The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

also includes the use of substantives ending in –tor and –trix, and verbs compounded with –
ad (Karakasis 2005: 35-36). This is also an identical problem for the term post-Classical
Latin, and it therefore follows that some of these defining features are rather fluid and to label
them as Late or post-Classical Latin is misleading. The other issue with late or post-Classical
Latin is that many authors writing in these periods actually write in a variety of classicizing
styles, and in many there is a clear tendency to emulate, often successfully, classical
standards. Therefore, to use the term post-classical or Late Latin as a chronology is often
oxymoronic because the Latin is distinctly classical.
The term Late Latin, moreover, ties into a notion of linguistic periodization that is
frankly uncomfortable, implying an „end-stage‟ of the language prior to its disappearance.
Such a notion, of course, is completely unfounded, because the spoken form of Latin never
did die; its speakers simply recognised its diversity from literary Latin and it was fated a
different path to its literary cousin. Indeed, some Romance-speakers continue to speak
„Latin‟. 440 It also, perhaps, promotes a negative image of a language „on the way out‟, and
even if not complicit with, does not challenge, previously held beliefs of decline. Languages
can of course be born (for example, Esperanto), or disappear (for example, Coptic as an
everyday spoken language in the face of Arabic), but Latin is not an example of this. It is
telling that for all the books discussing when Latin stopped being Latin, there are no books
discussing when Latin was born. The reason for this is not only does the evidence not permit
an answer, but also there is no answer: the first written evidence for Latin, the inscribed
440 A reference to Ladino, the Romance language of the Shephardic Jews expelled from Iberia; see
Alvar (2000: 19-26).
176