31.1093, Calls: Latin; Indo-European; Historical Ling/Spain

Fri Mar 20 20:31:03 UTC 2020

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-1093. Fri Mar 20 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.1093, Calls: Latin; Indo-European; Historical Ling/Spain

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Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2020 16:30:10
From: Carlotta Viti [21icllsantiago at gmail.com]
Subject: Latin in the linguistic context of the ancient Mediterranean

Full Title: Latin in the linguistic context of the ancient Mediterranean 

Date: 24-May-2021 - 28-May-2021
Location: Santiago de Compostela, Spain 
Contact Person: Carlotta Viti
Meeting Email: 21icllsantiago at gmail.com
Web Site: https://www.icll2021.com 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics 

Subject Language(s): Latin (lat)

Language Family(ies): Indo-European 

Call Deadline: 15-Oct-2020 

Meeting Description:

This workshop investigates the relationship between Latin and other languages
and cultures of Italy, of the Mediterranean and of the Middle East in
antiquity, that is, from prehistory until the end of the Roman Empire. On the
one hand, the Romans always acknowledged a cultural and linguistic debt to the
Greeks. Roman intellectuals were normally also fluent in Ancient Greek. Some
of them lamented the fact that Latin could not express abstract concepts and
used Ancient Greek as the source of borrowings. Some others defended the
lexical resources of Latin and preferred to imitate Ancient Greek by means of
more indirect calques. In any case, the comparison between Latin and Ancient
Greek vocabulary is a crucial topic in the Latin rhetorical tradition. This
comparison can be extended from the lexicon to grammar, since some syntactic
constructions may not be equally natural in both languages. 

On the other hand, the Romans were not particularly interested in the
languages and cultures of their conquered countries: apart from Ancient Greek,
they found it natural to destroy “tot populorum discordes ferasque linguas”
(Plin. 3,39) and to complement their military expansion with a complete
linguistic control of their provinces. Still, Latin has always exhibited cases
of dialectal variation, as well as language contact with Sabellic and with
other Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages of Ancient Italy and of
the Mediterranean. Despite the Roman official policy of language
globalization, multilingualism persisted for centuries in the Roman Empire,
which is to be expected given its geographical breadth, and numerous examples
of bilingualism are attested between Latin and Gaulish, Punic, Berber,
Aramaic, etc. These often-fragmentary texts are rarely investigated in Latin
linguistic studies, not only because of their intrinsic philological
difficulties, but also because Latin has been traditionally presented as a
quite homogeneous language, at least in its classical period, transmitted by a
consistent literary tradition with specific models of correct grammar and
elegant style, so that manifestations of internal variation and external
contact have been often neglected. 

Moreover, in the history of the Latin language, sources of linguistic
interference may change. In the late periods of the Roman Empire, Latin
especially interacts with Germanic languages in the North and with Semitic
languages, such as Aramaic, in the South and in the East of its territories.
These influences may affect different lexical or grammatical domains. Some
Germanic borrowings concerning colours, such as *blank “white”, *brūns
“brown”, *grīs “grey”, originally described horse coats and were introduced in
Vulgar Latin by Germanic soldiers integrated in the ranks of the Roman
legions; these borrowings become basic color terms in Romance languages.
Semitic borrowings, in both lexicon and grammar, appear in religious texts
related to the early Christian tradition, which represent translations of the
Hebrew Bible or original commentaries of it. However, some deviances in
agreement, in the use of tenses and moods, in clause linkage, etc. from
Classical Latin, which have been ascribed to features of Hebrew phraseology,
also find parallels in substandard varieties of Latin from archaic to imperial
ages, so it may be controversial to establish whether they are more
effectively triggered by external or internal mechanisms of language change. 

In this workshop, we aim to discuss various manifestations of linguistic
variation and language contact between Latin and other languages of the Roman
Republic and of the Roman Empire, which accompanied the intense exchanges of
artefacts, material products, literary motives and ideas through the Ancient
Mediterranean.

Call for Papers: 

We invite papers devoted to any aspect of language variation and change in
Latin – papers focused on the linguistic and cultural relationship between
Latin and Ancient Greek, papers based on the philological analysis of ancient
Latin bilingual texts, papers devoted to the emergence of Romance
constructions from Vulgar Latin, papers on the peculiarities of Christian
Latin, as well as papers addressing Latin in the light of modern research on
multilingualism, borrowing, calque, code-switching, linguistic interference,
accommodation, diglossia, pidgins and creoles, lingua franca (cf. Hickey
2013).

You can send your abstract (not exceeding 500 words, exclusive of references)
to 21icllsantiago at gmail.com until 15 October, 2020 and clearly state that your
submission is to be considered for the present Workshop. Submitted abstracts
will be evaluated by both the ICLL Committee and the Workshop organizer.
Accepted papers will receive a slot of 30 minutes (20 minutes presentation and
10 minutes discussion). 

As the Workshop will be included in the 21st International Colloquium of Latin
Linguistics in Santiago de Compostela (https://www.icll2021.com), all
participants should register for that congress. Within the end of 2021, we
will gather the papers for publication of the proceedings of the workshop in a
book series by Brill, Leiden.

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LINGUIST List: Vol-31-1093	
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