Exempta littera: metalinguaggio, sillabazione e assimilazioni consonantiche

The article deals with a particular phenomenon occurring in several Latin inscriptions from the Late Republican to the Late Imperial period. The product of consonantal assimilations is commonly transcribed by means of a single consonant: 'Volumnia' > 'Volumia', 'Victorius' > 'Vitorius', 'vixit' > 'visit' etc. No coherent explanation of these spellings has ever been offered in the scholarly literature, appealing from time to time to errors, effects of the Oscan substratum, unidentified simplifications. Thanks to a careful survey of the evidences, the hypothesis is put forward that these spellings, at least until the 3rd century CE, were part of a system of orthographic rules that involved the elimination of the consonant affected by assimilation. That is, we are dealing with a typical 'detractio' in the metalanguage of Roman artigraphers and orthographers, i.e., one of the phenomena traditionally attributed to the 'quadripertita ratio'. This is primarily shown by a passage from Quintilian, where the progressive assimilation /mn/ > /mm/ is described as "exempta 'n' littera." Thus, it was impossible to render the assimilation by means of a double, because consonantal groups were conventionally considered tautosyllabic. In other words, it was not possible to spell the product of assimilation in syllable-initial position according to Latin 'scripta' techniques.