By Daniel J. Taylor
Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 B.C.) was once the most prolific writers in antiquity. even though, of his De Lingua Latina merely six of 25 books have survived, and those are neither entire nor freed from textual corruption. This learn is an try to offer an enough, constant, and complete account of the linguistic conception with which Varro operated insofar because it will be recovered from the is still of De Lingua Latina.
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Example text
The word 'nature' and its derivations, which occur frequently in Latin grammatical and rhetorical texts, often puzzle the thoughtful reader. Ordinarily one passes lightly over the adjective 'natural' with the assumption that its denotation is obvious. But when technical features of language are characterized as 'natural,' the usual associations with the expression are so inappropriate that a need for closer study becomes unmistakably clear. Uhlfelder studied the problem. The superficial answer is that natura is used in a Stoic sense.
The process of declinatio, which is a linguistic universal and which enables language to create new items continuously, operates in two different ways. Declinatio voluntaria refers to the process of word formation, derivational morphology, as whenever slave dealers give names to their human chattel, or as when Romulus named the city of Rome after himself. Declinatio naturalis refers to the process of morphophonemic paradigma tic alternation, inflectional morphology, as exemplified by the declen sion of the slaves' names or of the name Rome and by the conjugation of The Nature of Language 23 verbs.
Shortly thereafter Varro expanded his area of inquiry by increas ing the number of data. 29 So, because certain cases are of this sort, it is, accord ingly, not easy to state that similarity exists if you analyze the forms of these individually without taking into account another case in which the sound is altered paradigmatically. 21, Varro is now dealing with four words, or two sets, each with two members. 36 Varro notes that the words must also be of the same number, or else the relationship which exists between the two sets will be invalid,26 and provides an example of what he has enumerated up to this point.