Pannonian Latin


Pannonian Latin was a variant of Vulgar Latin that developed in Pannonia, but became extinct after the loss of the province.

History

Most likely the bigger part of the indigenous population spoke P-Celtic. This was influenced by the neighbouring cultures. Unfortunately, the surviving data is not enough to distinguish their tribes' languages.
The conquest of the region by the Roman Empire was completed by 9 BC, and the territory integrated into Illyricum. In 10 AD Pannonia was organized as a separate province.
In Pannonia the material culture of the native population showed little sign of Romanization in the first 160 years of Roman rule.
In the second half of the second century there were major changes in the composition of the population, but the organic continuity of the Latin language development of the area is unbroken. The particularly destructive Marcomannic Wars changed the ethno-linguistic makeup of the province: speakers of the indigenous Celtic and Illyrian languages decreased in number, to be replaced by immigrants of different culture. This strengthened the position of Latin, allowing it to play an intermediary role.
The Pannonian provinces were exposed in the Migration Period starting in the fourth century. By 401, mass emigration became general after two hard decades full with Germanic and equestrian nomadic invasions. Hunnic control expanded gradually from 410, and concluded with the cession of Pannonia by the Western Roman Empire in 433. Only sporadic groups remained after the 5th century. Almost all families fled by the establishment of the Avar Khaganate in the second half of the 6th century, many moving to the Croatian coast or being taken by the Lombards into the Italian Peninsula.

Characteristics

Analysis of the Vulgar Latin spoken in Pannonia showed several phonetical developments:
  • the shortening of and geminates.
  • the merger of unstressed ~, but ~ fusion is less noticeable.
  • disappearance of from the 4th century onwards.
  • simplified to, to - less often to. group was simplified to or, but it is not known why the development was not uniform.
  • palatalization of plosives,, is poorly attested.
  • reduction of the diphthong to , and to .
  • lenition is attested from the 3rd century.
As in other provinces, accusatives after the 1st century AD were regularly switched to nominatives as the subjects of verbs, ergo -as was often written instead of -ae, which is the correct plural inflection of first-declension feminine nouns. Many instances of this error are found on a perhaps 3rd century epitaph from Pannonia. It says hic quescunt duas matres duas filias... et aduenas II paruolas, which means "here lie two mothers, two daughters... and two young foreign girls".
The dative and genitive cases are evidently quite common in the inscriptions. This ratio unmistakably indicates that Pannonia was where the dative-genitive fusion was most significant relative to the rest of the empire, since the rate is 45% in Pannonia and 24% for the entire empire.
An examination of the Pannonian Latin texts as a whole reveals that the process of amalgamation has only begun in linguistic singular.
Accusative-ablative mergers account for 15% of case errors in Pannonian Latin.

Historiography

The investigation of the language of Pannonian Latin inscriptions has been relatively neglected until recent times, until the appearance of the monograph of Bence Fehér in 2007: Pannonia latin nyelvtörténete. Notable older works are Béla Luzsenszky: A pannóniai latin feliratok nyelvtana from 1933, and József Herman: Latinitas Pannonica: kísérlet a pannóniai feliratok latinságának jellemzésére from 1968.