6 - The Latinity of the Laterculus

Summary

The Leiden manuscript is entirely dependent on the Vatican one, as I will seek to demonstrate in ch. 8, Its more correct Latin, therefore, is not in any sense independent, but is an attempt by the Carolingian scribe to tidy up the more obvious errors in his exemplar. Accordingly, the entire discussion of the author's Latinity relates to the text as presented by Pal. lat. 277.

ORTHOGRAPHY

The orthography of the Vatican text of the Laterculus is on the whole fairly correct. There are no vulgarisms like syncope or prosthetic vowels. The scribe, writing in an Italian hand in the early eighth century, presumably Italian himself, may well have contributed an additional level of error. The other texts copied in this codex are also carelessly written in this sense, and Lowe noted the presence of Late Latin spellings such as storia for historia, Spania for Hispania, consistent confusion of e and i, o and u and b and v, and irregular aspiration in the manuscript as a whole. The Latinity of another work in Pal. lat. 277, the Irish Questiones sancti Isidori, came under the scrutiny of Robert McNally. He found that both consonantal and vocalic orthography wandered from the Classical norm in very much the same way as the Laterculus, and does not seem to have found the orthographic ‘Irish symptoms’, such as the conspicuous misuse of single and geminate consonants.