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Re: Quick Latin pronunciation question

From:Eugene Oh <un.doing@...>
Date:Sunday, May 25, 2008, 15:39
Yes, the vowels involved have different length patterns. They are
simply not marked in Latin writing unless for pedagogic purposes. The
Latin pronunciation would have ['radi.i:] > English /reidi.ai/. The a
> ei shift can be explained by the Mediaeval tendency to lengthen
vowels in open syllables, which was probably not helped by the similarity of <radius> with a short /a/ with <radix> (from which derives radical etc.) with a long one. Where two short vowels collide at the end of a word, IIRC, the trend is to merge them when speaking into one long vowel, hence the long /i/ ending in the dative for i-stem third declension nouns or adjectives, like "fortis". (Then again, the two books I have at home on Latin differ on the length of the dative ending for non-i-stem third declension nouns.) In any case, I didn't get what you meant about <vacuum>. It rhymes with <continuum> in my speech. Although I do hear people pronounce it quick as [v{kju:m], and I think that might be what you are referring to, but I believe it is due to syncope of the schwa from regular use. Eugene On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 4:01 PM, Benct Philip Jonsson <melroch@...> wrote:
> 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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Benct Philip Jonsson <melroch@...>