Questions tagged [vowel-quantity]
For questions about vowel length.
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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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Are vowels long before "gn"?
Allen and Greenough, §10d, provide a general rule:
A vowel before ns, nf, gn, is long: as in cōnstāns, īnferō, māgnus [emphasis modified]
This seems to agree with Priscian:
'gnus' quoque vel '...
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How do I know where to place macrons?
How do I use macrons? I understand what they do and how they do it, I just don't understand how you know when and where to place them.
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How do we know the quantity of vowels followed by several consonants?
Judging by dictionaries and grammars, we seem to know the length of almost every vowel in classical Latin.
For word-final vowels and those followed by a single consonant, the length can be figured out ...
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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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Vowel length in future perfect indicative and perfect conjunctive
I want to compare future perfect active indicative and perfect active conjunctive.
They look identical, apart from first person singular (cogitavero ≠ cogitaverim).
But is there a difference in the ...
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Are there other verbs in -uō?
Someone asked me recently about the conjugation of the obscene verb futuō, futuere, futuī, futūtus—and in particular about the quantity of the ū in the participle.
I intended to look at some other -...
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Is there any rule to the length of "e" in "-ensis<"?
Is there any rule to the length of e in -ensis?
I looked up the following words in Perseus (which give entries from 'Lewis & Short' and 'Elem. Lewis') and Wiktionary, without being able to ...
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How can you tell whether prefixed ‘in-’ is the preposition ‘in’ or Indo-European ‘in-’?
Background
The verb īnsum has the prefix in-. Prefixing in/in- to words, changes their meaning to ‘in’, ‘on’ et sim., or ‘un-’, ‘non’ et sim. (ɔ:¹ negation).² However, according to Wiktionary, the ...
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Did the Romans confuse a long vowel with two short ones?
Consider the words sūs and sŭŭs.
The former has one long u, the latter has two short ones in two syllables.
For another similar pair with a different vowel, consider īmus and ...
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Interpretation of circumflex in a poem from 1621
A poem from 1621 contains one ô and one â.
The ô is the interjection ô and the â is in the relative pronoun quâ.
No circumflexes are used elsewhere in the poem.
Does the circumflex (or caret or ...
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Vowel shortening before another vowel: Exceptions
I am rather ashamed to admit that I used to pronounce Alexandrea (or Alexandria, cf. Ἀλεξάνδρεια) incorrectly in Latin, that is I mistakenly applied the famous rule "vocalis ante vocalem ...
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Are there any words in Latin that are "light"?
In Latin, every syllable is either "light" or "heavy". A "heavy" syllable is one that has a long vowel and/or a coda consonant, and a "light" syllable is anything else. This distinction is important ...
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Understanding vowel quantity in fieri
The verb fieri has an unusual conjugation, and one of the weird aspects is the long I before many vowels: fīō, fīās, fīet…
Why is the I long?
Does the origin of ...
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In contemporary spoken Latin, do people mark the 1st-declension ablative case?
In contemporary spoken Latin, such as (I think) occurs among canon lawyers in the Vatican and at Latin-only conventicula, do people clearly lengthen the -ā at the end of first-declension nouns in the ...
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How do I know if there's an "invisible yod"?
I've been told that the first syllable of abiciō is long by position, because it's actually an underlying *abjiciō, which causes it to be syllabified as *ab-ji-ci-ō before the *ji simplifies to i. So ...
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What is the correct vowel quantity for words formed from sĭ̄gn-?
My dictionary (Latinsk ordbok – latinsk–norsk, Cappelen, Oslo 2007) has for all instances of words with sĭ̄gn- a long ī, e.g.:
īnsīgniō, 4.
īnsīgnis, adj. m. komp. (sīgnum)
īnsīgne, is, n.
sīgnātē, ...
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Short vowels in lucubrando
I came across a poem from 1621 written in Sapphic stanza.
It contains this line:
pervigil Christi, lucubrando sudans
To scan that, the third word must be lŭcŭbrandŏ.
L&S ...
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What evidence points to a long ō in the first syllable of nōscō's present-tense form?
I've read in various sources that the verb nosco 'know' had a long vowel in the first syllable in Classical Latin pronunciation: nōscō [noːskoː]. I'm wondering what the linguistic evidence is for the ...
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Why is there a short ŭ in rŭtus?
In Cerberus's list of u-stem verbs, rŭō, rŭere, rŭī, rŭtus is the only one with a short ŭ in the participle stem.
Why is this? Does it go back to different types of verbs in PIE, as with stătus ...
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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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Vowel compensation for intervocalic -ss- > -s-
I was recently reminded (by this question) that intervocalic single -s- turned into -r- by rhotacism, and later new instances of intervocalic -s- were produced from -ss-.
If the vowel preceding -ss- ...
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Why is the prefix con- sometimes short, sometimes long?
A friend sent me this image:
Her question was simple: Is the Latin any good? The Latin indeed is good, and if one accepts the English to be in LOLcat, the English checks out as well.
However …
I also ...
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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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Does any Greek word have a geminate consonant after a long vowel?
I recently noticed a pattern in loans from Hebrew into Greek: the letter šin (or sin, or łin if you're really archaic) is transcribed σσ after a short vowel, σ elsewhere.
My knowledge of Classical ...
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Why is the root vowels of 'salsus' and 'saliō' from 'sāl' shortened?
Working my way through the Duolingo course, I noticed that salsus has a short root vowel, even though sāl, sālis¹ is long-voweled. The etymology entry on Wiktionary states that the adjective is from ...
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Which is correct? Eugenius or Eugenīus or both?
Checking the dictionary entries for Eugenius, I was surprised to find different vowel quantities depending on whether it was the adjective or the noun. As you can see from the screenshot above, ...
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Understanding Lewis and Short: Why sūbĭcĭo and not subjĭcĭo?
I just searched for Christmas questions on our site, and ended up reading this question and its answer.
There was a mention of the Lewis and Short entry on the verb subicere, and I was puzzled by the ...
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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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vowel length in "pro" before "f"
When I'm reading macronized texts, the prefix "pro" always seems to be marked long, with the exception of a few words in which it's followed by the letter "f": profugus, for example, and proficīscī, ...
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Are there specific exceptions to the rule of lengthening a vowel before "ns" or "nf"?
A while ago, I wrote an answer summarizing my understanding of the rule that a vowel is long in Classical Latin before ns or nf.
As far as I know, this rule applied very regularly. But I'm not sure ...
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Does any text corpus allow quantity-sensitive searches?
Is there a text corpus, preferably of classical Latin, in which one can or even must search with specific vowel quantities?
This came up when I wanted to search for patĕre but not patēre and had ...
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"Alēctō" or "Allēctō"?
"Alēctō" is the name of one of the Furies, made surprisingly famous in the Harry Potter books. It seems to come straightforwardly from Greek ă- "not" + lēg- "stop" + -tos "[adjective]", so "...
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Do contracted perfects have long or short vowels?
Many verbs have a suffix -v- in the perfect tense, which tends to disappear (or "contract" or "syncopate") before the ending: amā- > amāvisti > amāsti "you loved", audī- > audīvisti > audīsti "you ...
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