Old Latin


Old Latin, also known as Early Latin or Archaic Latin, was the Latin language in the period before 75 BC, i.e. before the age of Classical Latin. rather than vetus Latina It is ultimately descended from the Proto-Italic language.
The use of "old", "early" and "archaic" has been standard in publications of Old Latin writings since at least the 18th century. The definition is not arbitrary, but the terms refer to writings with spelling conventions and word forms not generally found in works written under the Roman Empire. This article presents some of the major differences.
The earliest known specimen of the Latin language appears on the Praeneste fibula. A new analysis performed in 2011 declared it to be genuine "beyond any reasonable doubt" and dating from the Orientalizing period, in the first half of the seventh century BC.

Philological constructs

The old-time language

The concept of Old Latin is as old as the concept of Classical Latin, both dating to at least as early as the late Roman Republic. In that period Cicero, along with others, noted that the language he used every day, presumably the upper-class city Latin, included lexical items and phrases that were heirlooms from a previous time, which he called verborum vetustas prisca, translated as "the old age/time of language".
During the classical period, Prisca Latinitas, Prisca Latina and other idioms using the adjective always meant these remnants of a previous language, which, in the Roman philology, was taken to be much older in fact than it really was. Viri prisci, "old-time men", were the population of Latium before the founding of Rome.

The four Latins of Isidore

In the Late Latin period, when Classical Latin was behind them, the Latin- and Greek-speaking grammarians were faced with multiple phases, or styles, within the language. Isidore of Seville reports a classification scheme that had come into existence in or before his time: "the four Latins". They were Prisca, spoken before the founding of Rome, when Janus and Saturn ruled Latium, to which he dated the Carmen Saliare; Latina, dated from the time of king Latinus, in which period he placed the laws of the Twelve Tables; Romana, essentially equal to Classical Latin; and Mixta, "mixed" Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin, which is known today as Late Latin. The scheme persisted with little change for some thousand years after Isidore.

Old Latin

In 1874, John Wordsworth used this definition: "By Early Latin I understand Latin of the whole period of the Republic, which is separated very strikingly, both in tone and in outward form, from that of the Empire."
Although the differences are striking and can be easily identified by Latin readers, they are not such as to cause a language barrier. Latin speakers of the empire had no reported trouble understanding Old Latin, except for the few texts that must date from the time of the kings, mainly songs. Thus, the laws of the Twelve Tables from the early Republic were comprehensible, but the Carmen Saliare, probably written under Numa Pompilius, was not entirely clear.
An opinion concerning Old Latin, of a Roman man of letters in the middle Republic, survives: the historian, Polybius, read "the first treaty between Rome and Carthage", which he says "dates from the consulship of Lucius Junius Brutus and Marcus Horatius, the first consuls after the expulsion of the kings". Knowledge of the early consuls is somewhat obscure, but Polybius also states that the treaty was formulated 28 years before Xerxes I crossed into Greece; that is, in 508 BC, about the time of the putative date of the founding of the Roman Republic. Polybius says of the language of the treaty "the ancient Roman language differs so much from the modern that it can only be partially made out, and that after much application by the most intelligent men".
There is no sharp distinction between Old Latin, as it was spoken for most of the Republic, and Classical Latin, but the earlier grades into the later. The end of the republic was too late a termination for compilers after Wordsworth; Charles Edwin Bennett said, "'Early Latin' is necessarily a somewhat vague term... Bell, De locativi in prisca Latinitate vi et usu, Breslau, 1889, sets the later limit at 75 BC. A definite date is really impossible, since archaic Latin does not terminate abruptly, but continues even down to imperial times." Bennett's own date of 100 BC did not prevail but rather Bell's 75 BC became the standard as expressed in the four-volume Loeb Library and other major compendia. Over the 377 years from 452 to 75 BC, Old Latin evolved from being partially comprehensible by classicists with study to being easily read by scholars.

Corpus

Old Latin authored works began in the 3rd century BC. These are complete or nearly complete works under their own name surviving as manuscripts copied from other manuscripts in whatever script was current at the time. In addition are fragments of works quoted in other authors.
Numerous inscriptions placed by various methods on their original media survive just as they were except for the ravages of time. Some of these were copied from other inscriptions. No inscription can be earlier than the introduction of the Greek alphabet into Italy but none survive from that early date. The imprecision of archaeological dating makes it impossible to assign a year to any one inscription, but the earliest survivals are probably from the 6th century BC. Some texts, however, that survive as fragments in the works of classical authors, had to have been composed earlier than the republic, in the time of the monarchy. These are listed below.

