It's rather curious how easy one starts with odium philologicum.
On 9/25/07, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
>
> Edgard Bikelis wrote:
> > Hi! O res capillosa!
> >
> > On 9/24/07, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
> >
> >>Mark J. Reed wrote:
[snip]
> >>>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?) .
>
> It would work here, because the first _o_ is long anyway ("long by
> nature"). But it simply won't work generally.
I didn't say this <o> is long thanks to this glide. I just meant that <i>
was not entirely lost.
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'.
>
> Obviously, if some poet has used the word that way. Strictly it should
> be mi-se-ri-a with four light syllables which is slightly tricky to fit
> into most verse forms!
>
> Now we know that in Vulgar Latin _i_ and _u_ in such positions were
> pronounced as semivowels, unlike in the Classical language. And it quite
> likely that some poet or other use the syllabification mi-ser-ja so that
> it would scan. But this has nothing to do with elision.
It indeed does not. I started to think about how [iu] were pronounced.
> As it's from the second declension, it was *miser-us miser-a
> > miser-um, but <e> is still short,
>
> Thank you - I am well of the words derivation.
Good for you.
> different from 'pătĕr' for instance, which
> > /e/ was once long, so pătēr-nŭs is understandable... but this <e> is
> long by
> > position also.
>
> There s no evidence that the long vowel was retained in _paternus_.
It can't have, as the heavy syllable hides the length of the vowel.
[snip]
This terminology IMO is misleading and confusing.
It is. Not everything we inherit needs to be good enough.
It is ultimately due
> to the ancient Greeks who were not the worlds best phoneticians (the
> ancient Hindus made a much better job of it) and simply didn't
> distinguish the concepts of vowel and syllable. This confusion was
> compounded when the Romans translated the Greek phrase which meant "by
> convention" as _positione_, i.e. by position.
>
> > ăŭlă 'pot' - ăŭlŭlă 'little pot' - ăŭlŭlārĭă 'relative to the little
> pot'
> > (ā!)
>
> ?? I know of no evidence that _aula_ was three syllables. The _au_ was
> surely a diphthong like _au_ in German.
Ah, shame. I got excited about putting morae ; ).
[snip]
> the famous sĭlŭă - sĭlŭānŭs i think it is before the shortening of this -a
> > from the first declension.
>
> The normal Latin pronunciation of _silua_ was /sIlwa/. It is true that
> Horace twice scans it as /sIlua/, but this is surely just a poet taking
> liberties to make the thing scan - i.e. poetic license.
Vedic sanskrit does the same thing... uses [iu] as vowels or glides as
needed. It seems the difference was irrelevant in speech.
> Maybe it is just (vedic) sanskrit interfering with my common sense ; ).
[snip]
BTW,
> > what is the difference between a heavy syllable and a plain long vowel?
> Can
> > one tell the difference just by hearing?
>
> Length is an attribute of vowels. A vowel may be long or short in Latin,
> German, Finnish etc.
>
> The old textbooks explained Latin & Greek scansion talking about long
> and short _syllables_ and more often than not simply expressing
> themselves in terms which confused the concepts of vowel & syllable.
> Explanations were given in which a vowel could be pronounced short but
> was "long by position" - a sort of contradiction!
>
> For the past 40 or 50 years it has become increasingly more common to
> refer to the quantities of syllables as heavy & light (a terminology
> adopted from the old Hindu phoneticians) to avoid such confusions. A
> syllable containing a long vowel is indeed heavy; but a heavy syllable
> may also contain a _short_ with a consonant coda.
>
> See Sidney Allen's "Vox Latina."
I went that far. Sanskrit distinguishes long vowels by nature from short,
even when they both are in heavy syllables, something like CV:CC versus
CVCC. Is this an audible difference?
[snip]
> > Well, there is the correptio iambica, iambic shortening... ...
>
> A peculiarity of Latin iambic & trochaic verse (not found in Greek
> verse) - but I fail to see what relevance to elision.
It's not relevant. My message was not a monograph, mind you ; ).
[snip]
--
> Ray
> ==================================
>
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
> ==================================
> Entia non sunt multiplicanda
> praeter necessitudinem.
>