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

Palladius: “mela rotunda, quae orbiculata dicuntur, sine cura toto anno seruare se
possunt‖, 567 and Ambrosiaster: “natura enim de ipsa se nouit”. 568 Therefore, the problem of
the why and when deponent and synthetic passive forms might have disappeared is not as
clear-cut as it may at first appear, and it is not sufficient to merely posit a terminus ante quem
for their disappearance in the first Romance writings.
Whilst there has been a ubiquitous acknowledgement of these paradigms, it has been
coupled with a paucity of investigation. This is especially true concerning the question of
why or when such forms disappeared from the spoken language, a problem that is particularly
prominent in works on historical Romance linguistics, which rarely include discussion of the
topic; the reason for this is presumably that since they are not a feature of Romance, there is
supposedly little need for their investigation. This is evident following a quick review of the
majority of textbooks on the subject. 569 Studies on Latin linguistics, meanwhile, tend to list
the linguistic features in later texts that make them different from Classical Latin. Such an
approach has typically been the mainstay of the two different camps, satisfying both
Romance linguists who seek out nascent features of the vernacular languages, and Latinists in
their hunt for features that differentiate the language from its classical predecessor. These
two separate approaches have fostered the idea of a linguistic no-man‟s land for the period,
marking it out as the responsibility of neither. As Wright (1993: 77) stated, “the
567 De Re Rustica 3.25.18.
568 Quaestiones Ueteris et Noui Testamenti 125.9.
569 For example, Poulter (1990: 52) states simply that “inflection for the passive voice disappeared”;
Rickard (1974: 13) notes that “[in Vulgar Latin] the synthetic passives are badly known and
comparatively little used”; Lathrop (1980) ignores the subject altogether, and Mattoso Camara (1972)
sidelines the subject with little discussion. These are just four examples, but represent an overall
general pattern.
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