Adams' paper and in the responses to it, especially Pezzini's. The material evidence in this volume, however, is drawn almost entirely from primary (and in the main dateable) texts because of the unreliability in matters of spelling and morphology of late-antique and mediaeval manuscripts through their tendency to regularise, whether modernising or archaising, standardising or vulgarising.1 It is notable and perhaps surprising that Adams' sections on the inscriptions constitute the first published comprehensive description and analysis of the spelling of such a large corpus of primary Latin documents, including the Golden Age and the Silver Age of Classical Latin. Neither Adams nor his respondents have much to say about other aspects of the language, with the partial exception of inflectional morphology. Under ‘Morphology’, Adams devotes 15 pages (424–438) to a range of instances of formal variation, especially of the noun,2 with much less on the verb.3 There follow seven pages on variations in grammatical gender (439–445) and eight on ‘purism’ and Greek loanwords (445–453), before a typically lucid and brief conclusion (453–7). Of the five respondents, Pezzini alone touches explicitly on morphology and vocabulary in any detail, though remarks of the others, especially of Ayres-Bennett, are intended to apply more widely than to spelling alone. However, there is nothing here on the syntax of the noun phrase, the verb phrase, or the complex sentence, nor on word order, including clitic placement. This is at first sight perhaps surprising given the prominence accorded to syntax by scholars who have written on the standardisation of Latin as a whole in the language of Cicero. Hannah Rosén in her book on the ‘crystallisation’ of Latin is summarised and quoted (Rosén, 1999: 11) by Adams at the outset (p. 366) as a prime representative of the widely held view that he is about to investigate, namely that the Latin of the Roman elite was (at least to a large extent) standardised and by the end of the Republic. I have italicised the preceding words to highlight the two questions around which Adams' article—indeed the volume as a whole—revolves: the meaning of standardisation in language in general and in Latin in particular, and the timing of the standardisation of Latin. Adams explains his avoidance of syntax as due to its diversity in Classical Latin and the complexity of its history. For, while certain constructions and syntactic regularities are eliminated in the course of the development of Old Latin into Classical Latin, and this selection may be seen as an aspect of standardisation (by exclusion), other, innovative constructions come and go, and it is part and parcel of the syntax of the Latin of the educated elite of all periods to show a variety of competing constructions. Such variety is characteristic of modern standard languages too, where typically only basic syntax is standardised to a high degree. Adams outlines a way of assessing the standardisation of syntax in the history of Latin, which others may now take up, but for present purposes he reverts to the basics. Even in modern languages, well into the age of printing, the scope of standardisation is very limited, being confined essentially to pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary, morphology, ‘and, less frequently, basic syntax’ (Pountain, 2016: 634, quoted by Adams, pp. 367–7). And even in spelling and pronunciation, it is a matter of degree rather than an either-or phenomenon (full standardisation vs no standardisation).4 Against this background, having announced his intention (already on p. 368) to focus on spelling in primary documents of the last two centuries BC and the first century AD, Adams argues essentially as follows. In socially diverse speech communities where more than one variety of a language is spoken and recognised, if a standard variety emerges, it is usually a prestigious variety that forms the basis of the standard, and this prestigious variety is usually that of the ruling classes living in the largest settlements—‘upper class and urban’ (Joseph, 1987: 59, quoted by Adams, p. 368). This was certainly so in Republican central Italy: features of Latin (originally ‘the speech of Latium’) to be aspired to were those of the educated elite of the city of Rome. In other respects, however, Adams continues, the circumstances of Latin were quite different from those of, say, modern English. For a standard language to come into being, some degree of codification is required, as is a high degree of agreement among the educated as to what the component language standards of the standard language are to be. In the case of Latin, to assert that the educated largely agreed would be based on silence, and in spite of much testimonial evidence of disagreement over numerous linguistic variants. And in the absence of direct evidence of codification—in the form of contemporary dictionaries, grammar books and manuals of spelling—we are obliged to look for reflections of codification in contemporary writing habits, that is, to say, in the spelling of inscriptions and papyri. And if, after close scrutiny of the spelling of a large corpus of contemporary documents, we ask by when was a consistent (or very largely consistent) orthography in use in Roman elite circles, the answer seems to be—given inconsistencies between and even within inscriptions down to the end of the first century BC—not before the death of Cicero, the standard view hitherto, but rather by the end of the first century AD. He pays particular attention to (1), since it is by far the commonest, and because it occurs in a wide range of morphological contexts, including root-syllables, various grammatical endings (especially of the noun but also of the verb), suffixes, the relative pronoun and miscellaneous particles and adverbs. Indeed, he reports and analyses instances of (1) context by context, offering, for example, on pp. 397–400 ten separate summaries of <ei> ~ <i> spellings in five official inscriptions from the first century BC, and so introducing the important distinction between ‘conditioned’ and ‘arbitrary’ variation.5 In effect, he is giving these documents, their drafters, every opportunity to reveal a spelling standard for the writing of long /i:/ grammatical context by grammatical context, even word by word. This would be at least a hint of the standardisation held by many to have been achieved before the end of the Republic. Adams' conclusions on first-century orthography (pp. 400–1) are specific and carefully worded: there is overwhelming regularity in the use of <ei> rather than <i> in the dative/ablative plural of the first and second declensions (e.g. scribeis ‘scribes’, cetereis ‘others’), in the masculine nominative plural of the second declension (e.g. sociei ‘allies’), in the masculine nominative relative pronoun (quei sg. & pl.) and in the accusative plural of i-stems of the third declension (e.g. omneis ‘all’), and of <i > rather than <ei> in the genitive singular of the second declension (note the contrast in, e.g. amicei socieique [‘friends and allies’ nom. pl.] populi Romani [‘of the Roman people’ gen. sg.]). As Adams puts it (pp. 400–1), ‘It would not be justifiable to assert that at this period there was no attempt to produce regularity in the genre [that is, of official documents prepared for publication]’, and ‘[a] rule covering these … inflections would have been easy to express or to deduce’. On the other hand, in other grammatical contexts there is (p. 401) ‘far more variation, either because no rule had been stated, or because it was difficult to come up with a simple rule, or because personal preference was accepted. These three possibilities are not in line with what full ‘codified orthographic standardisation’ would be taken to mean today’. I have summarised this section of Adams' argument in some detail, as great weight is laid on it by the respondents, especially Zair. It was Adams' original intention to focus on the first century BC ‘because of the common assumption that that was the ‘classical period’, and because I was looking for signs of standardisation then, but it became clear that that period cannot simply be isolated from either earlier or later formal Latin’ (p. 376). Consequently, in the second part of his section on ‘Orthography’ (pp. 403–22), Adams compares the findings above, from the official documents of the first century BC, with the spellings, first, of further official documents of later and earlier periods, and secondly of ‘literary pieces’ as representatives of a quite different genre (or genres) from that of official documents—inscribed poems (the Carmina Latina epigraphica and the Carmina Saturnia epigraphica), a papyrus fragment of Cicero and a telling passage of Varro. He reviews these further sets of texts, chronologically and generically distinct, no less thoroughly but more rapidly—in part because his procedure is now familiar, in part because there is less variation to report—and he draws (to summarise in brief) the following conclusions. First, in official documents the essentially inconsistent spelling of the first century BC (above) is of a piece with that of earlier (2nd c. BC) and slightly later (early 1st c. AD) documents, although the latter show a more frequent use of the modern, that is, Classical spelling options in (1)–(6) above, especially of <i> for <ei>. By contrast, almost complete consistency of spelling is seen in two documents of the middle and second half of the first century AD, the modern options in (1)–(6) above being used in a consistent orthography ‘of the type that one would expect to see in a modern edition of, say, a Ciceronian speech’ (p. 410). As Adams implicitly concedes, this final part of this conclusion is more a working hypothesis in that the radical inference that ‘standardisation was not a product of the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of the late Republic, but of the ‘Silver Age’ of a hundred years later’ (p. 410) rests on the orthography of two documents, and further research would be desirable. Secondly, the literary pieces reported and discussed (pp. 415–22) show broadly speaking the same pattern and with the same chronology, so that it is unjustified to regard the official documents as showing to any degree their own ‘official orthography’—‘a misnomer’ (p. 420)—and to imagine a different standard orthography for writing in other genres. Again, variation, even individual choice, is the rule from the middle Republic to the end of the first century It more through the and not the end of the first century The of in the Republic in formal documents, and including with the of and and various such as that about the it that at least some literary of the period also the evidence that used it, and the same passage also that eliminated the of to and Cicero modern have the in it in an is an This slightly focus on a spelling in in the Classical frequent in the five responses to Adams' to which I now The first two are Adams' case and his material with further of literary Latin, as in Adams' by corpus of material or by on its of Classical Latin from literary manuscripts from the Roman Adams' of especially variation with to Latin literary texts, three of to by of the first century BC and the first two centuries AD. In these documents, all of in the context of a of Latin draws attention above all to spellings, even when these spellings are not used within one and the same In these in various of the including the especially but all of written certainly or in the as in the documents by Adams, the spelling <ei> for long /i:/ is especially The use of this spelling with Adams' findings from inscriptions down to the first-century and so the argument for at standardisation of orthography before the second century AD. Pezzini of the case of a response to Adams' of Classical Latin in focus is on the spelling and morphology of the in the Scappaticcio, Pezzini sets to some of Adams' findings and in particular that certainly earlier Republican Latin, while showing and at is not standardised to any and secondly that even the manuscripts of literary are not to be as were to linguistic In the course of his Pezzini his findings by some fundamental questions and by some of the of what we to about the spelling used by and by Classical in In a volume on the standardisation of Latin, Pezzini attention to on the that Cicero (and to the middle Republic as being a Golden Age of Classical Latin, and to in particular as being, in of his one of the important in that and a for or of the standardising that to the Classical Latin of his own Cicero (and in very general the consistent with other remarks of Cicero on the standard of city speech’ by Adams (p. In the of one whether this the of the of with that of, say, than he one would of the first-century as being the if in the transmitted in the late Latin of However, Pezzini rather an of as the first in of his with and other in the use of linguistic variants. This selection or of competing and constructions may be seen as a form of standardisation Adams, p. with to & as Pezzini points the word or by is that which is later standard in Classical Latin. In of this Pezzini touches on a range of or sets of competing including of and and word In every or every one over the and where he use more than one it is usually to see that the