Questions tagged [vowel]
The vowel tag has no usage guidance.
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How to define a long or a short vowel in Latin words?
If there appears no macron on a vowel, which is part of a monophthong, then how can I define whether it is a long vowel or a short vowel？
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Was the "U" in Urbs pronounced as "ʊ" in classical pronunciation?
I noticed that on Wiktionary and on Wikipedia it says that the "U" in Urbs was pronounced as "ʊ". I thought that Latin didn't have these kinds of lax vowels? Wouldn't it be ...
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Why sōns but absēns?
The present participle of esse was (at one point) sōns, presumably from *h₁sonts. However, when a prefix is attached, it becomes -sēns, as in absēns and praesēns.
I'd always figured this was a relic ...
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Is there a context where every vowel makes a valid word?
Take, for example, the context N_X. By putting in different vowels, you can get nex "murder", nix "snow", nox "night", nux "nut", and Nyx "Night (...
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Unexpected long vowels in Plautus before a word-final T
In a comment to my answer on a vowel length question, Vincent Krebs pointed out that Plautus does not follow the classical rules that I laid out:
Plautus does not always shorten the vowel before -t. ...
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Determine length of vowel
How to determine the length of a vowel without dictionary or any stripes above letters?
Thanks.
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Is there a relationship between the phonology in Old Latin and later Vulgar Latin?
After some reading and research, I can't help but notice many similarities between Old Latin and what would become the Romance Languages. For example, the case endings for the nominative and ...
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Arnold and Conway, earlier change of pronunciation of aspirates?
Describing the pronunciation of Greek in schools in the UK, Allen says that a pamphlet by Arnold and Conway, "The Restored Pronunciation of Greek and Latin," pretty much set the standard ...
user3597
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βυκάνη < būcina: vowel reduction undone in borrowings from Latin?
So I've come across this word βῡκάνη, ostensibly borrowed from Latin būcina ('an ox-horn trumpet'), from bou- ('ox') + canere ('to sing'). The lack of vowel reduction is immediately striking; ...
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Are there minimal pairs between vowels and semivowels?
In Classical times, no distinction was made in writing between /u/ and /w/, or between /i/ and /j/. This distinction seems to have been phonemic, because we see names like Jūlius vs Iūlus.
But are ...
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Variation between syllabic and non-syllabic V: in what contexts is it possible?
Allen's Vox Latina, 2nd edition (1988) metions that there is occasional "poetic interchange" in Latin of syllabic [u] and non-syllabic [w], mentioning trisyllabic silua and disyllabic genva ...
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Does trisyllabic laxing occur in Latin words like 'decision' before entering English?
There's a phenomenon called Trisyllabic laxing where the vowel in a stressed syllable is shortened if two (or more) syllables follow. If the stressed vowel is in at least* the penultimate syllable (...
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Latin diphthongs, vowel qualities
There is one existing question on the SE (search for 'ae pronunciation'), but there are nothing equal to my interests.
My googling returned to me nothing too.
So, maybe somebody here know:
nowadays ...
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Vowel hiatus and non-diphthong vowel pairs (compared to Romance languages)
Classical Latin's 6 major diphthongs are clear-cut, phonologically speaking. We know ae is pronounced as one phoneme, such as in [ˈsae̯.pɛ], "saepe." However, we often come across words that have 2 ...
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Which words never elide?
I know the vocative ō doesn't elide with a following word in Latin, though it can elide with a preceding one. For example, Catullus LXI.39:
dicite "o Hymenaee Hymen…"
For metrical reasons, this ...
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On vowel lengths in Latin
This question originates from this thread upon suggestion of Joonas Ilmavirta.
Q. How do we know all the vowel lengths in Latin?
It would be of interest to me if we manage to collect a list with ...
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What is the nature of variation between αι and α in (Pre-)Greek words?
When trying to answer a previous question about the patronymic derived from Asclepius, I came across the following quotation from Beekes in the Wikipedia entry on Asclepius:
The name is typical for ...
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Is long vowel feature completely lost in deviated languages?
In Latin, some vowels are marked by a macron, they are long vowels. However, I found that in French and Spanish there's no macron in their writing.
Is the long vowel feature completely lost in the ...
