Re: Droppin' D's Revisited

On Thu, 23 Nov 2000 21:23:19 +0000, Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
wrote:

>At 12:46 pm -0500 23/11/00, Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
>[....]
>>
>> According to what I've read, all cases of orthographic <ens> were
>> pronounced without the nasal even in Classical Latin.
>
> Absolutely correct - this is stated by several Roman writers.
Well, Hale and Buck agree with you. But I'm not so sure this applied to
vowels that weren't already long, at least in Vulgar Latin. After all,
Spanish has <pienso> and other forms from Latin short <-ens->. I also note
that my references say that the (resulting) long vowel was nasalized.

>> Except for the participle ending <-ens>, where the [n] stuck because of
>> analogy with other cases, e.g. acc <-entem>.
>
>..and that was an artificially preserved form among the learned - in
>popular Latin the nom. was reformed as -ntis.
>
>> 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).
>
>Correct.
Possibly [i~fa~s], or [infa~s] since the experts seem to be less certain
about <-nf->.

>> 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.
>
>It certainly was considered rustic; in Gaul and the Iberian peninsular the
>final -s remained and was re-inforced through the schools (provincials
>wanting to be "more Roman than the Romans").  Even in Italy and the easten
>provinces it does not appear to have been simply dropped but rather to have
>give way to a palatal sound in popular speech, cf. Italian: duoi  <-- duos.
Modern standard Italian seems to have some forms which have been fronted in
that way and others where the -s is simply dropped.

>> Another example is, AFAIK, that 'ipse' was pronounced [isse].
>
>No - that was the Vulgar pronunciation, or rather ['Isse] or ['esse] was.
>The learned pronunciation remained ['IpsE].
>
>> So hey, even Latin spelling wasn't that reliable.
>
>Not for the colloquial language - at least the literary spelling.  Graffiti
>is more reliable   :)
>
>Ray.
Jeff