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

Perigrinatio, used synthetic passive forms to „raise the tone‟ of her writing: “Though Egeria
is not exactly stuffy, she is certainly aware of her dignity, and her use of the passive [...]
seems designed to raise the level of discourse of what is, after all, a travelogue, to that of a
more formal, dignified, register”.
If it was the case that deponent and synthetic passive forms were no longer in use in the
everyday spoken language, it would be a sensible argument to suggest that the higher a
register of language, the more frequently they would appear. However, the results from the
above sample show that this is not necessarily true. Isidore‟s De Natura Rerum, for example,
is written in an extremely stylised language. However, it uses only a slightly larger number
of synthetic passives than the others, but nothing to suggest any real dichotomy of usage.
It is interesting to compare these results to those found in the analysis of Flobert (1975),
to date the only large-scale and systematic study of deponent verbs undertaken for Latin
literature. Flobert incorporated a far greater diachronic range, studying texts written over the
course of a millennium, ranging from Plautus up to the eighth century. His study resulted in
the following average frequency rates of usage in Latin texts: 74 % active; 19 % passive; 7%
deponent (quoted in Laughton 1979: 91). This compares more or less favourably with the
monastic rules, which give the following frequency rates:
Rule of Isidore: 76% active; 15% passive; 5% deponent;
Rule of Fructuosus: 75% active; 16% passive; 9% deponent;
Common Rule: 87% active; 8% passive; 5% deponent.
242