Re: Quick Latin pronunciation question

According to the school grammar second declension plurals
in -ii should be /i.i:/, i.e. one short /i/ followed by a long one,
and uacuum should have two short vowels in succession.
At least by late ancient times the first vowel in such pairs
had disappeared, and only the second vowel, long or short
as appropriate, was written and probably spoken: radi, uacum.
Maybe the classical spelling was a pedantic morphological
spelling anyway; NB that the vocative of e.g. Lucius, filius
was Luci, fili all along, not **Lucie **filie, so Latin wasn't
above contraction of awkward vowel sequences!

2008/5/25 Tristan McLeay <conlang@...>:
> In Latin, how were ii and uu pronounced? I think they usually occur
> between a root and an affix, for instance "tuum" or "Patricii". "uu" in
> English borrowings is of course pronounced as either /ju:@/ (continuum)
> or /ju:/ (vacuum) with presumably no historical reason. I can't think
> of any English words with "ii" in them from Latin though.
>
> --
> Tristan.
>


--
/ BP

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