A4 Refereed article in a conference publication
Asigmatic non-standard plurals in 8th- and 9th-century Tuscian charters?
Authors: Korkiakangas, Timo; Alho, Tommi
Editors: Giovanbattista Galdi, Simon Aerts, and Alessandro Papini
Conference name: International Colloquium on Late and Vulgar Latin
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
Publication year: 2025
Book title : Varietate delectamur: Multifarious Approaches to Synchronic and Diachronic Variation in Latin: Selected Papers from the 14th International Colloquium on Late and Vulgar Latin
First page : 627
Last page: 638
ISBN: 978-2-503-60679-8
eISBN: 978-2-503-60680-4
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1484/M.LVLT-EB.5.143330
Web address : https://doi.org/10.1484/m.lvlt-eb.5.143330
This paper combines philological, linguistic, and paleographical methods in order to analyse 458 ‘asigmatic’ forms ending in -a (1st decl.), -o (2nd decl.), and -e/-i (3rd decl.) instead of the expected ‘sigmatic’ plurals ending in -as, -os, and -es, respectively. The forms are from a corpus of eighth- and ninth-century Tuscian charters. First, we discuss potential extra-linguistic causes that may have provoked an erroneous omission of -s; second, we examine the cases which may well represent other Late Latin grammatical forms rather than genuine asigmatic plurals. We argue that once errors and otherwise explicable forms have been removed, the rest can be considered intermediate, asigmatic, stages of the plural -V1 in the chain -V1s → -V1 → -V2 (e.g., CL casas → casa → It. case).