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

instability between deponent and active forms, and analytic passive forms are known in
Cicero. It is not unusual to see features in archaic Latin that disappear, only to subsequently
re-appear in Romance; perhaps the social factors of the post-Roman world were merely the
final death blow. Alternatively, the nature of the Latin sources may mean that analysis was
actually far more popularly used, but it simply is not reflected in the literature.
In answer to why synthetic passive was lost, then, no historical linguistic theory is
entirely safe from argument. Neither can it be said that any argument is a priori an answer.
However, it appears that there were two important processes at work. The first is a process
apparently common in many Indo-European languages to increase grammatical transparency
over time, and in this way Latin cannot be treated as an isolated example. The second
process involves the complex social factors at play in the post-Roman west. It would be out
of touch with modern linguistic theory to suggest that the loss of synthetic forms occurred
„just because‟, which besides being improbable is also a rather unsatisfactory answer. If there
are no apparent linguistic reasons behind the change, then it makes sense to look towards
social reasons, and those studies by scholars such as Kuster on other languages such as
Arabic and Old Norse have demonstrated how social factors can impact on an increase in
grammatical transparency.
266