A Diachronic Contextual Analysis of Greek Word Naturalized by Cicero

Abstract

In this paper I look at two specific Latin words that became part of the Latin vocabulary when Cicero naturalized them from Greek. These words are “vacuus” and “qualitas.” I use computational modeling such as N-Grams and Word2Vec to track how these words changed context over time as they became more ingrained in the Latin lexicon. I find that the context of these words actually changes very minimally over time, suggesting a different usage pattern with regard to a newly naturalized word than initially expected. I also find that Cicero’s contemporaries use “vacuus” is a narrower context than Cicero did, which suggests a possible desire to mimic usage of a unknown word rather than create a potentially incorrect context for it.