Abstract

The book is a monumental event in scope, in depth, and in the perspectives it closes and opens. It peers through the ornamental brocade of literary Latin to uncover the language as it was spoken and as it evolved in various regions of Italy and throughout the Empire. To employ the distinction of Ferdinand de Saussure, we descend from language to speech, from homo scribens to homo loquens. But homo scribens also comes up in many varieties—high, low, and specialized—on parchment, papyrus, and stone. At one end there stands archaic Latin; at the other, an array of Romance idioms. It is an exciting journey, fraught with surmises, and only a scholar who had explored all and sundry nooks and crannies of Latin could dare to undertake it. Adams entered upon the path toward Diversification with two remarkable studies of vulgar Latin texts: The Text and Language of a Vulgar Latin Chronicle and The Vulgar Latin of the Letters of Claudius Terentianus. In due course he produced three treasures of information, instruction, and linguistic enjoyment: The Latin Sexual Vocabulary ; Pelagonius and Latin Veterinary Terminology in the Roman Empire ; and, particularly dear to the heart of this writer, Bilingualism and the Latin Language. Then there is a plethora of articles, among them some personal favorites: the pieces on "The Uses of Neco" ; and on "Words for 'Prostitute' in Latin".