Re: Droppin' D's Revisited

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.