Accents, Pronunciation, and Normativity of Oral Speech in Late Antiquity
By Yuliya Minets, University of Alabama
The present-day linguistic sensitivities render one’s native tongue, accent, or speech peculiarities as important aspects of their identity. A native language of a displaced person, an accent of an emigrant, or a special manner of speech typical of a certain local or social background are often among the most eloquent and truthful testifiers of who the person is, where they came from, and what they have been through.
New Perspectives on Messapic Language and Culture
By Michele Bianconi, University of Oxford
In this talk, we are going to outline a new collaborative research project on Messapic, a language and culture present in Apulia in the second half of the first millennium BCE (cf. De Simone 2018, Marchesini 2020, 2021 Matzinger 2019). This is a project carried out by a newly-constituted working group named SPEM (Seminario PErmanente sul Messapico) and composed of specialists from different disciplines: linguistics, archaeology, epigraphy, and ancient history.
Explaining Ancient Greek Enclitics: A New Analysis
By Stephen Trazskoma, California State University, Los Angeles
In the ancient grammarians we find descriptions of the outcomes of adding an enclitic to an orthotonic host. Some of these are distilled in today’s grammars and textbooks, however, an analysis of how enclitic accentuation functions—a linguistic explanation of the causes of accentual expressions—has been frustratingly elusive to formulate. This paper proposes a solution based on my own analysis of Greek recessive accentuation (Trzaskoma 2023) and that of Steriade (1988).
Corpus-Wide Computational Analysis of Anagrammatic Wordplay in Latin Literature
By Joseph Dexter, Harvard University, Pramit Chaudhuri, and Elizabeth D. Adams, University of Texas at Austin
This paper describes a large-scale computational study of anagrams in classical Latin literature. Notwithstanding a small number of high-profile examples, such as the close collocation of Latium, maluit, quoniam latuisset, and paulatim at Aen. 8.322-326 (Ahl, O’Hara, Nelis, Chaudhuri and Dexter 2022), there remains a general skepticism about both the frequency and literary significance of anagrams in Latin poetry (Cameron, O’Hara).