Tommaso Mari

L’opera conosciuta come "Pauca de barbarismo collecta de multis" è una compilazione grammaticale latina di età carolingia che attinge alla dottrina di numerosi grammatici tardoantichi su "uitia et uirtutes orationis". Nel presente volume, che ne è l’editio princeps, l’autore descrive la tradizione manoscritta dell’opera, analizza le sue fonti grammaticali e letterarie e ne esamina la lingua, per poi delinearne una contestualizzazione storico-culturale. L’edizione è corredata da un ricco apparato critico che include puntuali raffronti con il testo e la tradizione manoscritta delle fonti della compilazione. Concludono il volume gli indici dei passi citati. Questo libro è pensato in primo luogo per gli studiosi della tradizione grammaticale latina tardoantica ed altomedievale, ma si rivolge anche a chi studia la fortuna dei classici latini nel Medioevo.

The work known as 'Pauca de barbarismo collecta de multis' is a Latin grammatical compilation produced in the Carolingian period. It draws upon the doctrine of many Late Antique grammarians about the 'vices and virtues of speech'. The present volume is the editio princeps of this text. In it, the author describes the manuscript tradition of this work, analyses its grammatical and literary sources and examines its language. In conclusion, he reconstructs the historical and cultural context of this work. The edition has a rich critical apparatus that includes references to the text and manuscript tradition of the sources of this compilation. The index of the passages cited is at the end of the volume.
This book is addressed in the first place to those who are interested in the Latin grammatical tradition in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, but also to those who study the reception of the Latin classics in the Middle Ages.

The Gesta de absolutione Miseni, transmitted in the Collectio Avellana as well as the Collectio Berolinensis, contain the minutes of a Roman synod held in 495; this synod, presided over by Pope Gelasius, readmitted to communion the bishop Misenus of Cumae, who had been excommunicated in 484 in the context of the so-called Acacian schism. While earlier synodal minutes are known, this text is the first known example of minutes of a Roman synod. A formal analysis shows that it fits well in the tradition of synodal minutes but also has original elements. The closest parallels are the Acts of the Roman synods of 499, 501, and 502; it appears that the minute-takers of the Roman See in this time had a more or less standardized way to produce minutes, which was common heritage of fifth-century minute-takers. The minutes show that, in this synod, written documents played a bigger role than debate and real-time communication; one gets the impression that this synod was conducted in a rather ‘stiff’ way. It is debated whether this is the result on the strict control that Gelasius exercised over the proceedings or heavy editing of the minutes.

The Council of Chalcedon was a multilingual event, but its multilingual
situation was unbalanced. Most attendees spoke Greek, which was de facto the official language of the council. The Roman delegates spoke in Latin, presumably for symbolic reasons, and their statements were translated simultaneously into Greek. The difference of language was no apparent obstacle to communication; this can be seen best in the third session, which was efficiently chaired by the chief of the Roman delegation. Although the translations recorded in the Acts are generally reliable, there are some differences between the Latin and Greek versions reflecting political differences between the Sees of Rome and Constantinople.
Languages other than Greek and Latin were spoken, as for example Syriac, but their role was marginal. The original minutes of the Council of Chalcedon reflected the “unbalanced” multilingualism of the assembly; they were mostly in Greek but preserved some parts in Latin. With time, and with Latin fading in the East, they lost the parts in Latin and became unilingual; at the same time, the Greek Acts were translated into Latin for a Latin-speaking western audience.

The 5th-century Gaulish grammarian Consentius wrote an extensive treatise on errors in spoken Latin. In the Roman grammatical tradition, errors in single words are deemed to arise by means of the improper addition, removal, substitution, and misplacement of one of the constitutive elements of the word (letter, syllable, quantity, accent, and aspiration). Late grammarians assumed that the four catego- ries of change applied to accents too, but only Consentius provided an example for each of these cases. However, his discussion poses some problems. The examples of removal, substitution and misplacement of an accent all concern the word orator and present oddities such as a circumflex accent on the antepe- nultimate syllable; they were clearly made up for the sake of completeness and have no bearing on our understanding of Vulgar Latin. On the other hand, the example of addition of an accent is tríginta, with retraction of the accent on the antepenultimate syllable; this must be genuine and fits in well with current reconstructions of most Romance continuations of Latin triginta (Italian trenta, French trente, etc.) and other vigesimals (uiginti, quadraginta, etc.).

