Re: Latin vowel inventory

Quoting Christopher Wright <faceloran@...>:

> I was reading a TY (Teach Yourself) Latin book and looked at the
> pronunciation section. This is what it said, converted to SAMPA, of course:
>
> (left indicates "long" vowel, right indicates "short" vowel)
> a /A/, /@/
> e /e/ (or /ej/), /E/
> i /i/, /I/
> o /o/, /A/
> u /u/, /U/
> y /y/
>
> Needless to say, I was dismayed that Latin might be so similar to English.
> I think rather that the writer of the book, namely one Gavin Betts, is an
> idiot who has no idea how it was pronounced. It's good for my sanity.
Mind you, the Teach Yourself series isn't exactly designed for
linguists.  They usually dumb down their comments to make them
more understandable for the uninitiated.

> Anyway, I tend to pronouce them like this:
> a /A/
> e /e/ or /E/
> i /i/
> o /o/
> u /u/
> y /i/
>
> The long vowels would actually be longer than the short ones.
The question is not whether Latin had a quantitative or a
qualitative distinction, but when it changed from the former
to the latter.  Evidence that Latin originally had a quantitative
contrast at some point can be gleaned from Sard, which collapsed
the "long" vowels with their "short" counterparts.  This suggests
that the two sets were acoustically similar at the time of the
colonization of the island during the late Republic (at any rate,
after the Second Punic war ended in 245 BC).  A few other Southern
Italian and Romanian varieties also suggest this, while all other
Romance varieties treat them separately.  In any event, the actual
vowel length distinction cannot be adequately reconstructed based
solely on Romance data.  (See Posner "The Romance Languages" for
more information.)

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Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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