La formazione del neostandard latino: il caso delle differentiae uerborum

This study is part of a series of researches devoted to the Latin grammarians, and more specifically to the attention they paid to spoken Latin. It is a well known fact, that alongside the direct epigraphic records there is a considerable corpus of testimonia that comes from the works of the artigraphs after the fourth century A.D. A separate chapter is represented by orthoepists and orthographists (culminating in the compilation of fragments of the ‘Appendix Probi’ around the fifth century A.D.). The general thesis of the work is that later grammarians, especially in the section devoted to vitia, i.e. lexical barbarisms or syntactic solecisms, often drew the attention to spoken reality and to their own skills as educated speakers. An attempt has been made to prove that the traditional dichotomic paradigm that contrasts the Latinitas on one hand, and the stigmatized vitia on the other, is an incorrect simplification. In fact, at least a third 'grey' segment emerges within the grammatical treatises. This is very similar to the Received Imperial Standard mentioned by Löfstedt and the "lengua común of the empire" identified by Coseriu. The existence of this segment of the late-Latin repertoire is called "Latin neostandard", a non-stigmatized segment, which is, however, a precursor of some of the preromance Latin developments, and is proved by a careful study of the so-called “differentiae verborum”. For the first time these extensive repertoires of homophones (as well as presumed synonyms; animus ~ anima, templum -delubrum etc.) are subjected to a thorough linguistic analysis. Using a simple heuristic device that involves the deduction of the real pronunciation underlying the presumed pairs of homophones (but not homographs) of which the “differentia” is described in terms of meaning (os ~ hos, quaestus- Questus, suum- sum etc.), 22 traits are listed (18 phonological and 4 morphological) which clearly pertain to neostandard Latin characteristics which were advocated by grammarians and subsequently present in the common history of the Romance languages.