Ricerc@Sapienza

The -ps- > -ss- regressive assimilation is admittedly part of a general weakening drift of syllabic codas in late latin, as in the cases of -kt- > -tt- / -xt-, -ks- > -ss- and so forth. The early Plautinian noun issula “mistress” (< ipsula) in a corrupt passage of Cistellaria (v. 450) is traditionally interpreted as the very first occurrence of this well-known vulgar latin phenomenon (cf. ital. esso, scrisse etc.). After a thorough inspection of all the available evidence, both in the inscriptions and in the literary texts, three points should be underlined. First, on the grounds of relative chronology, such an early occurrence of this assimilation (iii BC) is implausible. Secondly, the overwhelmingly attested late -spellings from -ps- must be traced back to a typical use of the latin scripta, namely the “deletion” (lat. demptio) of the “implosive” letter, see e.g. Quintilian, Inst. 1, 7, 29, on lat. columna. Thirdly, within the outlined context a -spelling is clearly deviant from the overall orthographic norm: it systematically occurs only in the case of lat. isse, issus etc. This leads to a new hypothesis: these forms (and only these) were the
result of an early morphological reinterpretation in the light of a diagrammatically iconic pseudo-etymology: ipse → is-se / is-sus (whence is-sa, is-sum). A surprisingly similar reinterpretation is attested in a famous Ciceronian passage on nom. Sing. īdem → isdem (Or. 157).