Consentius’ De barbarismis et metaplasmis includes a discussion of the
correct and incorrect pronunciations of several sounds; the author describes
the sounds discussed, but it is difficult at times to understand
exactly the characteristics of the sounds being described because the
phonetic terminology that was current in ancient grammar is not very
precise. This article focuses on the phonetic terminology with which
Consentius describes the errors in the pronunciation of the sounds of
i, l, t, c, s, and u, and especially on the use of the terms pinguis and
exilis. The case of the sounds of i is particularly interesting but also
very complicated, for it presents textual as well as interpretive problems:
Consentius describes both some pronunciation errors by Gauls
and Greeks and also the correct pronunciation of i depending on two
different criteria, its position within a word and its quantity; the latter
partly foreshadows Romance developments.

Consentius’ De barbarismis et metaplasmis includes a lengthy discussion
of errors in spoken Latin and thus provides us with a rich
list of non-standard Latin forms. it is precisely the non-standard
nature of these forms that caused trouble for medieval copyists,
such that Consentius’ manuscripts have variae lectiones among
which it is not always easy for a modern editor to choose. This
paper focuses on textual problems concerning non-standard forms
presented by Consentius, especially those involving metathesis and
the use of the aspirate; it also discusses cases in which Consentius’
text seems secure but the interpretation of the form he presents is
rather problematic, thus revealing some of the limits of his learning.
The paper also analyzes the significance of the forms discussed for
our understanding of “vulgar” or simply “non-standard” Latin.

The short Ars attributed by the manuscript tradition to the grammarian Asper is a treatise on the eight parts of speech of uncertain date and origin. The standard edition of this text is that of H. Keil in the fifth volume of the Grammatici latini, which is now one and a half century old. Keil’s edition is based on two fifteenth-century manuscripts and a reprint of the editio princeps. We now know five manuscripts that Keil did not use, two of them dating from the ninth century, the other three to the fifteenth century. Therefore, as is the case with many of the texts published by Keil, a new edition of Asper’s Ars is necessary. In this contribution I examine the manuscript tradition of the Ars and establish the relations between the manuscripts, also taking into account the recent studies on the transmission of grammatical works that are preserved partly in the same manuscripts (especially the Regulae Palaemonis). The extant witnesses show that Asper’s Ars was used in ninth-century France, after which it fell into almost total oblivion until it was re-discovered by the humanists, like many other grammatical texts. There certainly was an archetype, and the stemma is most likely to be bipartite. One branch of the stemma consists of a ninth-century manuscript copied in France and a late fifteenth-century manuscript copied in Basel, which share a common model. The other ninth-century French manuscript and the group of the late fifteenth-century manuscripts produced in the Roman humanistic circles derive from a common ancestor. The editio princeps, whose text was established by the humanist Pier Francesco Giustolo, is the result of contamination between the two groups. The indirect tradition, as far as we know, is very scarce.

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The minutes of church councils from late antiquity provide us with an unparalleled amount of first-hand information about late antique history and language. However, they present issues of different kinds that need addressing. In this paper I wish to suggest a methodological framework to work with conciliar minutes. First of all, one has to consider the question of the reliability of the minutes, which in turn raises the questions of their thoroughness and genuineness. In order to assess these, one has to establish how and under what circumstances the minutes were produced and transmitted; this is not always easy, for details about minute-taking surface only occasionally. Comparison of different versions of the minutes can also help understand if editing took place and to what extent it has affected the reliability of the minutes as historical evidence. In the minutes we obviously find factual information of a kind that can also be found in the works of ancient historians. Conciliar minutes, however, go beyond that, for they provide us with evidence of dialogue and debate, thereby allowing us to look at dynamics of communication. In order to disentangle such dynamics, I suggest using techniques from the linguistic fields of discourse and conversation analysis that focus on contextual parameters and social interactions. In the second part of the paper, I apply the methodological framework proposed to analyse the minutes of the third session of the Council of Chalcedon.

