Re: Some help with Latin

Mark J. Reed wrote:
> RAB> Vowels at the end of words, even if they are long, are elided before
> RAB> another vowel in verse.
>
> EB> ōdi' ĕt ămō. quāre' īd făcĭām fōrtāssĕ rĕquīrīs.
> EB> nēscĭŏ. sēd fĭĕrī sēntĭo'. ĕt ēxcrŭcĭŏr.
> EB> ' for elision.
>
> So does "elision" in this case mean that the elided vowel is not
> pronounced at all,
That is certainly what the metrics imply.

> regardless of whether it is normally short or long?
>  Or do long vowels become short rather than disappearing utterly?
This is actually a controversial area and the simple, honest answer is
that we simply do not know. If any trace of the long vowel remained it
certainly it did not combine with the following vowel to form a
diphthong, at least as far the metrics were concerned.

It has been observed (I've forgotten by whom) that practically all
instances of elided long vowels occur where dropping the vowel would not
give ambiguous meaning. The whole business of quantitative verse, which
was fine for Greek, sat artificially on the Latin language and was
clearly something only appreciated by the educated literati. What
evidence we have suggests that popular verse was stressed based at all
periods.

As the quantitative system was artificial in Latin, my own feeling that
they simply dropped the vowel. But as I say, this is controversial and
we simply have no way of telling without time travel  :)

--
Ray
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Entia non sunt multiplicanda
praeter necessitudinem.

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