Oskar wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Nov 2000 17:20:15 +0100, Christophe Grandsire
> <christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:
>
> >Unrelated note: yesterday I was looking at my Latin grammar, were it said
> that
> >CL for "month" was "mens, mensis". It made me wonder where the /n/ went,
as
> in
> >French it has become "mois" /mwa/ and in Spanish "mes" /mEs/ (I don't
know
> in
> >Italian and Portuguese, it would be nice if they kept the /n/ :) ). But
now
> you
> >tell me that CL /e:nsem/ was VL /eze/, so I'm wondering now if this
> deletion is
> >not a phenomenon that occured elsewhere in Latin and in an early time. Do
> you
> >know other examples where CL had /e:n/ but VL only /e/?
>
> According to what I've read, all cases of orthographic <ens> were
pronounced
> without the nasal even in Classical Latin. Except for the participle
ending
> <-ens>, where the [n] stuck because of analogy with other cases, e.g. acc
> <-entem>. In fact, nasals generally weren't pronounced in front of the
open
> sounds /f s/, even by conservatives like Cicero. So 'infans' would have
been
> pronounced [i:fa:s] (I think that's correct vowel length, not sure).
>
> It's interesting, really, how much Classical Latin orthography differed
from
> its pronunciation. We all know of the final m. Some final s's (like
> in nominative singular -us) weren't pronounced that much either, though I
> read that in Cicero's times, such s-deletion was considered rustic.
Another
> example is, AFAIK, that 'ipse' was pronounced [isse]. So hey, even Latin
> spelling wasn't that reliable.
The question is now: where is the Classical Latin orthography from? Maybe it
represent the lang as it was at the time of Cato (Cato Maior, not Uticensis,
obviously), or even that of Ennius. Probably the writing system used in the
Annales Maximi was picked up and retained as traditional even in the future
centuries. Another question: if CL had /i:fa:s/, why do we have Italian
i*n*fante (=boy)?
Luca