Re: Question about Latin.

On Saturday, October 16, 2004, at 04:25 , Steven Williams wrote:

> Did the Latin clitic -que (as in 'mare terraque', 'the
> sea and the earth') survive into any modern Romance
> languages?
Nope.

> Also, was it an exact equivalent to 'et',
> or did something more specific govern its use?
Not exactly in that 'et' was used more generally and had wider range of
mainings such as "also", "even". But there was considerable overlap in
meaning & usage. There was also another Classical Latin word for "and",
namely 'atque' (/ak_wk_we/ or /akkwe/ depending upon your analysis of CL
phonology) with a shortened form 'ac'; in CL 'ac' was used only before
words beginning with consonants (except |h|), while 'atque' was used
before any word.

The latter word is obviously derived from 'at-que' ("and but"). Texts
books tend to give explanations such as:
"_et_ simply joins words and clauses; _-que_ couples words to form one
whole (_se suaque_ 'himself and his belongings'), or couples two closely
related clauses; _atque_ connects with emphasis: 'and also, and I may add'
."
[Bradley's Arnold Latin Prose Composition]

They were at best tendencies. There was in practice a great deal of
overlap in usage between all three. The situation is not helped in that
manuscripts show considerable confusion between 'et', 'at' and 'ac', and
also between 'atque' and the adverb 'atqui' "but anyhow...." (Darned
careless copyists   :)

I have a vague idea I did read once that 'ac' survived into some Romance
dialects, but throughout western Romance the only word that survived to
the modern languages are descendants of _et_. Even that disappeared in the
eastern VL; the Romanian word for 'and' is _şi_ /Si/ from Latin _si:c_
(thus, so), which presumably had acquired a colloquial use of "and so".

Ray
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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