Hail fellow, well MET: a follow up to ‘Gambling in Greek’

Another thing I saw in the Museum at Naples was the originals of the tavern frescoes from Pompeii that I wrote about James writing about some months ago (here). It’s a bit hard to find good pictures of these, so I’ve put some photos up here (all left-to-right in the original).

In the fourth one (close up directly below), which once showed two fighting drinkers being ejected by the barman, the painted figures have been mostly lost, but their words largely remain. The latest reading for the words on the left is NOXSI. / A ME / TRIA. / ECO / FVI ‘You cheat. 3 was thrown by me. I was (the winner)’. At this time the letter E was often written as two vertical strokes, like this: II. You can see this at the beginning of the fouth line, where ego is written IICO. But in the photo, especially if you zoom in, the second line looks pretty clearly like AMIII: there’s one too many strokes. This is backed up by the early drawings of the inscription, which you can see in Mary Beard’s blog here and here and which pretty clearly also show three strokes.

So what to make of these? The first two letters are pretty clearly AM, but there is no plausible Latin word AMIE or AMEI. James has an excellent suggestion, which is that the last stroke is really the vertical of a T, with the crossbar lost in the damage to the plaster. That would give AMIIT = A MET, still meaning ‘by me’, with the old-fashioned ablative form of the first person pronoun normally spelt med (uncertainty whether to spell final -d in words like sed ‘but’ with -D or -T is common in writing from at least the first century AD). Probably no-one had said med for a good two hundred years by this point, but this use of the old-fashioned form would fit in with the other old-fashioned features I noted in my previous post, like C for G. Seems pretty convincing to me!

The epigraphic gallery of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples is now open!

This is wildly exciting: when I went there in 2007, it was opened only on special application, and when I went in 2013 there was no electric light, and I had to examine the inscription I was interested in by the light of my own torch and a lamp obligingly held by a member of the Museum’s staff: there was certainly no possibility of looking at any of the other objects, as I had hoped. I’m extremely grateful to the Museum for kindly allowing and facilitating both my previous visits, but it must be said that it is much better now that one can just swan in and revel in all the epigraphy. I’ll post a few things from my latest visit in the coming weeks.

This time, I’ll focus on one inscription in particular, which is the rather nice column supporting a water basin (basin supplied separately) with an Oscan inscription which is published in Imagines Italicae as ma.heíis.de.me.v.ínim. me x.ekak.flit<e>am.emmens (Cumae 3/Cm 5) and translated as ‘Ma(is) Heiis, son of De(kis), meddix of the vereiia, and the X meddix (or the 10 medices) bought this flitea‘. A meddix is a type of magistrate. Apart from the fact that it’s not clear exactly what a me x is, especially as X is not a regular letter of the Oscan alphabet, the main problem is flit<e>am, which clearly has to be the name of the object on which the inscription is written. So far, the only semi-plausible suggestion is that it is somehow a borrowing of the Greek word πλινθεῖον /plintheion/ ‘brickwork’. There are a number of problems with this idea, though: a) it’s unlikely that Greek pl- would be borrowed into Oscan as fl-, which otherwise has no problem with the sequence pl-; b) we would probably expect the Greek sequence -εῖ- to be borrowed as Oscan –ei– or –í-; c) the Greek word is neuter, the Oscan one is feminine.

 

And, actually, there is a further problem, which is that, according to Imagines, the fifth letter of flit<e>am is actually v on the stone (hence the pointy brackets). Now, as emendations go, e for v is really pretty reasonable: in the Oscan alphabet e  is written E, while v is just an E without the middle horizontal stroke. You can see the (other) instance of v, fourth letter from the right, in this inscription below (note that Oscan is written right to left). But, given the many problems we already have in connecting flit<e>am to πλινθεῖον, perhaps we should just give up the connection, and accept that we have a word flitvam whose origin is obscure, and at any rate is nothing like πλινθεῖον.

So, is it really a flitvam? Well, I’m not sure. Rix, in his edition Sabellische Texte, prints an e with a dot under it. Unfortunately, in his edition, this dot means two different things: a damaged letter, or a letter conjectured from a broken or mistakenly written letter on the object. So it is not clear whether he sees a damaged e, or, like Imagines, a mistaken v which he replaces with e. There is definitely some kind of horizontal-ish stroke in the middle of the letter. It’s more or less visible in the photos below; in person, with a raking light, it looks deeper, firmer and more intentional. On the other hand, the object has clearly been damaged, and the stroke is less well-made than the other es in the inscription (you can see one as the second letter from the right in the picture above): it is not precisely parallel to the upper and lower horizontals, beginning rather low on the vertical and straggling diagonally upwards. At the moment I’m leaning towards seeing it as an e, but it just shows how much difficulty can be involved in reading even a clearly-written inscription.

