The generality of the book's title, Ideas on Language, reflects the fact that Latin Christian writers did not, in the main, view language as an object of scientific study per se or as a discipline. Christian writers’ observations on language are always text-related and text-centred, and elaborated with an exegetical or doctrinal purpose in mind. However, D. shows convincingly that Latin Christian writers use language and interpretative tools developed by grammarians, and that grammatical doctrine underscores many of the Fathers’ comments on the language and rhetoric of Scripture.
D.'s book is divided into three parts, devoted respectively to (1) the origins of language and the identification of the primeval language spoken by the ‘protoplasts’, the first human beings, before the Babelic diversification of languages; (2) the evaluation by Latin Christian writers of the diversity of languages and of multilingualism and foreign-language learning; (3) the vocabulary and categories they use when describing linguistic phenomena.
The practice of comparing the Bible in three different languages led Christian scholars to develop an incipient comparativism – a subject touched on repeatedly throughout the book. Indeed, some of the most interesting commentary on linguistic phenomena comes from Jerome, who had a lifelong hands-on experience as a translator. Whereas knowledge of ‘barbarian’ languages in pre-Christian Classical periods was episodic and opportunistic, and did not as a rule lead to a systematic comparison of languages and a subsequent reconsideration of linguistic ideas, the need to compare Latin and Greek and Hebrew in a sustained manner opens up new paths of linguistic interpretation and comparison.
D. proceeds in descending taxonomic order, from observations concerning the origins of language, the classification of language groups, the criteria for determining relationships and, finally, reflections on syntax, lexicon and phonetic-graphematic levels.
Christian classifications of languages stem from the Biblical narrative of the genealogy of Noah in Gen. 10. I single out here D.'s discussion of the fifth-century commentator Arnobius the Younger (pp. 224–6), who, in a discussion of Ps. 104, proposes a threefold classification of languages corresponding to Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth. Each of them is assigned an area of occupation, respectively the Near East, Africa and the West, and the Indo-Iranic region. We find here an interesting distinction between linguae and patriae, ‘nations’, which are said to be more numerous than the languages assigned to each region. A further distinction is between linguae and sermo, perhaps adumbrating a superordinate hierarchy of ‘language families’ and individual languages or varieties: cf. Commentarii psalmorum, p. 159.69–74 Daur: ‘Ham, Noah's second son, [was assigned an area extended] from Pelusium to Cadiz, in which [people speak] languages of the Punic type (linguas sermone Punico); in the North, where they speak languages of the Latin type, and in the South, where they speak languages of the barbaric type’. Unfortunately, Arnobius gives no other details helping us to understand better the distinction between lingua and sermo in this context.
Also interesting is D.'s analysis of Isidore's classification according to the point of articulation (languages that articulate phonemes predominantly in the palate, against the teeth or in the throat) and of Isidore's account of the four stages of evolution in Latin, from a prehistoric prisca Latinitas to the Imperial mixta (pp. 226–31). Immigration is viewed as a negative but decisive motor of language change. This view is perhaps not new. Plutarch, for example, echoes the notion that immigration and contamination were the reasons for the transformation of Latin, originally a variety of Greek (cf. Plut. Rom. 15: ‘Italian words having not yet at that time entirely submerged [ἐπικεχυμένων] the Greek’).
