The sources of the Appendix Probi: between scholarly tradition and substandard Latin

Abstract

After a methodological premise on the correct use of ancient grammatical texts as evidence of late Latin language, the paper examines the fifth section of the Appendix Probi, considered in the past as a list of forms used in the spoken language at the time of its composition, in order to distinguish two different types of headwords: a) those containing linguistic quaestiones derived from the grammatical tradition et related to phenomena already attested in previous ages; those that concern incorrect uses, mainly graphic, of the present. The latter are however corrected by resorting to the learned strand of the De Latinitate treatises, which provide the correct forms to be used in place of the incorrect ones.