Between Translationese and Informal Late Latin: Notes on the Language of the Earliest Latin Translation of the Vita Antonii

The earliest Latin translation of Athanasius of Alexandria’s Vita Antonii, produced most probably for a Western audience in the late 350s CE, enjoyed a very brief and limited circulation before the early 370s CE, when it was supplanted by a new translation prepared by Evagrius of Antioch (ca. 320–ca. 395 CE). Surviving in a single tenth-eleventh-century manuscript and published in full only in 1939, this text has not enjoyed a great popularity or a very good reputation with scholars (historians and linguists alike) due to its author's excessively literal approach to translation and the sub-standard quality of its Latin.
The present paper intends to show that such reputation is undeserved, especially in light of the findings of recent attempts at circumscribing the identity of the author of this anonymous translation and the cultural context of its production. I will do so by presenting the results of a detailed examination of the inventory of demonstrative pronouns employed in the text in terms of its overall composition, frequency of use of individual components and the rate of survival of their inflectional forms, the syntactic values of individual pronominal forms, and their correspondence (or lack thereof) with their equivalents in the Greek original. My investigation will focus especially on disputed issues such as the interpretation of anaphoric/cataphoric and associative uses of demonstratives such as ille, ipse, idem, the possible emergence of some of the demonstratives as
‘articloids’, the overall restructuring of the demonstrative system in late non-standard Latin, and, in connection with these, the various choices made by the anonymous translator when rendering the forms of the Greek definite article into Latin.
The results of my investigation to date suggest that, far from being just another example of poor-quality translationese or an instance of (unlikely) use of Latin as a Sondersprache, the versio
vetustissima of the Vita Antonii should rather be viewed as a valuable source of information about morphological and syntactic features of varieties of informal Latin spoken in fourth-century Egypt and language-contact induced changes in the context of Greek-Latin bilingualism.