Oscilaciones de género y de flexión en la latinización de préstamos griegos de la declinación atemática

Abstract

The incorporation of certain Greek borrowings from the athematic declension into the Latin inflectional system can only take place through a morphological transformation known as “metaplasm”, which changes the Greek athematic paradigm into a thematic one. The thematization of the four kinds of metaplasms presented in this paper often entails a change of gender as a result of being imposed by form in Latin. Such a manner of integrating Greek words into Latin not only reveals some interesting morphological aspects, but also confirms the availability in Latin of a pair of signifiers (themes in -a / themes in -o, -e) for distinguishing morphologically the feminine/masculine subgenders.