Genealogical metaphors for affinity and filiation are not frequent, but Jerome calls Hebrew linguarum matrix, as it is identical to or a close descendant of the protolanguage given by God to Man before Babel (p. 239) (D. also quotes alternative views [pp. 60–2], such as that of Theodoretus of Cyrrhus, who maintained that ‘Syriac’ was the protolanguage and that Hebrew was a taught, not a natural language, in Quaest. Oct. 60–1). Jerome's use of uicinus, ‘close’, to denote similarities between languages could both mean geographical proximity causing borrowing and interference – D. calls it a Sprachbund effect – or kinship. In another passage, Punic and Hebrew are called conterminae, ‘bordering on one another’, clearly not in literally geographic terms, but at the same time not explicitly genetic either. A more openly derivational metaphor is de fontibus manare, also used by Jerome in reference to the relationship of Punic to Hebrew in Comm. Is. 7.14 (pp. 239–41), and cognatae, used by Augustine in relation to the same languages – in my view a stronger kinship term than ‘allied’ (p. 246). (For the language used by Roman grammarians to identify language affinity cf. P. De Paolis, ‘La parentela linguistica fra greco e latino nella tradizione grammaticale latina’, in G.V.M. Haverling [ed.], Latin Linguistics in the Early 21st Century [2015], pp. 610–25.) D.'s research here could be supplemented with material from Greek patristics, where statements about language affinity are expressed in similar terminology (cf. Bas. Caes. Hom. Hexaem. 2.6 [of the Syriac language]: διὰ τὴν πρὸς τὴν Ἑβραΐδα γειτνίασιν; Theodoretus Cyrrh. Interpret. In Dan., PG 81.1448.10: ἡ Σύρων φωνὴ γειτνιάζουσα τῇ Ἑβραίᾳ). The Greek and Latin traditions are closely intertwined, and research similar to D.'s on the ‘linguistics’ of Philo and Origen, who, like Jerome or Augustine, had received a thorough grammatical training from an early age, would complete the picture with essential details.
Ancient grammar failed to develop theories of syntax, with the partial exception of the Stoics’ analysis of complete and incomplete utterances (pp. 264–5). Latin Christian writers touch on syntactical notions mainly in a contrastive framework, especially in cases in which overliteral translation led to unidiomatic and sometimes ambiguous Latin in the Vetus Latina. Jerome and Augustine comment on syntactical completeness mainly in terms of ‘redundancy’ and ‘deficiency’, deploying a critical vocabulary – its key terms are ‘pleonasm’ and ‘ellipsis’ – used by pagan commentators to highlight rhetorical and intentional textual strategies. In Biblical exegesis grammatical tools are adapted to interpret language correctness, completeness and idiom. Augustine, for example, comments on the greater frequency of ellipsis in Greek and Hebrew than in Latin (Locutiones in Heptateuchum 4.30), although perhaps it is a step too far to conclude, as D. does, that Augustine was aware that ‘the criteria for a complete utterance vary across different languages’. Rhetorical figures and cases of deviant word order – alien to Latin – are called hyperbata (pp. 275–8). At p. 277 I disagree with D.'s interpretation of Jer. Comm. Is. 15 (on Is. 57.2: ueniat pax, requiescat in cubili suo; ambulet in directione sua), because uerborum consequentia refers to the visionary and disconnected sequence of thought, not to word order: the word order presents no difficulties for a Latin speaker.
Jerome and Augustine also resort to grammatical concepts when discussing discrepancies in gender and number between Hebrew and Greek or Latin, which they place in the Roman theory of idiomata, or ‘peculiarities’, created to explain divergences between Latin and Greek (pp. 317–27). Jerome draws on Donatus in his comparison between Latin and Hebrew interjections and their functions. Of great interest are Jerome's considerations on lexical borrowing, well-founded or fanciful, between Hebrew and Latin and vice versa (pp. 306–8) and, in the final chapter, his comparisons between the phonemic and graphemic sets of the two languages, even if I fail to understand on what grounds D. contends that Jerome based his considerations on differences between Latin and Hebrew place names (e.g. between Gomorra and ‘Amorah) on the columns of Origen's Hexapla (p. 381).
D. has written a detailed, well researched and informative book on several subjects sometimes discussed before in isolation, but never so comprehensively and inclusively, and it is difficult, in a review necessarily engaging with a selection of the most interesting topics, to do the book full justice. D.'s self-imposed limitation of scope to Latin Christian thinkers was a necessary sacrifice, considering the amount of texts he had to cover.
