The language of Plautus: His linguistic methods and their reflection of Roman society (Roman Republic)

Although many scholars have studied the work of Plautus, their work has focused largely on Plautus as a manipulator of Greek Comedy or as an interesting study in archaic Latin. Only recently have scholars begun to look at Plautus in terms of his own language and his own audience. Even so, the few linguistic studies that have been done were primarily statistical and contributed little to an understanding of his audience.; Earlier investigation into the language of Plautus reveals that he used the foreign languages of Greek and Punic along with his native Latin in his plays. Previously, most believed the Greek was used to mark its users as “intelligent,” and the Punic was believed by most to be intended as gibberish; this is in fact not the case. Both languages served to place his characters in the real world in which he and his audience lived. This in turn reveals that Plautus expected his audience to have at least a basic understanding of Greek and some familiarity with Punic.; While previous studies of Plautus have analyzed his use of the idioms that served as markers of so-called “female” language have concluded that he crossed the boundaries of gendered language for whatever reason, the largest such study was primarily statistical and gave no reason as to why Plautus would have done that. In fact, Plautus did not use such markers as markers of “feminine” language at all, but rather as markers of emotion and power. Plautus played on the connotations such idioms had in the minds of his audience to create his own version of the adulescens amator, who was in fact the forerunner of the elegiac lover of later Roman poetry.