Building a Corpus of Ancient Venetic

For the past few weeks I've been doing something which has been rewarding and frustrating in almost equal measure (in between some weekends visiting family in Sussex and Yorkshire, with some Roman sites and a grinning she-wolf thrown in): namely, building up a complete corpus of all the extant inscriptions in the ancient Venetic language.... Continue Reading →

August 25, 2015 0

Two Latin words for elephant

There are two words for “elephant” in Latin, and both have to do with Greeks in Italy. The first one, elephantus (or sometimes elephas or elephans), is fairly straightforward. It’s used in Latin from about the second century BC, and it’s a borrowing of the Greek word ὁ ἐλέφας, –αντος. That’s the normal Greek word for both African and Indian elephants, and is... Continue Reading →

June 3, 2015