- Chapter Thirty-Six -
presence of Irish; with rather more difficulty they can also indicate approximately
how long Latin remained a spoken language in Britain. By this I mean how long
it was a language used in a wide variety of styles and registers; Latin remained a
spoken language in the liturgy, for example, throughout the Middle Ages, but that is
only a use restricted to one register and will not count for this discussion.
It is characteristic of the spoken Latin of Late Antiquity that the quantitative
distinction between long and short vowels, to which differences in the point of
articulation were ancillary, disappeared. Instead, differences in the point of articula-
tion, formerly secondary, were now crucial. So vivo gives Italian vivo, but bibo gives
Italian bevo, because a Latin short i was more open than a long i, and hence i > e,
but i> i.^66 The way in which this process worked itself out varied between the
individual Romance languages, but the direction of change was fundamentally the
same. At a rather earlier period the diphthongs, ae, oe, had become simple vowelS.^67
Among the changes to consonants is the disappearance of final -m (very early)
and -s (late and only in some areas of Romance, including British Latin).68 The con-
sequences for morphology were far-reaching: there was no distinction between, for
example, Petrus, Petrum, Petro (all> Petro or Pedro). All these changes are attested
in the British Latin inscriptions of the fifth and sixth centuries:
VASSO for vassus, AD QUAE for atque^69
CONGERIES for congerie^70
CIVE for civis, CONSOBRINO for consobrinus 71
MULTITVDINEM for multitudine 72
The genitive singular ending of the second declension in -i was used without any
attention being paid to the syntax. We have both:
SENACVS / PRESB YTER HIC IACIT73
and
DOMNICI / IACIT FIUVS / BRAVECCF4
or
CORBALENGI IACIT / ORDOUS75
66 V. Vaananen, Introduction au latin vulgaire (Paris, 1967), §§ 42-6.
67 Ibid., § 59.
68 Ibid., §§ 127-9; d. C. Smith, 'Vulgar Latin in Roman Britain: epigraphic and other
evidence', in H. Temporini and W. Haase, Au/stieg und Niedergang des romischen Welt.
II. Prinzipat, 29.2, Sprache und Literatur, ed. W. Haase (Berlin, 1983),925-6.
69 ECMW, no. 33; d. Smith, 'Vulgar Latin in Roman Britain', 911-12.
70 ECMW, no. 101.
71 ECMW, no. 103.
72 ECMW, no. 78.
73 ECMW, no. 78.
74 ECMW, no. 122.
75 ECMW, no. 126.