The Appendix Probi ("Probus' Appendix") is the conventional name for a series of five documents believed to have been copied in the seventh or eighth century in Bobbio, Italy.[1] Its name derives from the fact that the documents were found attached to a copy of the Instituta Artium, a treatise named after (but probably not written by) the first-century grammarian Marcus Valerius Probus.[2]
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Appendix Probi
The Appendix was likely composed in Rome[i] around the first half of the fourth century AD.[4]
It is specifically the third of the five documents that has attracted scholarly attention, as it contains a list of 227 spelling mistakes, along with their corrections, which shed light on the phonological and grammatical changes that the local vernacular was experiencing in the early stages of its development into Romance.
The text survives only in a carelessly transcribed water-damaged manuscript of the 7th or 8th century[5] which is kept at the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III[6] as MS Lat. 1 (formerly Vindobonensis 17).
Phenomena visible in the spelling mistakes
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Note that the format is "[correct spelling], not [incorrect spelling]".[7]Scribal abbreviations have been expanded.
^There is a reference on line 134 to caput africae, the name of a grammar school known to have been located in that city.[3]
^Note the regular dissimilation, after syncope, of /-tl-/ to /-kl-/.
^An example of hypercorrection (Elcock 1960: 30), in this case the improper insertion of a silent ⟨n⟩, cf.Tooltip confer the spellings herculens and occansio below.
^Perhaps by analogy with existing words like urbs or plebs (Elcock 1960: 32).
^The unusual forms figel and mascel may reflect the replacement of the diminutive ending -ulus with -ellus, followed by the loss of both final /s/ and the unstressed /ŭ/. While the change may seem to foreshadow e.g. the Romansh form maschel, such forms are unusual for the time period and would not be seen again until the Kassel glosses (Elcock 1960: 32).
Leppänen, V., & Alho, T. 2018. On The Mergers Of Latin Close-Mid Vowels. Transactions of the Philological Society. doi:10.1111/1467-968x.12130
Powell, Jonathan G. F. 2007. A new text of the "Appendix Probi". The Classical Quarterly 57(2). 687–700. doi:10.1017/S0009838807000638.
Quirk, Ronald J. 2005. The “Appendix Probi” as a compendium of Popular Latin: Description and bibliography. The Classical World 98(4). 397–409. doi:10.2307/4352974
Quirk, Ronald J. 2006. The Appendix Probi: A scholar's guide to text and context. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta.
Quirk, Ronald J. 2017. Hypercorrection in the Appendix Probi. Philologus 161(2). 350–353. doi:10.1515/phil-2016-0119
External links
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Transcription of the Appendix Probi by Sean Crist, following W. A. Baehrens, 1922, Sprachlicher Kommentar zur vulgärlateinischen Appendix Probi.