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

possibilities: first, that the author is sufficiently competent in a learnt, classical, Latin, that he
is able to use the forms correctly; second, that the author‟s speech patterns and classical Latin
are in agreement; third, that the author‟s speech patterns and classical Latin are so far
removed from each other that the use of learned forms such as deponents can no longer
interfere (1961a: 209-210). The second option was rejected by Politzer, who preferred the
third. Wright has also argued that „archaic‟ morphology was accessible only to those
educated in the written word, and that “no one, however educated, actively used the old
morphology in their speech” (1982: 42). Presumably, then, the argument would have to be
made that anyone reading such forms would actively gloss the deponent or passive into a
suitable vernacular alternative.
The theory of Politzer is problematic on two main levels. In the first instance, even if
it were correct that synthetic passives and deponents were no longer in use in the seventh
century, this does not answer the question of when they disappeared, and so the problem still
remains, albeit pushed further back in time. In the second instance, if deponent and synthetic
passive forms were dropping out of use in the spoken language of the post-Roman period,
then it would be expected that their usage begin at least to fluctuate in the texts, sensibly
becoming less frequent, especially in those texts that are more representative of the spoken
language. However, it will be shown that not only do deponent neologisms continue to be
coined in later Latin, but they remain omnipresent in texts of all registers, including those
Christian texts that were specifically concerned with communicating in a lower-register of
language. It is interesting, for example, to note that in a study of a legal document written by
a certain John, bishop of Pisa in the eighth century, Everett (2003: 144) highlights its Latinity
to be imperfect compared to those of the biblical quotations the author had clearly copied.
He notes, however, that he nevertheless “shows an acquaintance with some classicising
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