Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Latin vowel inventory

From:Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Wednesday, July 30, 2003, 2:17
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.) ========================================================================= Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally, Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of 1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter. Chicago, IL 60637