Author Description

From the introduction by Paavo Castrén:00Finland has a long tradition in Pompeian studies, beginning in the early 1930?s when Dr. Veikko Väänänen, subsequently Professor of Romance languages at the University of Helsinki, spent several years in Naples and Pompeii and became acquainted with many local archaeologists and philologists. He developed particularly close contacts with Matteo della Corte, who at that time was preparing a Supplement to the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum IV, which contains the Pompeian graffiti and election programmata. Mostly on the basis of this collection of graffiti, Väänänen was able to reconstruct several aspects of the language spoken in Pompeii before the great eruption of Vesuvius. He discovered that many linguistic phenomena that had been considered to belong only to the later develop-ment of Romance languages had already appeared before AD 79. His academic dissertation, La langue vulgaire des inscriptions Pompéiennes, was published in 1935. Due to his mastery of vulgar Latin and the longstanding contacts he had made, Professor Väänänen became well known not only within the community of Pompeian studies but also in the broader academic world.