About ThDS
Title of the project: Thesaurus dubii sermonis: Digital Critical Collection of Ancient Latin Linguistics (1st century BC - 8th century CE)
Coordinators: Michela Rosellini (Sapienza Università di Roma) and Elena Spangenberg Yanes (Sapienza Università di Roma)
Fundings: Research grant of Sapienza Università di Roma (2018) and A. von Humboldt Stiftung Forschungsstipendium für erfahrene Wissenschaftler (2020)
Abstract: objective of the project is the digital critical edition of the fragments of 1st-century-BC – 3rd-century-CE Latin grammarians dealing with the dubius sermo, namely the whole of the observations on morphologic and syntactic uncertainties in Latin language. Such reflection was developed in Republican and early Imperial Age in the erudite tradition de dubio sermone (also called de Latinitate), which represents the advanced level of ancient linguistics in contrast to elementary school teaching. The issues of (1) the reconstruction of ancient texts on this topic and (2) the dependence of late antique grammarians on earlier sources for the dubius sermo have been debated since the beginning of modern studies on Latin grammarians. The so far available studies either attribute to each author of the tradition de dubio sermone only the fragments cited by name by indirect witnesses or, on the contrary, the whole of the passages dealing with linguistic uncertainties in late antique grammatical sources. The present project faces this vexata quaestio with an groundbreaking approach. Indeed, it aims not only at the edition of the fragments of each concerned grammarian, but also at the reconstruction of the whole of ancient expositions of the dubius sermo along with the literary examples of the various linguistic phenomena, which were accumulated across centuries. Therefore we will collect all the passages of late antique (until the 8th century) grammatical treatises which transmit the linguistic reflections on the dubius sermo and the connected literary examples and draw on republican and early imperial sources either citing them by name or not.