 

fliteam or flitvam?

 

 

 

 

 

A calque ‘under the sea’ ?

… with apologies to fans of The Little Mermaid.

The adjective ὑπό-σαλος ‘under the sea’ is suspicious as a Greek word. It functions, so it seems, as an equivalent to a prepositional phrase such as ὑπὸ τοῦ ἁλός (‘under the sea’, but more likely to mean ‘because of the sea or salt’). The chief cause of suspicion is that Greek ἇλς ἁλός, ‘salt’, did not begin with a [s], at least not in historical Greek. We should find ὕφαλος (see also Buck-Petersen, p. 357 i), as, indeed, we do in Sophocles’ Antigone and subsequently. Indeed, the adjective occurs as a name in the context of ὑπόσάλος.

Before the Greek language was even written down, it lost the sound [s] at the beginning of words and between vowels. By contrast, Latin kept [s] at the beginning of words, so we get sets like ἇλς, Latin sal, and English ‘salt’, ἑπτά, septem, and seven, etc. ([s] between vowels in Latin is a story for another day…). The loss of [s] in both enviroments means that there was no Greek stem sal– on which to build our compound adjective and, if there had been such a stem at the time of that compound’s creation, the [s] between vowels would have been lost subsequently.

Where we find Greek words that begin with a sigma, that sigma cannot be original (one problem is that σῦς, ‘pig’, appears in Homer alongside the expected ὗς; cf. Latin sus, English swine). Explanations include the simplification of a cluster of consonants or that the word in question came into Greek after the loss of initial [s] had ceased to operate. As examples of the latter, consider σιμικίνθιον (semicinctium an apron), σουδάριον (sudarium a towel), and συμψέλια (subsellia seats of a certain kind), words that were borrowed from Latin by Greek speakers alongside what we may call the lexical residue of the Roman Imperial jackboot, or sandal: e.g., κεντυρίων (centurion), λεγιονάριος (legionarius), and πραιτώριον (praetorium).

Here’s the context for that sole instance of ὑπόσαλος as ‘under the sea’ in the Periplus Maris Magni or ‘Voyage around the Great Sea’ (aka Stadiasimos or ‘Measuring by Stades’), as quoted by one third-century Hippolytus in his Chronicle:

(72) Ἀπὸ τοῦ Εὐσχοίνου ἐπὶ τοὺς Ὑφάλους στάδιοι οʹ· νησίον ἐστὶν ὑπόσαλον· ἔχει δὲ καὶ αἰγιαλὸν βαθύν.
‘From Euschoinos to Hypaloi, seventy stades; the islet is under water; and it has a deep (or thick) beach.’

Before we try to explain how the sigma in ὑπόσαλος could be the [s] lost from the Greek equivalent of English ‘salt’ and Latin sal, let us consider whether salt or the sea needs to be involved in the word at all.

The sigma in ὑπόσαλος is so suspicious that the other analysis given in the same LSJ entry is worth considering:

‘II. shaken underneath, undermined, γῆ Plu.2.434c (ὑπὸ σάλου codd.); ὀδόντες ὑ. loose teeth, Dsc.1.105.5′ [also in Dsc.5.102.2, but that’s the lot] .

On that analysis, the sigma is unimpeachable: it was always there in σάλος, σαλεύω, etc., whatever the origin of the word (Beekes, true to character, classifies it as ‘Pre-Greek’), and, hence, could be justified in an adjective like ἐπίσαλος, which is also used by our Stadiasmos:

(55) Ἀπὸ Ναυσίδος εἰς Πτολεμαΐδα στάδιοι σνʹ· πόλις ἐστὶ μεγίστη· ἐπίσαλός ἐστιν ὁ τόπος, καὶ νῆσον ἔχει· Ἶλος καλεῖται· ἀσφαλίζου.
‘From Nausis to Ptolemais two-hundred and sixty stades: the city is very big; the place is rough (subject to storms), and has an island; it is called Ilos: go carefully!’

Could the islet in (72) — named Ὕφαλοι ! — simply mean ‘shaken underneath’ or ‘undermined’, or even ‘slightly shaken or storm-tossed’, since ὑπο- can add the notion ‘slightly, a bit, somewhat,…’ (trust me, I am/was a lexicographer)?

