Latin at Vindolanda

The tablets of Vindolanda, Britain of been a source of great insight to daily life in Roman Britain. We have discussed this valuable resource in previous posts before. (See below.)

Research has given new understanding about the development of the Latin language:

Quote

 

The cursive scripts in Latin documents from this period have traditionally been classified by experts in palaeography into two main categories: Old Roman Cursive (ORC), prevalent in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD and late into the 3rd century, and New Roman Cursive (NRC), which is well attested from the 4th century AD, but is thought to have its origins in the late 3rd.

All of the writing tablets from Roman Britain will belong chronogically to the family of ORC scripts. Even before the discovery of the ink-written leaf tablets at Vindolanda and Carlisle (c. AD 70–130), it had been proposed that there were certain developments and changes in the character and style of the scripts in the early 2nd century AD which are important in relation to the later appearance of NRC.

In the newly-acquired evidence of the Romano-British tablets, including those on metal, we see ORC scripts of the first two centuries using letter forms which were critical for the development of NRC. So the steadily-accumulating evidence from Roman Britain has undermined the idea of clear chronological demarcation of script types, and supports the view that the move to NRC was an evolving process in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, rather than a change in which stylistic canons were imposed – in other words, more of a continuum than a sharp break. What is just as remarkable is that the limited amount of evidence on Latin papyri from Egypt and the Middle East suggests similar trajectories of development at either end of the Empire.

 

The Romano-British Writing Tablets of Vindolanda – Antigone (antigonejournal.com)

Here is a link to the Roman inscriptions found in Vindolanda:

Vindolanda Tablets - Home | Roman Inscriptions of Britain

Now that's an interesting insight into the development of English. We may have gone Germanic in the post-Roman world, but our modern alphabet is still based on Latin, a survivor of the Dark Ages.