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Some Latin words end in -que (for example quinque, vocative of adjectives ending in -quus and imperatives like relinque), but I have never seen the conjunction -que attached to such words. Are there examples of having a double -que in this sense? Do grammarians or other writers suggest avoiding such combinations?

I am not interested in pronouns where the final -que comes from the conjunction, but in words that coincidentally end in -que. The answers to an earlier question indicate that quinque does not have the conjunction -que in it.

Added detail: I am mostly interested in the case where both 'e's are short, that is, words ending in -quĕquĕ instead of -quēquĕ. The answer by brianpck below gives an example with -quēquĕ.

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    A fascinating thought and question! I can't wait to see the answer.... Mar 23, 2016 at 13:15

1 Answer 1

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I searched through plausible forms (particularly adverbial forms of adjectives ending in -quus) and only found one example:

Aequeque

in rebus minoribus socium fallere turpissimum est aequeque turpe atque illud de quo ante dixi (Cic. S. Rosc. 40)

simili quae praedita constant
natura atque ipsae res sunt aequeque laborant
et pereunt (Lucr. 1.847)

Otherwise, I have not found one example, even in later Latin writings. All search results for these are either typos (usqueque for usquequo) or bad machine transcriptions (propinqueque for propinquaeque).

It does not take much imagination to see that most words in the relatively short list of Latin words ending in -que would complain if a -que was added.

  1. It does not take a sensitive soul to cringe at the dissonance of such words as usqueque, quicumqueque, or (my favorite) jamjamqueque.

  2. Many words ending in -que already use the ending -que, e.g. itaque, neque, and atque

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    OMG jamjamqueque makes me incredibly happy. It's like when I had to go to the hospital and they told me I had a jejunojejunal intussusception. Mar 23, 2016 at 13:49
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    Thanks! It should be noted, though, that the word you propose ends in -quēque, not a -queque with two short 'e's. My original intention was in the doubly short version (where dissonance seems worse), which I should have spelled out. The list does not include inflected forms, so verbs ending in -quere and adjectives ending in -quus are absent. Anyhow, your finding is interesting (and of course worth my +1).
    – Joonas Ilmavirta
    Mar 23, 2016 at 14:30
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    Good answer. If you simply search for queque (no word boundaries enforced) in the HP corpus, you find only 2 results, both aequeque. latin.packhum.org/search?q=queque
    – Cerberus
    Mar 23, 2016 at 15:53
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    Cool--and I didn't even know about that tool! I ended up going with intuition because I couldn't find a way to search Google without word boundaries, e.g. *queque
    – brianpck
    Mar 23, 2016 at 16:16
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    Going back a bit further, pre-Latin quīquomqueque would be fantastic, but utterly unpronounceable. May 21, 2017 at 9:35

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