There are only a few other compound adjectives in -σαλος (ἀ-, εὔ-, and κονί-; very different are βήσαλον and φύσαλος: see Buck-Petersen, p. 359 ii) and none support the idea that the -σαλος part could be the salt sea rather than ‘shaken’.

So, it is likely that since ὑπό with χρῡσός means ‘with gold underneath’ (of the ground), ‘underneath/covered by gold, gilded’ (of an iron ring), or ‘containing a mixture or proportion of gold‘ (so LSJ, for some of the children in Plato’s Republic), ὑπό with σάλος could describe the islet as ‘with turbulence below’, ‘covered by rolling swells’, or ‘somewhat storm tossed’. There might be some sense in that in the Stadiasmos, a guidebook for sailors. If so, we can delete the first section of ὑπόσαλος from LSJ and make an improvement on its Supplement and Revised Supplement.

If not, can we explain why a salty word in Greek has a sigma? Does any help come from the long-term contact between speakers of Greek and speakers of Latin, especially in nautical contexts in texts from the time of the Roman Empire?

Could the sigma reflect a Latin (partial) origin for our ‘under the sea’ adjective? If so, how?

One possibility is that we have a ‘hybrid compound’: one part of the word is from one language, another from another. If that seems strange, it is no stranger than a tele-vision or an auto-mobile  or a hetero-, homo-, or metro-sexual, all of which with a Greek start and a Latin finish. Perhaps, a seafarer who used Latin and Greek with some degree of mixture took Latin sal as the root of a new adjective and then qualified it with an element from his knowledge of Greek word-formation. Real ancient parallels would be ὑπο-καμίσ(ι)ον or ὑπο-καμάσιον ‘a shirt (Latin camisa) that is worn underneath (Greek), an undershirt’ and ὑπο-νοτάριος ‘a notary (Latin) who is underneath or subordinate (Greek), a deputy or sub-notary’.

Can we go a step further and see a ‘calque’ here? A ‘calque’ is an element-by-element translation of a term from one language into another. The Paradebeispiele or ‘Parade-Examples’ (or, in English, the ‘oft-cited examples’, if not ‘examples on parade’) are Modern Greek ουρανοξύστης, German Wolkenkratzer and French gratte-ciel, both based on English ‘skyscraper’, but not necessarily with the elements in the same order as in English.

In our case, the Latin term behind ὑπό-σαλος would be sub-salsus, ‘slightly salty’ (Oxford Latin Dictionary, p. 1848, s.v.), which is found in the medical writer Celsus and the encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder, respectively of water and of a plant. The calquer did not think to drop the [s] in his element-by-element translation: ὑπό- for sub-, Latinate σαλ(ο)-, not ἁλ- for sal, and then adjusting the formation to a Greek pattern (without sigma before the ending). It migth be a problem that σάλος is a noun, but salsus is an adjective. Should we expect ὑπ(ο-σ)άλιος as a calque of sub-salsus (cf. ἐνάλιος)? That said, a compound adjective ending in -αλ-ο-ς would be fine. Indeed, as we saw, ὕφ-αλος is attested — as is ἔναλος.

As a further complication, could the direction of calquing be the other way round: from Greek into Latin? Pliny the Elder is a major source of evidence for us of Latin borrowings of Greek words and of Greek words known only (or chiefly) from Latin authors and their texts. Celsus, as a medical writer, is exactly the kind of borrower and calquer of Greek words that we would expect to meet. (I know nothing about how much Greek influence Celsus actually shows…) An element-by-element translation of the Greek adjective would give a Latin adjective — something like sub-sal_sus. Besides, compounding is so restricted in Latin that Greek is normally involved at some level. I do not know how common it is for Latin sub- to add the notion of ‘slightly’, whereas for ὑπό- it is somewhat ubiquitous. The Oxford Latin Dictionary, p. 1835, s.v. sub- prefix., notes, ‘Before verbs and adjectives it indicates a reduced intensity in the action or quality…’. When and why sub- does so and in which authors are questions for another time. Even if the calquing happened into Latin from Greek, the sigma in ὑπόσαλος would remain unexplained.

