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

languages are grammatically as capable as others of satisfying the same role. As such, a
language normally gives way to another, either through death or suicide, to another because
of social pressures, such as lack of social prestige, rather than inherent linguistic weaknesses
(Crystal 2002: 68-91). A final problem, and perhaps the biggest as far as this topic is
concerned, is that there is no reason why deponent verbs and the synthetic passive should be
seen as a hindrance to a language. Many languages, including those with which Latin was in
contact, made use of synthetic grammatical systems, as will be discussed below.
There is perhaps a tendency amongst speakers of analytic languages to suggest that
analysis is equatable with transparency, and hence is easier than synthesis. It is not
surprising, for example, that the American Foreign Service Institute (FSI) labels individual
languages on a scale of one to three, depending on their „difficulty‟ for learners. However,
this is not necessarily the case and perceptions of language difficulty are purely subjective.
Analytic forms are not without their problems for learners and speakers will naturally prefer
those systems to which they were natively exposed whilst learning a language as a child.
Learners of Italian, for example, often struggle with the choice between the analytic perfect
constructions with essere or stare, yet have less difficulty with the synthetic present tense,
whilst a native Russian speaker will have far less difficulty in comprehending the Latin case
system because it is reflected in their language. As such, care must be taken not to impose
individual linguistic sensibilities onto other speakers, ancient or otherwise, and although
ecological linguistics can provide a useful analogy, it must be used with caution.
6.10 A New Proposal for the Loss of the Passive
It will now be proposed that the loss of the synthetic passive and deponent verb forms
was a two-stage process: first, the synthetic passive was lost as a result of a wider historical
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