This article is a follow-up on the recent editio princeps of the Pauca de
barbarismo collecta de multis, a Carolingian grammar on the traditional
topic of the uitia et uirtutes orationis. Here are some observations on questions that have remained open and suggestions for further research. As for the authorship of the treatise, here it is suggested that the most likely author is Clemens Scottus, master of the palace school in the early ninth century. It is still doubtful whether Clemens also wrote one of two extant grammars on the parts of speech. The second question concerns
the position of a Bamberg manuscript within the tradition of this treatise. It is cautiously suggested that the branch in which this manuscript belongs is the product of a revision. The third question concerns the relationship between the Pauca de barbarismo and some ninth-century commentaries on Aelius Donatus’ Ars maior. Our treatise is earlier but more research is needed to clarify its position within this group of analogous texts.

The grammarian Consentius lived in Gaul between the fourth and fifth century AD. His 'De barbarismis et metaplasmis' is the largest treatise on the traditional topic of the vices and virtues of speech. In this work, Consentius provides us with valuable information on many aspects of non-standard Latin. He also shows a unique interest in the regional diversification of Latin. From his normative perspective, Consentius tells us about the bad Latin spoken by peoples living on the ‘periphery’ of the Western Roman Empire, such as Gauls, Africans, and Greeks ; that is opposed to the 'Romanus sermo', the pure Latin of the ideal centre of the Empire. However, when Consentius looks at this ideal centre from a ‘sociolinguistic’ point of view, he finds that not everything is good in the Latin of Rome, for the language of the Roman plebs too is corrupt.
The present paper analyses the linguistic aspect of the dialectic between centre and periphery as it emerges from Consentius’ work. The views of contemporary authors are also taken into account. This contribution takes advantage from recent progresses on the text of Consentius, for the author is preparing a new critical edition of the 'De barbarismis et metaplasmis' based on fresh manuscript evidence.

From a morphosyntactic point of view, Latin by and large expresses possession with suus when subject and possessor are co-referential, with eius/eorum when they are different. The Romance languages have lost this distinction, replacing it with one of number: they have generalised reflexes of suus for a singular possessor, of suus or illorum for a plural possessor. It has been observed that suus sometimes replaced eius already in Plautus. By looking at authors from the archaic period to the Middle Ages, this study shows that suus always had a slight tendency to replace eius in contexts where semantic and pragmatic factors override syntactic ones, but only in later authors there occurred a widening of the usages of suus, suggesting that its generalisation was taking place in the spoken language. On the other hand, the use of illorum for a plural possessor cannot be traced back to early Latin.

Consentius' De barbarismis et metaplasmis is the largest and most detailed treatise on phonetic mistakes (barbarisms) and poetic licences (metaplasms) that the Latin grammatical tradition has handed down to us. This work, which has received considerable attention because of the features of vulgar and regional Latin it deals with, also offers remarkably original insights into how late Latin scholarship perceived poetic language. The intent of this paper is to sketch an overview of Consentius' concept of metaplasm and the kind of examples that he provides, and in so doing to analyse his grammatical approach to poetry, looking at the ancient grammatical tradition, at historical linguistics, and at relevant problems of textual criticism. The modern reader, being aware of historical linguistics, may be struck by what appear to be inconsistencies between the theory of metaplasm as expressed by the ancient grammarian and the examples provided in order to illustrate the different kinds of metaplasm. As a matter of fact, most words that are listed as metaplasms in the grammatical tradition are archaisms, which in many cases represent the forms that are more ancient and normal from an etymological point of view: I have tried to investigate the approach that the ancient grammarian had to such an issue. Some space is dedicated to illustrating cases in which Consentius wrongly misinterprets linguistic phenomena and the poetic text, and some to cases in which a textual reappraisal could explain some apparent difficulties in a better way.

