The < e >/< i > spelling variation in Latin inscriptions from Rome (250 BC-AD 300): a preliminary (historical) sociolinguistic analysis based on the inscriptional data

This paper analyses the cases of &lt; e &gt; for /ĭ/ which occur in a corpus of 4,080 Latin inscriptions from Rome. All the inscriptions considered were divided into four periods (“mid-Republic”, “late Republic”, “early Empire” and “late Empire”), and in three sociolinguistically different groups (“formal”, “informal” and “diaphasically low” texts). Chapter 2 offers a qualitative study of all the e-spellings (for /ĭ/) in the corpus, in order to ascertain whether they might actually testify to the merger of /ē/ and /ĭ/. Chapter 3 examines the distribution of these e-spellings in the chronological and sociolinguistic groups defined above. The obtained results support a new interpretation for the mid-Republican instances of for /ĭ/ (ca. 250-120 BC). Moreover, they also suggest that, from this period onwards, the merger of /ē/ and /ĭ/ took the form of a “change from below”.