63 Colloquial and Li.. - Ganino.com

330 nigel m. kay
formation for humorous purposes, and it also appears in a poetic graffito:
under a statue of Octavian a wit wrote pater argentarius, ego Corinthiarius,
because he had a reputation for proscribing people whose Corinthian ware
he coveted for his collection (Suet. Aug. 70 = Courtney 1993: 474–5); and
(iii) these suffixes have many Romance reflexes, such as Italian -aio (even
the double suffix -aiuolo, ase.g.borsaiuolo (a dealer in bags, humorously
denoting a pickpocket) and fruttaiuolo (a fruit dealer)), French -ier, Spanish
-ero,Portuguese-eiro etc.; Olcott (1898: 138) comments that ‘the suffix still
forms new words whenever the need is felt, even in jest, a sure test of its
popularity and usefulness’ (see also Staaff 1896).
5 conclusion
I have aimed in this paper to provide some general thoughts about colloquial
language in Martial, and have looked in some detail at three particular
types of it in the epigrams. In this, as in many other matters, he is clearly
a valuable and fertile resource. It is notable, for example, that his epigrams
provide a significant proportion of the material which Hofmann added in
his Nachträge to the first edition of Lateinische Umgangssprache. 32
32 Hofmann 1951, esp. 188 ff. (=Hofmann–Ricottilli, esp. 358 ff.).