Re: Some help with Latin

Edgard Bikelis wrote:
> 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?) .
It would work here, because the first _o_ is long anyway ("long by
nature"). But it simply won't work generally.

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.

> 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.

> 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_. the
syllable -ter- is heavy in any case, so the quality of the vowel cannot
be determined. But in view of the short vowels of _pater_ I think the
chances are that _paternus_ also had all short vowels. It doesn't make
sense to say that a vowel becomes long by position. A short vowel is a
short vowel whatever its position.

This terminology IMO is misleading and confusing. 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. And the _Aulularia_ in Plautus'
comedy retains a syllabic value for the -i-, as indeed you show it! The
long-a is, to use the old terminology, "long by nature" - i.e. the first
-a- in -aria is a long one, irrespective of what follows.

> 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.

> 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?
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."

>
>>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... ...
A peculiarity of Latin iambic & trochaic verse (not found in Greek
verse) - but I fail to see what relevance to elision.

[snip]
>
> 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.
And on that we are agreed.

BTW - there's been some doubt in some posts about the vowel at the end
of _requiris_. The verb is 3rd conjugation and the vowel, therefore, is
short, i.e. requi:ris. But the syllable has a consonant coda, namely -s,
and so is heavy.

--
Ray
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Entia non sunt multiplicanda
praeter necessitudinem.

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