Several Ecumenical Councils were held within the Christian Church in Late Antiquity to discuss Christological controversies and issues of Church politics. The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD) are preserved and provide a huge amount of information about the history, society and language of this age. These proceedings include letters sent before and after the Council, documents utilised during the sessions, and the allegedly verbatim transcripts of the debates.
Ecumenical Councils were assemblies of bishops from virtually the whole Christian world. In fact, as they were held in the Eastern Empire, the vast majority of attendees were eastern bishops, while only three western clergymen attended the Council of Chalcedon, all of them representatives of the Roman see: Paschasinus bishop of Lilybaeum, Lucentius bishop of Asculum and the Roman presbyter Boniface. The language of the Council was overwhelmingly Greek: the statements of Latin-speaking representatives and the few other linguistic minorities (Syriac and doubtfully Persian) were translated by interpreters. In this multilingual context, it seems that only very few individuals were functionally bilingual.
The minutes of the Council were written in Greek while also including the original Latin statements of the Roman delegates. When these reached Rome, Pope Leo lamented that it was hard for him to have a firm grasp of the proceedings of the Council, for his Greek was not good enough. Only in the mid-sixth century were the Acts of Chalcedon fully translated into Latin, and as in the Greek version the traces of Latin were excised, the once bilingual minutes of a multilingual gathering eventually became entirely monolingual, reflecting the growingly irreversible linguistic divergence of the two Empires.
In this paper I shall investigate the multilingualism of the Council of Chalcedon especially with respect to the role of the Latin-speaking Roman delegation.

The theological controversies that arose within the Christian Church of Late Antiquity resulted in the convocation of several Ecumenical Councils, where bishops gathered from the whole Christian world to discuss matters of faith and Church politics. The Acts of these Councils include letters, documents relevant to the debates, and most interestingly the allegedly verbatim transcripts of the discussions held there. Bishops from both the Latin and Greek speaking world attended the Councils: the Western representatives normally spoke in Latin, the Eastern ones in Greek, with the mediation of interpreters. A crucial Council was held at Chalcedon in 451, where most participants spoke Greek and the Latin speakers were assisted by interpreters. The original proceedings of this assembly are lost, but we possess a later Greek version, where the Latin utterances have been suppressed, and a Latin version, which is a translation of the original Greek version and occasionally preserves original Latin utterances. Inasmuch as most of the Acts profess to be verbatim transcriptions of actual debates, this extremely long text represents the richest evidence for the spoken Greek and Latin of more or less educated men in antiquity, although the processes of editing and translation must have obscured to some extent the features of spoken language.
My research question, in focusing on the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, is manifold: first, I shall attempt to pinpoint traces of spoken Latin as they emerge from the few original Latin utterances preserved and the sometimes over-literal Greek translations and Latin re-translations; second, I shall investigate the very phenomena of translation and re-translation, comparing the Greek and the Latin version where both are available; related to this, I shall try to work out if and to what extent Greek and Latin bureaucratic prose have influenced each other in this text.
The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, just like those of the other Ecumenical Councils, have been so far ignored by linguists. A few remarks on the language and the translations are to be found in an article of the editor of the Acts, Eduard Schwartz (1933), and in the introduction to the recent English translation by Price and Gaddis (2005).
In addressing issues of spoken language, I follow the syntax- and discourse-based approach to spontaneous spoken language of Miller and Weinert (1998). As for linguistic aspects of translation, I mainly rely on the contrastive linguistic and stylistic approach of Vinay and Darbelnet (1995).

References:
Miller, J. and Weinert, R. (1998), Spontaneous Spoken Language. Syntax and Discourse (Oxford).
Price, R. and Gaddis, M. (2005), The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon (Liverpool).
Schwartz, E. (1933), ‘Zweisprachigkeit in den Konzilsakten’, Philologus 88: 245-53.
Vinay, J.-P. and Darbelnet, J. (1995), Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation, trans. by J.C. Sager and M.-J. Hamel (Amsterdam and Philadelphia).

