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Re: USAGE: Latin puerique (was: Circumfixes)

From:Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham@...>
Date:Thursday, May 13, 2004, 0:15
--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Ray Brown <ray.brown@F...> wrote:
> On Tuesday, May 11, 2004, at 09:57 PM, Richard Wordingham wrote: > > > --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@M...> > > wrote: > >> But if I'm not misremembering, that is not certain; there is > > conflicting > >> evidence with regard to the effect of -que on stress. In fact,
I
> >> believe that if you reverse the phrase to "puellae puerique",
then
> > there are > >> actually three different possibly-correct placements of the > > emphasis: > > Yes - I'd forgotten - must check out the evidence when I can. > > >> 1. puéllae púerique (no effect) > > I find that difficult to believe, at least for the Classical & > post-Classical periods. Early Latin, as we know, did have word
initial
> stress (like the gaelic langs, Hungarian etc) so 1 would clearly
apply
> then. But when the stress shifted to the penultimate or
antepenultimate,
> depending on the quantity of the penultimate syllable, I find it
difficult
> to believe that púerique would survive.
As the stress of _pueri:_ on its own is _púeri:_, I would actually find a doubly stressed *_púerí:que_ quite credible. It even has a parallel in the double stressed clitic compounds (right phrase?) of Greek such as _ántHro:pós tis_ and _sô:má ge_. Note that the two stresses in these words are separated by an unstressed mora (sô:ma = sóoma, except that the length affects the quality of the vowel.) Richard.