The reviewer of the second edition of a book whose first edition has been as positively received as this one faces a challenge. What is there to say that has not already been said by the first round of reviewers? Especially when, as in this case, the author had set up a blog to collect comments and corrections and has incorporated the necessary changes together with in his words ‘most but not all’ (p. xii) of the suggestions made by reviewers of the first edition. A detailed overview and assessment of the consequent differences between the two editions can be found in S. Höfler (Kratylos 65 [2020]), while W.'s new blog for this second edition is accessible at http://ohcgl.blogspot.com/. Although there are numerous changes of detail, in terms of structure and content the second edition replicates the first. It is some 60 pages longer, two thirds of which consist of new text with the remainder being devoted to a lengthier and updated bibliography and revised indexes. Nine of these extra pages are to be found in the section on Etruscan in Chapter 43, a topic that is certainly of intrinsic interest but arguably of only peripheral relevance, especially since possible Etruscan influences on Latin are dealt with separately at the appropriate points. Many of the chapters have a page or two of additional material and/or new footnotes, and two, Chapters 7 and 15, have revised titles but otherwise the sequence, number and titling of the chapters is unchanged, as are almost all the subsection titles. It is hard therefore to see what constitutes the ‘remodelling’ mentioned in the preface to this new edition.

W. states that his ‘ideal reader would be an undergraduate or graduate student in Classics or Linguistics’, while hoping that ‘more advanced scholars will also find something of interest’ (p. xi). The latter hope is undoubtedly fulfilled, as witness the book's regular citation in the specialist literature. For students, on the other hand, the way in which the data are set out may mean a good deal of toing and froing depending on their particular combination of classical and linguistic knowledge. Consider, for example, the new section 26.3 on irregular nouns with suppletive stem formation. Since the chapter is titled ‘The Fourth and Fifth Declensions’, readers brought up on traditional grammars may be puzzled that several of the items discussed there (vis, vas, supellex) are usually classified as third declension. More significantly, they may well not be familiar with the concept of suppletion, in which case a footnote on p. 274 sends them forward to another footnote on p. 470, where it is briefly defined and exemplified, although, as the index informs us, the term is used a dozen times in the main text between these two footnotes. However, for a topic like suppletion, which is key to understanding structure and change across all word classes, an entry in a glossary of technical terms would have been useful. Better still would have been a separate section dedicated to the principles of paradigm organisation as a prelude to the discussion of word forms, in the same way in which Chapter 4 provides the necessary conceptual and terminological background for phonetics and phonology. (For an update on current work on suppletion, not available at the time this edition went to press and with inter alia a rich variety of Latin and Romance exemplification, see now TPhS 117.3 [2019].)

A different issue concerns the place of syntax. W. introduces Chapter 40 ‘Selected Observations on Syntax’ with the observation that ‘historical syntax has long been the stepchild of historical linguistics’ (p. 476). However, it is perhaps time to discard this chestnut. For the last three or four decades there have been regular conferences both on the general principles of grammatical change and on the specifics of change in Latin, Indo-European and Romance together with innumerable specialist events on key topics like grammaticalisation and reanalysis, neither of which are dealt with here despite their importance in understanding both the development of Latin from Indo-European and of the Romance languages from Latin. There are some cursory bibliographical recommendations in footnote 2 (p. 476), but they are somewhat dated and theoretically limited. Recent studies such as M. Hertzenberg, Third Person Reference in Late Latin (2015), L. Danckaert, The Development of Latin Clause Structure (2017), M. Loporcaro, Gender from Latin to Romance (2018), C. Gianollo, Indefinites between Latin and Romance (2018), to name but a handful, could usefully be added here. Part of the problem is that works such as these often depart from functional or semantic categories, like clause, indefinite and reference, and then explore the changes in the patterns of form that have taken place over the centuries, whereas W.'s book is organised around the phonemes and morphemes that define the forms. It is thus, for example, relatively straightforward to incorporate a section on the accusative and infinitive, taken, as the traditional label suggests, as a construction built out of a combination of forms, but harder to deal with the key diachronic issue of the mechanisms at work in the replacement of that construction over time by patterns involving finite clauses with the associated grammaticalisation of items like quid, quod, (quo)modo and quia as emerging complementisers. Similarly, there are sections in this chapter devoted to special uses of the nominal forms of the verb, and the vexed question of the diachronic order of precedence between the gerund and the gerundive, but little or no attention is paid to the role of the periphrases constructed out of them in combination with grammaticalised or grammaticalising verbs like habere, esse, facere and ire, important though those are both in early and classical Latin and in the developments that characterise late Latin and Romance.

To talk in this way, of course, is to assume a historical sequence characterised by labels such as late and early. This in turn raises the issue of periodisation, addressed explicitly in Chapter 3 and re-emerging in Chapters 44 and 45 ‘Vulgar Latin and Proto-Romance’. This is a topic that I have discussed in the introduction to J.N. Adams and N. Vincent, Early and Late Latin: Continuity or Change? (2016), and I will not repeat myself here. However, as W. notes (p. 542 n. 6), the label ‘Vulgar’ is controversial and, given the tendency in some of the theoretical literature to treat it as a diachronic successor to the classical language, is perhaps best avoided. In any case, some, even if necessarily brief, consideration of the difference between diachronic and diastratic/diamesic classifications of languages would have helped. And while it is good to see a volume like this, which brings together the history of Latin and Romance in one extended account, there are aspects of the treatment of the latter which will raise the eyebrows of many Romanists. In that respect, perhaps the most surprising is the family tree on p. 543. It is significantly different from the tree that appeared in the same slot in the first edition, but neither then nor now are there any references or discussion. Both trees raise difficult questions about the classification and internal relations of the Romance languages and indeed about the very idea of Proto-Romance, issues that W. is well aware of, as is shown by his excellent review article devoted to the Dictionnaire Étymologique Roman project in Kratylos 62 (2014). Some discussion to accompany the tree is therefore surely needed even within the ‘outline’ format of a volume like this.

If I have focused here on some topics that I find problematic, this is not to deny the overall excellence of the volume, its breadth of coverage, the wealth of empirical detail and the ease of consultation occasioned by the ample word, citation and subject indexes. The first edition has had its deserved place on the reference and teaching shelves for the last decade. This second edition will surely take that over for the years to come.