On Thu, 10 May 2001, Raymond Brown wrote:
> At 5:41 pm -0400 9/5/01, Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
> [snip]
> >
> >I'd really like to know why the "ex before consonant > e" rule works so
> >sporadically...
>
> Mainly because no one told the Romans about that "rule" :-)
[snip]
> I suspect the post-Renaissance "rule" about _ex_ before vowels & _e_ before
> consonants was an attempt by the pedantically minded to 'purify' Latin and
> make ex/e behave exactly like ab/a, which it didn't in either the Roman or
> the medieval period.
Our Latin teacher told us that if we used ex before a vowel and e before
a consonant we probably wouldn't go too wrong but that wasn't quite it.
<shrug> OTOH this is a one-semester intensive Latin course.
But as a quasirelated point of curiosity, who came up with "deabus" as
the dat/abl plural of "dea" (?) (goddess)? It shows up in 6th ed.
Wheelock but not in 3rd ed. Wheelock. Did someone make it up by analogy
with something else so we students wouldn't get confused about our deities?
YHL