Further, if, in ὑπόσαλος, we do have a calque from Latin and if ὑπόσαλος, ‘shaken underneath’, was already in use by the same speakers and/or in nautical registers (the writer of the Stadiasmos also used ἐπίσαλος…), we have a loan-shift or a semantic calque. That is, a Greek word gained a meaning through the use of a Latin counterpart or near-counterpart. For example, the Roman Republican historian Sallust used amare as ‘to be in the habit of’ (as well as ‘to love’), because Greek φιλεῖν could mean ‘to be in the habit of’ as well as ‘to love’. One of my suspicions about the entry in LSJ, second to the sigma between vowels in a salty word, was how the same word could have two meanings that were so different: ‘under the sea’ and ‘shaken underneath’. If one meaning is to do with salt and the  other is to do with σαλός ‘shaking’, we have homonyms and should have two entries.

One final angle: with the meaning ‘under the sea’, ὑπόσαλος would be a ‘prepositional governing compound’, one, that is, that originated in a prepositional phrase. Let us suppose that a bilingual seafarer wanted to say ‘under the sea’ and began in Greek (ὑπό), then started to continue in Latin, either with sale (ablative of sal) or with the dative sali with the genitive salis (because Greek did not have an ablative for him to use), but finished with a Greek ending. Such a hypothetical prepositional phrase would be a peculiar kind of code-switch: a speaker’s (or writer’s) switch from one language to another mid-sentence, mid-phrase, or even mid-word. My favourite code-switch is still that in the title of a paper by Poplack: ‘Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish Y TERMINO EN ESPAÑOL’.

The last word: as St Paul was on his way to Italy by sea, the Acts of the Aposles 27:14 (a turbulent text) names a wind as εὐρ-ακύλων, which has a counterpart in Latin script in euro-aquilo (CIL VIII 26652: see below) a east-north wind. The first part is Greek, the second Latin (whatever the script). The Bauer-Danker Lexicon quaintly calls it ‘a hybrid formation of Lat.-Gk. sailor’s language’. Was the Greek element ‘borrowed’ into Latin and then the whole borrowed into Greek or was the Latin element borrowed into Greek and then the whole borrowed back into Latin?

ZETA ROROPES

On Friday, I was very fortunate to be invited to a wonderful conference at the University of Verona (“Beyond Lexicon: Diachronic language contact on the structural and systemic level”), brilliantly organised by Paola Cotticelli and Federico Giusfredi. After a series of excellent papers and before a particularly pleasant evening dinner, I walked to the nearby Museo Archeologico al Teatro Romano, open till 7 pm most nights, to enjoy its spectacular views over the city. There is also a good selection of inscriptions, and this third century mosaic caught my eye.

As you can see from the photo below of the museum label (I learned always to photograph the label from Katherine),  the text is said to read ROROPES ZETA meaning ‘Roropes lives’. This attracted my attention at first because I thought it seemed a nice parallel to the modern habit of pronouncing letter-names of abbreviations rather than spelling out the whole phrase: people now say ‘oh em gee’ for OMG, the abbreviation of ‘Oh my God/gosh!’, and ‘double u tee eff ‘ for WTF, even though the abbreviation is no shorter, indeed in the second case longer than what is being shortened. In the Museum’s reading, ZETA would stand her for Z, the abbreviation for Greek ζήσῃς, which is not uncommon in the formula pie z (also written out in full pie zeses) ‘drink and may you live’ found on a number of Latin drinking cups from the later Roman Empire. There are other examples of Romans using the letter name to stand for a Greek word: a fragment of Varro’s Menippea has labda as a cover term for the obscene verb λαικάζειν (probably following Aristophanes who has the same euphemism).

But a bit of further reflection made me think that there was a better explanation for this text. After all, ‘may you live’ would be a typical sentiment on a goblet, but less usual on a private mosaic. Furthermore, the name Roropes is, as far as I can tell, unparalleled anywhere in Greek and Roman texts, and isn’t built out of any recognizable elements. I would read RODOPES (note that the right hand leg of the second R of the mosaic is entirely drawn in), genitive singular of the well-attested Greek name Rhodope (34 examples from Rome alone according to Solin Die griechischen Personennamen in Rom). ZETA has nothing to do with the Greek letter, but is a later Latin way of writing the Greek loanword diaeta, which means not only ‘way of life’ (hence our modern diet) but also ‘room’. So the text just means ‘Rhodope’s Room’—incidentally, a nice example of a Latin text containing only Greek words and Greek morphology.

I should say that this was the only slip I found in the museum labels, and I hugely enjoyed the wonderful displays and stunning layout of the Museo. Highly recommended as a prelude to dinner for anyone visiting the beautiful town of Verona.

