Local Vulgar-Latin Elements in Curse Tablets, with special Attention to the northern Provinces of the Roman Empire
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
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| Description | When interpreting defixiones, one has to take into account not only the Vulgar-Latin development or syntactic rules, but also specific cursing rules as well as author's education. All these factors, although often contradictory, may, at the same time, influence the final structure of a cursing text. With respect to the specific cursing rules, the tendency to clarity seems to be the strongest one: the names more often stay in nominative, the nominative forms are usually isolated from the syntactic structure of the text, especially in the beginning of the text, or their isolation is indicated by the graphic layout itself. This situation is made even more complicated – further interferences may be caused by omission of final consonants or by the author's lack of education. On the contrary, in some cases the authors favour syntactic rules over magical rules. |
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