Pannonian Latin (also known as Pannonian Romance) was a variant of

Vulgar Latin Vulgar Latin, also known as Colloquial, Popular, Spoken or Vernacular Latin, is the range of non-formal Register (sociolinguistics), registers of Latin spoken from the Crisis of the Roman Republic, Late Roman Republic onward. ''Vulgar Latin'' a ...

that developed in

Pannonia Pannonia (, ) was a Roman province, province of the Roman Empire bounded on the north and east by the Danube, on the west by Noricum and upper Roman Italy, Italy, and on the southward by Dalmatia (Roman province), Dalmatia and upper Moesia. It ...

, but became extinct after the loss of the province.

History

Most likely the bigger part of the indigenous population spoke

P-Celtic The Gallo-Brittonic languages, also known as the P-Celtic languages, are a proposed subdivision of the Celtic languages containing the languages of Ancient Gaul (both ''Gallia Celtica, Celtica'' and ''Belgica'') and Celtic Britain, which share ce ...

. This was influenced by the neighbouring cultures (eg. Illyrian and

Scythian The Scythians ( or ) or Scyths (, but note Scytho- () in composition) and sometimes also referred to as the Pontic Scythians, were an ancient Eastern Iranian equestrian nomadic people who had migrated during the 9th to 8th centuries BC fr ...

). Unfortunately, the surviving data is not enough to distinguish their tribes' languages. The conquest of the region by the

Roman Empire The Roman Empire ruled the Mediterranean and much of Europe, Western Asia and North Africa. The Roman people, Romans conquered most of this during the Roman Republic, Republic, and it was ruled by emperors following Octavian's assumption of ...

was completed by 9 BC, and the territory integrated into Illyricum. In 10 AD

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 The Marcomannic Wars () were a series of wars lasting from about AD 166 until 180. These wars pitted the Roman Empire against principally the Germanic peoples, Germanic Marcomanni and Quadi and the Sarmatian Iazyges; there were related conflicts ...

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 The Migration Period ( 300 to 600 AD), also known as the Barbarian Invasions, was a period in European history marked by large-scale migrations that saw the fall of the Western Roman Empire and subsequent settlement of its former territories ...

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 modern historiography, the Western Roman Empire was the western provinces of the Roman Empire, collectively, during any period in which they were administered separately from the eastern provinces by a separate, independent imperial court. ...

in 433. Only sporadic groups remained after the 5th century. Almost all families fled by the establishment of the

Avar Khaganate The Pannonian Avars ( ) were an alliance of several groups of Eurasian nomads of various origins. The peoples were also known as the Obri in the chronicles of the Rus' people, Rus, the Abaroi or Varchonitai (), or Pseudo-Avars in Byzantine Empi ...

in the second half of the 6th century, many moving to the Croatian coast or being taken by the

Lombards The Lombards () or Longobards () were a Germanic peoples, Germanic people who conquered most of the Italian Peninsula between 568 and 774. The medieval Lombard historian Paul the Deacon wrote in the ''History of the Lombards'' (written betwee ...

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 ~ ( for ), 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 ( CIL III 3551), 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 A monograph is generally a long-form work on one (usually scholarly) subject, or one aspect of a subject, typically created by a single author or artist (or, sometimes, by two or more authors). Traditionally it is in written form and published a ...

of Bence Fehér in 2007: ''Pannonia latin nyelvtörténete'' (The Latin Linguistic History of Pannonia). Notable older works are Béla Luzsenszky: ''A pannóniai latin feliratok nyelvtana'' (Grammar of the Pannonian Latin Inscriptions) from 1933, and József Herman: ''Latinitas Pannonica: kísérlet a pannóniai feliratok latinságának jellemzésére'' (Latinitas Pannonica: Attempt at Characterizing the Latinity of the Pannonian Inscriptions) from 1968.

Notes

Bibliography

* * * * {{Romance languages Eastern Romance languages Extinct Romance languages Extinct languages of Europe Pannonia

History

Characteristics

Historiography

See also

Notes

Bibliography