The theological controversies that arose within the Christian Church of Late Antiquity resulted in the convocation of several Ecumenical Councils, where bishops gathered from the whole Christian world to discuss matters of faith and Church politics. The Acts of the first two Councils, Nicaea and Constantinople I, are now lost, but we have the proceedings of Councils from the fifth century onwards. Among these, I am going to focus on the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon (451). These include letters, documents relevant to the debates, and most interestingly, the allegedly verbatim transcripts of the discussions. The need for accuracy in these transcripts made the role of notaries absolutely crucial.
Bishops from both the Latin and Greek speaking world attended the Council: the Eastern representatives spoke in Greek, the Western ones in Latin, with their speeches being translated by interpreters. The Acts of Chalcedon are preserved in both Greek and Latin versions. The original Greek proceedings of the Council contained the original Latin speeches, which were suppressed in later Greek versions, the ones that we have. As the Latin versions, prepared in sixth-century Constantinople, are translations from the later Greek versions, the speeches that were originally in Latin are normally re-translations, but sometimes the translators had also access to earlier and more complete versions that also preserved the original Latin speeches.
In this framework, inasmuch as large sections of the Acts profess to be verbatim transcriptions of actual debates, these extremely long texts represent the richest evidence for the spoken Greek and Latin of more or less educated men in antiquity. To be sure, processes of note-taking, editing and translation must have obscured some features of spoken language. In this paper I shall first illustrate the scribes’ work for the preparation of the Acts. Secondly, I shall attempt to figure out to what extent both spoken Greek and spoken Latin have survived the scribes’ intervention. Finally, I shall try to work out the linguistic output of scribes on the Acts as we have them now, especially as far as the translation work is concerned, where linguistic elements have been transferred from one language to another and the Greek and Latin bureaucratic prose have influenced each other.

The Christological controversies that arose within the Christian Church of Late Antiquity resulted in the convocation of several Ecumenical Councils, in which bishops gathered from the whole Christian world to discuss matters of faith and Church politics. The Acts of Councils from the fifth century onwards are preserved and provide us with invaluable information about the history, society and language of this age. In this paper I am going to focus on the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon (451), a milestone in the history of the Church. These proceedings include letters, documents relevant to the debates, and most interestingly, the allegedly verbatim transcripts of the discussions.
Bishops from both the Eastern and Western Roman Empire attended the Council, but the two groups were for the most part mutually unintelligible: the Eastern representatives spoke in Greek, the few Western ones in Latin, with their speeches being translated by interpreters, and only a few attendees had a command of both languages. The official proceedings of the Council were written in Greek: this was a problem for clergymen in the West, for not even Pope Leo I could read Greek with ease. This made it necessary for the Acts to be translated into Latin, which was done a century later at Constantinople. Both the Greek and Latin versions of the Acts are extant.
Inasmuch as parts of the Acts profess to be verbatim transcriptions of the actual debates that took place at Chalcedon, these extremely long texts represent the richest evidence for the spoken Greek and Latin of more or less educated men in antiquity. It is clear that the processes of editing and translation must have obscured to some extent the features of spoken language. The Acts have never been studied from a linguistic perspective: in this paper I shall investigate the aspects of translation and re-translation, comparing the Greek and the Latin version of the Acts; related to this, I shall try to work out if and to what extent Greek and Latin bureaucratic prose influenced one another in these texts. In this way I intend to shed light on the phenomena connected to the growingly irreversible linguistic divergence between the Eastern and Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, in particular as far as the Eastern and Western religious authority is concerned.

Consentius’ De barbarismis et metaplasmis is the most detailed treatise on the "vitia et virtutes orationis" in the Latin grammatical tradition. This original text was probably produced in fifth-century Gaul by a non-professional grammarian as a section of a larger grammatical work. In the Middle Ages, a time when clergymen (especially those from the British Isles) had to learn Latin as a foreign language, this text enjoyed considerable success, for it was a practical guide to mistakes to be avoided in Latin speech. As happens with several grammatical works, the first stages of the medieval transmission of this text must have been due to Insular scribes, Irish in particular. The text then returned to mainland Europe in the eighth and ninth centuries, and was copied in several centres of the Carolingian Empire (probably Fulda and Regensburg), where Irish and German scholars could read it and cite it as an authority in their works. A southern offshoot of this text is to be seen in eight/ninth-century Monte Cassino and in the area where the Beneventan script was common. Still in the eleventh century, the De barbarismis et metaplasmis was available in Monte Cassino and Central Italy: I have recently discovered a manuscript containing both this work and some of its indirect sources. This text then sank into oblivion until some nineteenth German scholar brought it to light again.
This paper is the reconstruction of the journey of a technical treatise over a thousand five hundred years through manuscripts and works of indirect tradition, and in a way it is also the reconstruction of the intellectual history connected to the diffusion of certain grammatical texts and ideas over a continent.

