Varro’s Intuition of Cognate Relationships

This paper argues that Varro evinces an intuition in De Lingua Latina of what would now be termed cognate relationships. The evidence presented includes Varro’s search for regularity among languages; his predilection for otherwise rare figurative language when attempting to articulate a relation between Latin and Greek and Latin and the Sabellic dialects that he sees extending beyond mere borrowing; and the consistent and pointed ways in which he deploys formulaic expressions to convey distinct levels of kinship between Latin words and their foreign sources or counterparts.