Fragments and inscriptions

Notable Old Latin fragments with estimated dates include:
The authors are as follows:
Old Latin surviving in inscriptions is written in various forms of the Etruscan alphabet as it evolved into the Latin alphabet. The writing conventions varied by time and place until classical conventions prevailed.
Apart of old inscriptions, texts in the original writing system have been lost or transcribed by later copyists.

Orthography

Some differences between old and classical Latin were of spelling only; pronunciation is thought to be essentially the same as in classical Latin:
These differences did not necessarily run concurrently with each other and were not universal; that is, c was used for both c and g.

Phonology

Stress

Old Latin is thought to have had a strong stress on the first syllable of a word until about 250 BC. All syllables other than the first were unstressed and were subjected to greater amounts of phonological weakening. Starting around that year, the Classical Latin stress system began to develop. It passed through at least one intermediate stage, found in Plautus, in which the stress occurred on the fourth last syllable in four-syllable words with all short syllables.

Vowels and diphthongs

Most original PIE diphthongs were preserved in stressed syllables, including ; ; ; .
The Old Latin diphthong ei evolves in stages: ei > ẹ̄ > ī. The intermediate sound ẹ̄ was simply written e but must have been distinct from the normal long vowel ē because ẹ̄ subsequently merged with ī while ē did not. It is generally thought that ẹ̄ was a higher sound than e. Even after the original vowel had merged with ī, the old spelling ei continued to be used for a while, with the result that ei came to stand for ī and began to be used in the spelling of original occurrences of ī that did not evolve from ei.
In unstressed syllables, *oi and *ai had already merged into ei by historic times. This eventually evolved to ī according to the process described above.
Old Latin often had different short vowels from Classical Latin, reflecting sound changes that had not yet taken place. For example, the very early Duenos inscription has the form duenos "good", later found as duonos and still later bonus. A countervailing change wo > we occurred around 150 BC in certain contexts, and many earlier forms are found.
Old Latin frequently preserves original PIE thematic case endings -os and -om.

Consonants

Intervocalic was preserved up through 350 BC or so, at which point it changed into . This rhotacism had implications for declension: early classical Latin, honos, honoris ; later Classical honor, honoris. Some Old Latin texts preserve in this position, such as the Carmen Arvale's lases for lares. Later instances of single between vowels are mostly due either to reduction of early after long vowels or diphthongs; borrowings; or late reconstructions.
There are many unreduced clusters, e.g. iouxmentom ; losna < *lousna < */leuksnā/; cosmis ; stlocum, acc..
Early du becomes later b: duenos > duonos > bonus "good"; duis > bis "twice"; duellom > bellum "war".
Final occurred in ablatives, such as puellād "from the girl" or campōd "from the field", later puellā and campō. In verb conjugation, the third-person ending -d later became -t, e.g. Old Latin faced > Classical facit.

Morphology

Nouns

Latin nouns are distinguished by grammatical case, with a termination, or suffix, determining its use in the sentence: subject, predicate, etc. A case for a given word is formed by suffixing a case ending to a part of the word common to all its cases called a stem. Stems are classified by their last letters as vowel or consonant. Vowel stems are formed by adding a suffix to a shorter and more ancient segment called a root. Consonant stems are the root. The combination of the last letter of the stem and the case ending often results in an ending also called a case ending or termination. For example, the stem puella- receives a case ending -m to form the accusative case puellam in which the termination -am is evident.
In Classical Latin textbooks the declensions are named from the letter ending the stem or First, Second, etc. to Fifth. A declension may be illustrated by a paradigm, or listing of all the cases of a typical word. This method is less frequently applied to Old Latin, and with less validity. In contrast to Classical Latin, Old Latin reflects the evolution of the language from an unknown hypothetical ancestor spoken in Latium. The endings are multiple. Their use depends on time and locality. Any paradigm selected would be subject to these constraints and if applied to the language universally would result in false constructs, hypothetical words not attested in the Old Latin corpus. Nevertheless, the endings are illustrated below by quasi-classical paradigms. Alternative endings from different stages of development are given, but they may not be attested for the word of the paradigm. For example, in the second declension, *campoe "fields" is unattested, but poploe "peoples" is attested.
The locative was a separate case in Old Latin but gradually became reduced in function, and the locative singular form eventually merged with the genitive singular by regular sound change. In the plural, the locative was captured by the ablative case in all Italic languages before Old Latin.

