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

death blow for them because there no longer existed this analogy. As such, deponent verbs
disappeared from use, either coming to be completely forgotten and replaced by a normal
active synonym, or else analogically levelled with their normal active counterparts.
There are two main questions here: why and how did the synthetic passive and
deponent verbs disappear? Both of these questions are very difficult to answer because of the
superficial nature of the textual evidence, which can only be used as limited evidence. The
most important notion is that Latin is not alone in its loss of synthesis, but part of a wider
Indo-European trend in shifts from synthesis to analysis. Why this should occur is still a
matter of debate, and no doubt will be for many years to come. It is not the aim of this thesis
to explore the complex historical linguistic factors behind this change, although it seems
possible that there exists a relationship between a preference for analysis and large-scale
social factors. It is clear that the loss of the synthetic passive is equatable with this preference
towards analysis. It is suggested that the loss of deponent verbs was linked with the loss of
the Latin passive form. The question of when they disappeared is equally as problematic, but
an investigation of the monastic rules shows at least that both still appear to have been in use
in the Iberian Peninsula at the start of the seventh century, and so arguably their
disappearance occurred after this date.
6.12 The Monastic Rules and the Wright Thesis
In many ways, the Wright thesis sits well with the Latinity of the monastic rules and
their cultural context. It was shown in Chapter Three that Visigothic monastic society seems
to have been as aural as it was literate, and the idea of one person glossing forms in an oral
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