The Language of the Vindolanda Writing Tablets: An Interim Report

TLDR

The Vindolanda tablets provide a substantial corpus of early‑empire Latin from a military outpost, comparable to contemporaneous finds such as the letters of Claudius Terentianus and the Bu Njem and Wâdi Fawâkhir ostraca, and have been discussed as a specimen of Vulgar Latin. Although misspellings, syntax, morphology, and lexicon in the tablets show influence from spoken varieties, they should not be interpreted as purely Vulgar Latin, as the documents are largely formulaic and not reflective of everyday speech.

Abstract

The recent publication by A. K. Bowman and J. D. Thomas of The Vindolanda Writing Tablets (Tabulae Vindolandenses II) (1994) provides another substantial corpus of Latin from a military outpost in the early Empire. The tablets take their place alongside such important military finds as the letters of Claudius Terentianus, which are roughly of the same date, the ostraca from Bu Njem, and the ostraca from Wâdi Fawâkhir, which again are dated to the first/second centuries. The Latin of the Vindolanda tablets has recently been discussed by H. Petersmann as a specimen of ‘Vulgar Latin’, at a conference devoted to Vulgar and Late Latin. But while the influence of spoken varieties of the language can be detected in some misspellings, and in aspects of the syntax, morphology, and lexicon of the tablets, one must resist the temptation to find ‘Vulgar Latin’ (however one defines that problematical term: see below, IX.4) as the sole or principal element of the tablets. Many of the documents were not composed by free composition, but have a formulaic structure which made little or no demand on the linguistic competence of the writer (e.g. applications for leave (166–77), the daily reports of a type found at Bu Njem, which have certain distinctive features of syntax (155–6)). Accounts and lists (178–209) too may in their syntax and format, if not necessarily in their spellings, be heavily influenced by the conventions of their genre. Moreover record-keeping of this type usually falls to individuals with a degree of education and numeracy, and their writing may have little or nothing to reveal about the spoken language which they used or heard.