First declension (a)

The 'A-stem' declension. The stems of nouns of this declension usually end in and are typically feminine.
A nominative case ending of -s in a few masculines indicates the nominative singular case ending may have been originally : paricidas for later parricida, but the tended to get lost. In the nominative plural, -ī replaced original -s as in the genitive singular.
In the genitive singular, the was replaced with from the second declension, the resulting diphthong shortening to subsequently becoming. The original form is maintained in some formulae, e.g. pater familiās. The genitive plural ending -āsōm, borrowed from the pronouns, began to overtake original -om.
In the dative singular the final i is either long or short. The ending becomes -ae, -a or -e.
In the accusative singular, Latin regularly shortens a vowel before final m.
In the ablative singular, -d was regularly lost after a long vowel. In the dative and ablative plural, the -abos descending from Indo-European *-ābhos is used for feminines only. *-ais > -eis > īs is adapted from -ois of the o-declension.
The vocative singular had inherited short -a. This later merged with the nominative singular when -ā was shortened to -ă.
The locative case would not apply to such a meaning as puella, so Roma, which is singular, and Syracusae, which is plural, have been substituted. The locative plural has already merged with the -eis form of the ablative.

Second declension (o)

The stems of the nouns of the o-declension end in ŏ deriving from the o-grade of Indo-European ablaut. Classical Latin evidences the development ŏ > ŭ. Nouns of this declension are either masculine or neuter.
Nominative singulars ending in -ros or -ris syncopate the ending: *agros > *agrs > *agers > *agerr > ager.
Many alternative spellings occur:
The 'consonant-stem' and 'i-stem' declension. This declension contains nouns that are masculine, feminine, and neuter. The stem ends in the root consonant, except in the special case where it ends in -i. The i-stem, which is a vowel-stem, partially fused with the consonant-stem in the pre-Latin period and went further in Old Latin. I/y and u/w can be treated either as consonants or as vowels; hence their classification as semi-vowels. Mixed-stem declensions are partly like consonant-stem and partly like i-stem. Consonant-stem declensions vary slightly depending on which consonant is root-final: stop-, r-, n-, s-, etc. The paradigms below include a stop-stem and an i-stem.
For the consonant declension, in the nominative singular, the -s was affixed directly to the stem consonant, but the combination of the two consonants produced modified nominatives over the Old Latin period. The case appears in different stages of modification in different words diachronically. The Latin neuter form is the Indo-European nominative without stem ending; for example, cor < *cord "heart."
The genitive singular endings include -is < -es and -us < *-os. In the genitive plural, some forms appear to affix the case ending to the genitive singular rather than the stem:
In the dative singular, -ī succeeded -eī and -ē after 200 BC.
In the accusative singular, -em < *-ṃ after a consonant.
In the ablative singular, the -d was lost after 200 BC. In the dative and ablative plural, the early poets sometimes used -būs.
In the locative singular, the earliest form is like the dative but over the period assimilated to the ablative.

Fourth declension (u)

The 'u-stem' declension. The stems of the nouns of the u-declension end in ŭ and are masculine, feminine and neuter. In addition there is a ū-stem declension, which contains only a few "isolated" words, such as sūs, "pig", and is not presented here.

Fifth declension (e)

The 'e-stem' declension. Its morphology matches the Classical language very nearly.

Personal pronouns

Personal pronouns are among the most common thing found in Old Latin inscriptions. In all three persons, the ablative singular ending is identical to the accusative singular.

Relative pronoun

In Old Latin, the relative pronoun is also another common concept, especially in inscriptions. The forms are quite inconsistent and leave much to be reconstructed by scholars.

Verbs

Old present and perfects

There is little evidence of the inflection of Old Latin verb forms and the few surviving inscriptions hold many inconsistencies between forms. Therefore, the forms below are ones that are both proved by scholars through Old Latin inscriptions, and recreated by scholars based on other early Indo-European languages such as Greek and Italic dialects such as Oscan and Umbrian.