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Quality of final ĕ ĭ ŏ
Evidence from the Romance languages provides fairly good evidence for distinct qualities, [ɛ] vs. [eː], for ĕ and ē in stressed syllables when followed by a consonant. Likewise for ŏ and ō as [ɔ] vs. [...
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Do vowels before /j/ make diphthongs?
In my experience, Latin has a short list of diphthongs that are found in native words. This list includes ei /ej/, as in dēinde.
However, there are other vowels that can appear before /j/: see major /...
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When is "ei" a diphthong?
Many introductory Latin books will explain that Classical Latin has four diphthongs: ae and au are common, while oe and ei are rarer. (Eu and ui also show up, but if I understand right that's a Greek ...
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Can "ee" appear in Latin?
There are a few instances in Latin where words are spelled with two vowels next to each other, in hiatus: filii "sons", metuunt "they fear".
Now, the last words of the Emperor Julian II are normally ...
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How long was the privative alpha?
In Ancient Greek, the "privative alpha" is a negating prefix, cognate to Latin in- (as in "in-conceivable", not "in-flammable") and English "un-". It survives in English in words like "a-typical" and "...
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What makes a syllable "heavy" or "light"?
The rules for positioning of syllable stress in Latin are relatively simple; they are as follows:
In two-syllable words, the stress always falls on the first syllable.
In three or more syllable ...
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How was iī pronounced?
Most of the time, Latin doesn't allow two instances of the same vowel next to each other: forms like *mee (from meus) are replaced with alternatives like mī.
However, in I-stem second nouns, the ...
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Are there iota or hypsilon contract verbs?
In Greek, verbs are classified as "consonant-stem" or "vowel-stem". Vowel-stem verbs, aptly, have a vowel at the end of their stem. And in the Attic dialect, if this vowel is a short alpha, epsilon, ...
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How many syllables are there in 'mortuus'?
I asked yesterday why the participle mortuus has two us.
When Rafael asked whether one of the us were consonantal, I had no other evidence than being taught that they are both vocalic.
Arguing by ...
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Where did the passive infinitive come from?
The etymology of the present active infinitive seems well-documented. Proto-Italic had an infinitive-like suffix *-si, so *dōnā- + *-si = *dōnāsi > dōnāre by regular sound changes (s → z → r between ...
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Which vowel combinations contract?
In Attic Greek in particular, there are well-understood patterns of "vowel contraction" that replace two vowels in hiatus with a single vowel or diphthong.
But in Latin, contraction seems much more ...
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Are there verbs in -o-?
Verbs conjugated in -a- (amō, amāre, amāvī, amātus), in -e- (habeō, habēre, habuī, habitus), and in -i- (audio, audīre, audīvī, auditus) are common and well-known. Verbs in -u- (acuō, acuere, acuī, ...
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Why vesperascit instead of vesperescit?
I was recently working on a little translation project and my intuition and memory suggested that "evening comes" is vesperescit.
Checking dictionaries corrected me: it is vesperascit instead.
Why is ...
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Did the Romans ever distinguish long vowels in writing?
In most modern writing of Latin, long vowels are distinguished from short vowels by using macrons (e.g, āēīōū). As far as I know, however, ancient authors rarely, if ever, distinguished long vowels ...
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When is there a U instead of an E in gerund(ive)?
Tuomo Pekkanen's Latin grammar mentions (§52.3) that the -e- added to the present stem before -nd- in the gerund and gerundive (in the third and fourth conjugations) can be replaced with a -u-.
For ...
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How can one predict the length of theme vowels in verbs?
The theme vowels a, e, and i in infinitives are long. But, in other forms of those verbs, they can be short. But when, exactly? What are the rules for this? And how about the suppletive vowels used ...
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Forming a compound with the second word starting with a vowel
For both Latin and Greek, what rules govern the formation of a compound of two words, with the second word starting with a vowel?
I'm specifically most interested in the rules for Latin, since this ...
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Homo from hemo?
I stumbled upon a Latin grammar from 1916 today, and it mentions that nemo comes from ne and an old version of homo, namely hemo.
Is this theory considered valid these days?
What support is there for ...
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Could the u in e.g. aufero be related to the u in Mycenaean a-pu-do-ke?
I came across this Mycenaen word when I was trapped in a Wikipaedia chain:
the verbal augment is almost entirely absent from Mycenaean Greek with only one known exception, (𐀀𐀟𐀈𐀐), a-pe-do-ke (...
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