È opinione ormai consolidata che il grammatico Consenzio sia vissuto tra il quarto e il quinto secolo nella Gallia Narbonese. Col suo trattato De barbarismis et metaplasmis, il più ampio mai scritto da un grammatico sull'argomento dei vitia et virtutes orationis, Consenzio ci fornisce preziose informazioni su innumerevoli elementi di latino substandard. Inoltre, fatto singolare per un grammatico, egli si mostra particolarmente interessato alla diversificazione del latino su base geografica (cf. p. 12.22f. Niedermann vitia non solum specialia hominum, sed generalia quarundam nationum): è cosí che egli ci rende conto di deviazioni del latino parlato da genti periferiche come Galli, Africani e Greci rispetto alla Romana lingua, senza risparmiarsi incursioni nelle idiosincrasie linguistiche della plebs Romana e, sostengono alcuni, degli Itali.
In questo intervento mi propongo, dopo aver brevemente esaminato la questione della provenienza dell'autore, di analizzare l'aspetto linguistico della dialettica centro-periferia per come emerge nella sua opera, allargando il campo, ove opportuno, al contributo di autori coevi. A questo scopo, discuterò i passaggi chiave del testo, avvalendomi anche dei progressi testuali dati dalla recente scoperta di un nuovo testimone manoscritto del De barbarismis et metaplasmis.

This thesis consists of a critical edition, English translation, and commentary of Consentius’ De barbarismis et metaplasmis. Consentius probably lived in Gaul in the fifth century, and this work was presumably part of a larger grammatical treatise; as it stands, it is the most extensive discussion of language deviations (errors in ordinary language and poetic licences) in the Latin grammatical tradition.
The critical edition has taken advantage from the availability of a manuscript and several sources of indirect tradition that were not used by previous editors. In the introduction, I provide a discussion of the tradition with a stemma codicum. The new text is quite close to that of previous editions, but arguably has several improvements. I also provide the first English translation of this work.
In the commentary, I look at the text from the points of view of historical linguistics and the history of linguistics.
The section on metaplasms is tightly embedded in the Latin grammatical tradition. This allows us to look into the grammatical approach to the poetic language. In particular, the role of archaisms is crucial in the grammarians’ appreciation of poetry, and I analyse their views on this while also explaining the history and use of the forms Consentius and other grammarians discuss. An appendix to the discussion of metaplasms is the final section on the scansion of verses, which displays some original, if sometimes bizarre, views.
The section on barbarisms is most interesting for the language historian: as Consentius discusses errors that arise in spoken language, he provides evidence for substandard Latin that is unparalleled in ancient grammatical texts. I assess such evidence by looking at other grammatical treatises, substandard texts (literary or not), and the Romance languages. Several forms mentioned by Consentius foreshadow Romance developments. The text also provides us with information about the regional diversification of Latin.

The theological controversies that arose within the Christian Church of Late Antiquity resulted in the convocation of several Ecumenical Councils, where bishops gathered from the whole Christian world to discuss matters of faith and Church politics. The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon (451) include letters, documents relevant to the debates, and most interestingly, the allegedly verbatim transcripts of the discussions: these provide unparalleled evidence for the history and language of the time. The role of notaries and scribes in the production of the Acts is crucial. In this paper I consider the work of the scribes and its output on the historical and linguistic reliability of the Acts. These are by and large reliable as far as the events of the Council are concerned, although there is evidence of omissions and alterations. The Acts prove also precious in assessing features of spoken Greek: by looking at syntactic complexity and lexicon of spoken statements as opposed to originally written passages, one finds the same characteristics that modern research attributes to spontaneous spoken language.

Introduction The fifth century was very rich in theological discussion. The controversies on the nature of Christ, and some not so lofty issues of Church government, prompted the convocation of several Church Councils, in which bishops gathered from several parts of the Christianised world to settle such issues. The Council of Chalcedon was summoned in 451 by the Emperor Marcian, who had come to the throne of the Eastern Empire the year before. In this paper I shall investigate the linguistic situation at the Council of Chalcedon and look at the way the linguistic differences of the attendees reflected and/or influenced the dynamics of power at the Council and in its aftermath, especially as far as the relations between West and East are concerned. Our main source consists of the Acts of the Council, which include the allegedly verbatim records of the proceedings alongside documents produced before and after the Council. 1