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

formed a subsection of the passive vocabulary of those who could read and write, comparable
to English forms as –eth do now” (1982: 42). Their employment is not discussed at any
length by Wright, although subsequent scholars have sought to show how their use could
have functioned in Wright‟s model (Green 1991).
6.5 Dating the Disappearance of Synthetic Passive and Deponent Forms
The disappearance of synthetic passive and deponent forms has, to date, been centred
on two principal and opposing schools of thought, which to a large extent also reflect the
positions of Banniard and Wright in the Latin / Romance debate. The first position, surmised
by Muller (1924) and Flobert (1975), argues for a relatively late survival rate of deponent and
passive forms in the spoken idiom, possibly up to the early-ninth century. This view is based
quite simply on the survival of the forms in texts up until this period throughout the Latin-
speaking west. It is therefore roughly in agreement with the Banniard view of the spoken
language. The second, headed originally by Politzer (1961a), posits that such forms
disappeared from the spoken language much earlier. This standpoint drew on the same
documentary evidence as the former, but suggested that the continued use of correct classical
orthography, and therefore presumed phonology, indicates that these are what Wright
phraseology would call „learned‟ forms, since they have not undergone the expected
phonological changes as other lexical items. Therefore, for Politzer this implies that they are
artificial features and not reflective of the contemporary spoken speech.
The fact that deponent and passive forms continue to appear in later Latin texts up
until the eighth and ninth centuries is suggested by Politzer to signify one of three
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