A multidisciplinary analysis of non-literary Latin texts from Roman Britain

Abstract

The present paper is focussed on the major corpora of non-literary documents written on tablets in Roman Britain. This encompasses the stylus tablets from Londinium-Bloomberg, the ink-written tablets from Carlisle and Vindolanda, and the curse tablets incised on lead. The main purpose of this analysis is to show from a quantitative perspective how these different corpora diverge from each other not only in respect of the writing material but also according to the presence or absence of specifc linguistic features: gemination, degemination, vowel syncope, and presence or absence of initial h-.