Vol. 55 (2019)
Articles

The role of archaisms in the Latin inscriptions of the Roman Empire: some new considerations in light of computerized dialectology

Published August 10, 2020
Author
Silvia Tantimonaco
Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest
Keywords
Latin linguistics, Roman epigraphy, geolinguistics, sociolinguistics, Hispania, archaisms
Dates
Published date: 2020-08-10
How to Cite

APA

Tantimonaco, S. . (2020). The role of archaisms in the Latin inscriptions of the Roman Empire: some new considerations in light of computerized dialectology . Acta Classica Universitatis Scientiarum Debreceniensis, 55, 147–169. Retrieved from https://ojs.lib.unideb.hu/classica/article/view/7936
Abstract

This paper aims to reconsider the role of archaisms in epigraphy and, above all, their possible dialectal value. Indeed, according to a traditional theory, provinces that were colonized earlier by the Romans preserved archaic varieties of Latin. Scholars have often used inscriptions to support this idea, particularly in the case of Hispania, but the results of this paper, which rely on the methodology of modern Computerized Dialectology, are negative in this regard.