Greek in Italy at the BSR

Wednesday 29 March saw the Greek in Italy team in Rome for a one-day workshop looking at the impact of the Greek language on the languages of ancient Italy. I think I can speak for everyone in the Greek in Italy team, and for our invited speakers, in saying that the conference was a huge success. We were extremely fortunate to be able to make use of the excellent offices of the British School at Rome, and to make use of their fabulous lecture hall, accommodation and dining facilities. Thanks go especially to the Director, Christopher Smith, and the residence manager, Christine Martin for their superb generosity and efficiency.

We were very pleased to have enjoyed excellent papers from our three invited speakers. Marina Benedetti discussed the treatment of Greek terms in Latin grammatical works, and included a fascinating discussion of the Ars of Dositheus, a grammatical work written in Latin with interlineal translation into Greek. The Greek terms include those which seem to be calqued back from Latin, such as συζευκτικός for coniunctivus, and show that grammarians understood there to be an equivalence between the Latin suffix –ivus and Greek -ικός, a relationship that doesn’t seem to hold in other domains, such as medicine.

Albio Cassio spoke about some Greek dialect terms of Magna Graecia which we know mainly from ancient glossaries. These show not only how much we don’t know about the Greek dialects spoken in the area, but also some fascinating glimpses of the interactions between Greek and local languages. One case in point is a word for bread, πανὀς (and related terms), found in Greek comic playwrights, including the intriguing Blaesus, born in Capri in the second or first century BC and whose attributed works include a Saturnus and Mesotribas (meaning something like ‘The man who rubs his genitals’).

As Albio Cassio pointed out, Blaesus has a fascinating name: in Greek βλαισός means ‘distorted’ or ‘splay-footed’, but in Latin blaesus means ‘lisping’ (it is thought to be borrowed from Greek with shift in application from the feet to the tongue). Blaesus is not uncommon as a Roman cognomen (and Blaesius as a nomen), and is also found used as a cognomen in a fourth-century Oscan curse-tablet (in the form Blaisiis). In Greek, however, excepting Romans recording their names in Greek, the playwright Βλαῖσος is the only instance of the name recorded. The example of Blaesus was an appropriate taster for Paolo Poccetti’s paper, a tour de force of linguistics and onomastics, in which he gathered many examples of interaction between Greek and local languages from personal names. As with the name of Blaesus, in many cases it was difficult to be sure about whether a feature was local or a Greek import, and in some cases it is probably impossible to disentangle the two.

The Greek in Italy presentation (which attracted famous bloggers from the other side of Rome) showcased some of our recent work, and the event was a very enjoyable opportunity for the whole team to get back together. All six current and former project members were there, so we nearly filled up an entire table in the BSR dining hall and made serious inroads into the BSR’s stocks of limoncello.

 

‘Greek in Italy’, the Lexicon of Liddell and Scott, and the ‘what’s-its-name, thingumbob’

Please scroll down for the lighter and less technical part of this post…, namely the ‘thingumbob’…

Recently, a colleague and friend asked me why it was that Liddell-Scott-Jones (from hereon ‘LSJ’ and, as available through the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, ‘TLG LSJ’) accented τριακόντακις ‘thirty-times’ proparoxytone, not τριακοντάκις paroxytone like all other adverbs in -κις, ‘-times’. The short answer is that LSJ doesn’t. The misaccentuation suggests that TLG LSJ was tripped up by the abbreviated headwords of the printed edition of LSJ. All that was printed of the headword was -κ̆ις, its accent inferred from τριακοντά-δραχμοι to give τριακοντάκις (rightly). The classic rant on the abbreviation of headwords is John Chadwick’s own in BICS 11 (1994) 1-11, at 2. Whether the accent was placed on TLG LSJ’s headword automatically or manually, I do not know.

It was then that the entry for τρῐᾱκοντάμερος came to my attention:

‘Dor. word, dub. sens. in IG14.256.27 (Phintias Geloorum); cf. Jahresh.4 Beibl.21.’.

This inscription is from Phintias of the people of Gela, which was the settlement that ‘replaced’ Gela, the Rhodo-Cretan colony where Aeschylus had his lethal encounter with a tortoise: something of a hotspot of Greek in Italy).

