Latin

It has long been debated whether morphosyntactic change is teleological. Jespersen (1917:4), for instance, maintained that emphatic negative constructions are created in response to the weakening of older negative adverbs. Others have argued that …

Ennius 550 Sk (atque atque accedit muros Romana iuventus, ‘The Roman youth atque atque advanced against the walls’) has long puzzled scholars on account of what appear to be side-by-side tokens of the conjunction atque ‘and’. …