variation is rather than distinction by Adams In by contrast, variation is much and is a different As of a literary primary documents, Pezzini of course that he is at a in a of his spelling one by argument and with the of such as close to the of the at the of the the orthography of the in contexts where variation is be a In the present of the and of standardisation of Latin orthography, Pezzini in to the of a literary from the spelling of official which are by their very formal and He his with to an of earlier and later spelling not by Adams, and This case is as it up contemporary inscriptions and the mediaeval manuscripts of the spelling, while the late-antique the so-called the modern spelling, which is by to have been by a of the great follow his This would a between official and literary orthographic is for his And may we the on vs modern spellings given that it either when surely used or an form where the modern and critical of evidence for Republican literary orthography are with due even on the their questions and their of the for the last two papers in the volume, which are more and is quite but are in Adams' piece in research contexts, and in with it, especially with regard to the of within which are for further research in Latin. Zair orthographic variation Adams' history of on standardisation in Latin (and since the and general and some specific with Adams' and and with his conclusion for the absence of standardisation in Latin spelling before the latter part of the first century AD. central question that Zair is around the of He questions whether Adams, for all his from of standardisation drawn the of the modern with a p. of such would be to see standardisation as an or rather than a or Zair explicitly that standardisation is not an but a an that have a of p. and sets this his of Adams' that there either is or is not and in particular that there is not standardisation of Latin in the first century Zair different of variation in spelling and other in modern Such variation not the of standardisation in modern and a not be taken as standardisation in Latin. This an whether Adams' are and to a more of this case in the of linguistics. For example, on the of the spelling <ei> for which Adams in his sets of inscriptions from respectively the and middle of the first century AD, the of is as a of that to be to Adams' aspect of Adams' argument by Zair is the of the of variation in the inscriptions many spellings in Republican Latin have been eliminated from all but and this not as standardisation well And it is that about spelling and by Roman and other in language are used to effect, by Adams as evidence and by Zair (and Ayres-Bennett, as evidence for at least its if not its This is not the only to the drawn by these respondents from and the history of Rome. one would expect standardisation to have been and not the of a from in the second century BC, by the of Greek as a standard language, by of the Roman elite from of the of in the of language standards of of standardisation by Ayres-Bennett, standards have in the in the class of and in the numerous where written texts were and perhaps in texts of different This of course in the question where these and writing their Adams is explicitly on this but it is as Zair not to sight of the the scope in to drawn from is a and where Zair from Adams' to contemporary spellings and the of The two of would surely not on the and of distinction between spellings and spelling on which educated and on which the use his In their come down to the before or after the period from Cicero to the death of the of the or the of but even more broadly than given her in French and the standardisation of modern language standards and standard and also sets Adams' reflections and in a context of earlier research and about linguistic that in to is modern languages and so Adams' as a explicitly the important distinction between standard language more or less complete and language standard even a feature of a For the of her paper, on language are widely as while standard languages are in seen as of In effect, here the question in Adams' second distinction on Adams' numerous remarks on which is in between elite and (and e.g. Adams, p. simply In this alone among the five respondents comes close to with Adams' remarks on that standards with of including the of of and languages that form the focus of Adams' on (pp. main is that in the modern the of standardisation is by no which questions for the Roman context about the between and Classical spellings (and other linguistic the of paper is a of the four of standardisation in the by paper seems to p. although is not in Adams' Of the four and has to say about the first he seems to the which and he has nothing to say about the third the remarks on On sets the Roman distinction p. between the of (especially and grammatical of these essentially of or modern, of codification in and grammar final is on the of and disagreement among by Adams from Latin as part of his case standardisation and by Zair as very much a even of standardisation remarks on the topic with to French that have been with to Latin, including different of variation vs or and a of standardisation as an Adams, p. on and in that language may a description of and an that not only the first three papers in this volume but also much on the development of Latin into the Adams' final article is a conclusion to his research of In its approach and it is characteristic of Adams at his in from his own minute analysis of over large of drawn largely from less documents and literary texts, for conclusions and working on the of a volume such as this would have been a for he had of such close and critical disagreement and being to having the last word on questions large and He would I have in his the and attention to his by the to this only we have his response to It after writing this that it is in the of Adams' that we come close to his response by The five in this volume are in what is the and order, but I for one have it to Adams' piece after the four responses to it. This in has that a frequent in or with was to that or critical question was on or in what he had just or It is in a Adams' final focus was on the ‘standard that he had so drawn on for and to every other variety of Latin. the is not the first his the as sets of with a rule that essentially by the the that we have for this been as the of long is in not but that before eight or Adams' eight the of that has such a weight of and contrast is to It is all even for to that the development and standardising of Classical Latin are if not It is to the of all the to this volume to show that much to be in the history of the writing of the of