Entries that contain ‘dub.sens.’ are always intriguing, and this one is especially so in that its general meaning, if not its precise application and referent, are clear from the elements that form this compound: the two stems seen in τριάκοντα ‘thirty’ and ἁ̄μέρᾱ (or, as here, ἀ-) ‘day’ [Attic ἡμέρᾱ]. All this was put right in the 1996 Revised Supplement, which adapted a comment in the 1968 Supplement: (as a new word) ‘τριακοντά̄μεροι, οἱ, prob. a board of officials performing duties for thirty days,…; cf. πεντάμεροι’. The original entry is then signalled for deletion.

Of greater interest (and amusement) and of no less relevance is the entry for τραγέλαφος ‘goat-stag’. Apart from ‘a what’s-its-name, thingumbob‘ (s.v. I 3), there is also the quaint charm of the transition from (s.v. I 1) ‘a fantastic animal, represented on Eastern carpets and the like‘ to (s.v. II) ‘later, a real animal of Arabia, or on the Phasis, prob. a kind of wild goat or antelope, LXX Jb.39.1, D.S.2.51, Plin.HN8.120, etc.‘.

This word is thought by some to have appeared on the Nile Mosaic of Palaestrina (s.v. Wikipedia), whose captions were published as IG XIV 1302 (but see also SEG XLV 1452)  and feature other lexical and animal rarities, including the non-standard form ἄρκος, ‘bear’, known from the Zenon papyri, a Carthaginian curse tablet, and the Greek Bible. The mosaic has been dated either to 120-110 BCE or to the time of the Emperor Hadrian (117-138 CE). A large and high-resolution image of the mosaic is available through Wikimedia Commons.

In the detail below, the ‘lynx’, ΛΥΝΞ (not the standard spelling, λύγξ), is clear, as are the letters ΔΓΕΛΑΡΥ (underline for underdot to mark a letter as difficult to read). However, that label is not closely associated with a depiction of any animal.

Georg Kaibel, the editor of IG XIV 1302, conjectured [ΤΡ]<Α>ΓΕΛΑ<ΦΟ>[Σ], which requires a certain amount of charity from the viewer-reader and their acceptance of an invisible ‘thingumbob’.

The re-reading, <Α>ΓΕΛΑΡΧ[ΟΣ] (see SEG XLV 1452), the ‘leader of the pack’, makes better use of the letters that are visible. But, a pack of what, exactly? Perhaps, the leader (bottom left of the following detail) of the relatively-distant three hunters (bottom right).

An amusing alternative is that this label continues that for the lynx, who, then, is the leader of the pack of monkeys depicted elsewhere.

For more on the mosaic itself as well as its captions, see P.G.P. Meyboom, The Nile Mosaic of Palaestrina: Early Evidence of Egyptian Religion in Italy (Leiden, New York, and Cologne: E.J. Brill, 1995). For the reading and re-reading, see Meyboom, The Nile Mosaic, 25 and 238-239.

Since the mosaic is thought (at some stage) to have depicted an elephant (Meyboom, the Nile Mosaic, 25), we may recall that some time ago, Katherine posted about words for ‘elephant’. I encountered those boves lucas while teaching Lucretius last term (DRN 5.1302) in relation to the remarkable compound anguimanus, ‘such that has a snake for a hand’: itself a lexical rarity (an accusative plural of a fourth-declension adjective to boot!) and once described, as one of my supervisors used to quote, as ‘an atavistic zoonym harking back to a protohabitat, proper to an animal with an prominent appendage of ophidian resemblance’.

Greek in Italy Rome Workshop

We are delighted to announce that we will be hosting a workshop “The impact of Greek on the languages of Ancient Italy” in the British School at Rome, Via Gramsci, Rome, on the afternoon of Wednesday 29 March, 2017. We are very pleased that three of the leading Italian scholars of the Classical and Italic languages have kindly agreed to speak at this workshop. The  programme will be as follows:

3.00 Prof. Marina Benedetti Università per Stranieri di Siena

Latin loan translations from Greek: suffix conversion in the grammatical terminology.

3.45 Prof. Albio Cesare Cassio Università di Roma “La Sapienza”

Doric Identity and Linguistic Melting Pot in Ancient Tarentum:  Evidence from Some Italiotic Glosses.

4.30 Break

5.00 Prof. Paolo Poccetti Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”

Language contacts in the light of morphological adaptation of proper names in Southern Italy and Sicily

6.00 Prof. James Clackson and members of the “Greek in Italy” project

Greek in Italy – the Cambridge project

Please get in touch we me (jptc1@cam.ac.uk) if you would like to know more or are interested in attending.