Re: Some help with Latin

Hi! O res capillosa!

On 9/24/07, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
>
> 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.


Indeed. But sometimes I have the impression of /iu/ becoming glides (ōd' ĕt
or ōdj ĕt?) . I did not read enough to solve my doubt, but here it is:

mĭsĕr 'poor' - mĭsērĭă 'poverty' (ē!)

Why so? I think this /i/ may be really /j/, lengthening by position:
'miserja'. As it's from the second declension, it was *miser-us miser-a
miser-um, but <e> is still short, different from 'pătĕr' for instance, which
/e/ was once long, so pătēr-nŭs is understandable... but this <e> is long by
position also.

ăŭlă 'pot' - ăŭlŭlă 'little pot' - ăŭlŭlārĭă 'relative to the little pot'
(ā!)

the famous sĭlŭă - sĭlŭānŭs i think it is before the shortening of this -a
from the first declension.

Maybe it is just (vedic) sanskrit interfering with my common sense ; ). BTW,
what is the difference between a heavy syllable and a plain long vowel? Can
one tell the difference just by hearing?

> 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.

Well, there is the correptio iambica, iambic shortening... ...

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.

This would probably be solved if we understand how -- gods, how? --
saturnian verses were composed. Some say it was accentual, some say it was
moraic, some say it was both, or neither. Every choice given by
combinatorial analysis have a champion ; ).


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  :)

Alas, indeed.

--
> Ray
> ==================================
> http://www.carolandray.plus.com
> ==================================
> Entia non sunt multiplicanda
> praeter necessitudinem.
>
Recte dicis,

Edgard.

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