Reviewed by David Elton Gay, Bloomington, IN
A companion to the Latin language is a comprehensive handbook on the various historical stages of the Latin language and their grammatical forms, registers, and regional and literary forms.
After a brief general introduction by the editor, the book is divided into five thematic parts. The first of these, ‘Sources’, looks at various sources for the Latin language. The idea of sources is read very broadly, and thus the section includes essays on the Latin alphabet and orthography by Rex Wallace, inscriptions and other non-literary documents by James Clackson, manuscripts by Bruce Gibson, and the Romance languages as a source for spoken Latin by Roger Wright.
The second section, ‘The language’, turns to the structure of Latin, with essays on Latin phonology by Matthew McCullagh; prosody and metrics by Benjamin W. Fortson, IV; inflectional morphology by James Clackson; syntax by Geoffrey Horrocks; vocabulary by Michèle Fruyt; word formation, also by Fruyt; and Latin particles by Caroline Kroon. The third section, ‘Latin through time’, includes essays on Latin within its Indo-European context by Fortson; archaic and Old Latin by John Penney; Classical Latin by Clackson; Late Latin by J. N. Adams; Medieval Latin by Greti Dinkova-Bruun; and, finally, Neo-Latin by David Butterfield.
The fourth section addresses literary registers, with essays describing the registers of Latin in comedies, by Wolfgang de Melo; epic and lyric poetry, by Rolando Ferri; satire, by Anna Chahoud; oratory and rhetoric, by J. G. F. Powell; historiography, by Christina Shuttleworth Kraus; epistolary Latin, by Hilla Halla-aho; scientific and technical Latin, by Thorsten Fögen; legal Latin, also by Powell; and Christian Latin, by Philip Burton. The book’s final section is ‘Latin in social and political contexts’, and includes essays on the social dialects of Latin, by Clackson; bilingualism in the Latin-speaking world, by Alex Mullen; the language policies of the Roman Republic and Empire, by Bruno Rochette; and the regional variants of Latin in the Roman world, by Giovanbattista Galdi.
The linguistics in the essays tends to be fairly traditional, which will widen the readership of the book, but the level of linguistic and philological sophistication varies considerably. While most of the essays will be accessible to anyone with a basic knowledge of Latin or historical linguistics, others, like those by Geoffrey Horrocks and Caroline Kroon, require considerably more linguistic knowledge than is often found among Latinists.
This book is not, it should be noted, a reference grammar; rather, it is a description of Latin in its myriad historical and regional registers and forms, which covers far more than the Classical Latin covered by most reference grammars. Such broad coverage makes the Companion to the Latin language a very useful book both for students of Latin and for scholars working on Latin as a linguistic or philological topic.