14
votes
Does D/L variation go back to a dl cluster?
Bibliography on this phenomenon: Poucet 1966: 140, supplemented by Burman 2018; if you have free time, you can also watch "(False) Etymology and ‘Sabine -l-‘" by Nicholas Zair - he presented ...
- 11.8k
14
votes
Accepted
Precise pronunciation of b, d and g
In Ecclesiastical Latin, B, D, and G are pronounced as stops, like in English (or like in Spanish at the start of a word). Ecclesiastical pronunciation is based on Italian, and Italian doesn't have ...
- 69.3k
13
votes
Accepted
Why is this Etruscan letter sometimes transliterated as "ch"?
Most of our understanding of Etruscan pronunciation comes from our knowledge of Greek. Back before the Greek alphabet was standardized, there were different varieties used in different areas. And ...
- 69.3k
11
votes
Accepted
Why does “inferus” have /f/ rather than /d/?
Weiss (Hist. Comp. Gramm. Lat. 75, note 26) says that "the first syllable of īnferus was identified with in- and the medial *dʰ was therefore given a pseudo-initial treatment".
De Vaan (s.v.) agrees, ...
- 31.5k
11
votes
Accepted
What makes a syllable "heavy" or "light"?
Any syllable containing a long vowel is heavy, but not all heavy syllables contain long vowels.
Syllabification is a fairly abstract concept, so unfortunately, there are multiple conflicting ...
- 30.1k
10
votes
Accepted
Does any Latin noun originally end in -r?
Pater, mater, frater etc. are IE -r stems; compare pater with English father, Sanskrit (acc. s.) pitaram etc.
Iecur is an IE -r/n heteroclit, like Avestan yakarə.
- 18k
10
votes
Accepted
Did an internal m nasalize the preceding vowel?
Sampson 1999 summarizes research on nasalization of vowels in Latin:
"there is every reason for believing that in the history of Latin significant vowel nasality, allophonic and perhaps even ...
- 11.8k
10
votes
Is pronouncing 'th' as 's' in 'Boethius' typical in any common Latin pronunciation scheme?
It actually helps to know that the th was not always there. A variant of his name that was common (standard?) in Medieval and early modern texts was Boetius. In some texts, he's even Boece.
While a ...
cmw♦
- 58.2k
9
votes
Accepted
-NL- and -LL- in Classical Latin
Check out the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg. It thankfully allows you to search words, which will allow you to look at deeper results. From a cursory search, though it seems that conl- is earlier, ...
cmw♦
- 58.2k
8
votes
What makes a syllable "heavy" or "light"?
The answer to your question is simple and difficult at the same time.
As Christian Lehmann (Lehmann 2010) puts it rather succinctly,
"A light syllable is one ending in a short vowel; all other ...
- 11.8k
8
votes
What makes a syllable "heavy" or "light"?
A syllable is can be heavy in two ways.
It is heavy by nature if it contains a long vowel or a diphthong.
It is heavy by position if the vowel is followed by a "consonant cluster".
If neither happens, ...
- 116k
8
votes
Accepted
How many syllables are there in 'mortuus'?
Here is metric evidence in support of three syllables.
I went through all occurrences of mortuu- in Vergil(ius) and Ovid(ius), and I found no occurrences that would require scanning mortuus or mortuum ...
- 116k
8
votes
Accepted
Is there a difference between ΚΘ and ΧΘ?
Here is Allen, Vox Graeca (15):
Allen and Sturtevant (Pronunciation of Greek and Latin) both argue, based on the rarity of misspellings of the type *κθών, that the first consonant in such clusters ...
- 31.5k
8
votes
Are vowels long before "gn"?
There is some inscriptional evidence that has been interpreted as indicating that short -ĭ- before -gn- was lengthened to -ī-, or perhaps remained short but was raised in quality from [ɪ] to [i].
That ...
- 30.1k
8
votes
How to pronounce the sequence "ti" when reading Latin
The common pronunciation depends somewhat on when you're learning, as well as where. In recent decades there's been a push toward "reconstructed" pronunciation in education; if you learned that "c" is ...
- 69.3k
7
votes
How to pronounce the sequence "ti" when reading Latin
There is no single standard for Latin pronunciation. The main division is between reconstructed pronunciation (based on our idea of what Classical Latin sounded like) vs. everything else. As Draconis ...
- 30.1k
6
votes
Did an internal m nasalize the preceding vowel?
A pronunciation like [sũːmʊs] for summus in Classical Latin seems rather unlikely considering that the Italian reflex is sommo [somːo] and not [suːmo].
The letter M in Latin corresponded to the nasal ...
- 30.1k
6
votes
How is Latium pronounced?
Apparently this pronunciation of Latium is similar to the one that the French use.
I had the same question when I visited Rome and realized that the modern name of Lazio is the Italian pronunciation ...
- 161
6
votes
Loss of s before voiced consonants at word boundaries
In early classical poetry, a final /s/ did not necessarily make position in Vs CV. This is common enough in Plautus, especially when combined with Brevis Brevians, and seems to diminish in frequency ...
- 1,470
5
votes
Does D/L variation go back to a dl cluster?
I'm not sure how well-accepted this theory is, but Fournet proposes a relationship between [d] (*) and /l/ in Etruscan: Hurrian -da ~ Etruscan -l "[dative marker]", Umbrian *daukomṇ > ...
- 69.3k
5
votes
Ecclesiastical Pronunciation of the word Monachus, Monachi etc
I have just found out that both plural forms monaci and monachi are, or at least were, used in Italian so I guess the variation in the Latin is probably due to whatever form the writer used in Italian....
5
votes
Is pronouncing 'th' as 's' in 'Boethius' typical in any common Latin pronunciation scheme?
We need to distinguish a mediaeval Latin pronunciation from an English one. The English pronunciation is what would be used in talking about him in a English context, and is what one might expect for ...
- 4,713
5
votes
Does D/L variation go back to a dl cluster?
The big problem with the apparent cases of *d > l in Latin is working out which of them are reliable. In the late 19th century there was a vogue for trying to identify cases, most of which are now ...
- 51
5
votes
Variation between syllabic and non-syllabic V: in what contexts is it possible?
An interesting discussion.
Re aqua, it is a thorny problem. There are two (indirectly three) cases in Lucretius (and, save for an anonymous tragic line and an anonymous inscription, in Lucretius alone)...
- 51
5
votes
Hypothesis for Umbrian letter ers pronunciation
According to Rex Wallace, writing a chapter on the Sabellian languages for the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages, "[d]elta was used for a voiced fricative /ẓ/ (ř) rather ...
- 69.3k
4
votes
When did 'ph' start to be pronounced like 'f'?
Based on discussion by Latin grammarians such as Diomedes and Priscian, plus interchange between "PH" and "F" in spelling (nicely summarized by the graph in Alex B.'s answer) it ...
- 30.1k
4
votes
Accepted
Loss of s before voiced consonants at word boundaries
Alongside the prefix ex- ~ ē- there is the preposition ex ~ ē, which offers a way of testing whether the same s-loss occurs before a voiced consonant at a word boundary. If it consistently does, we ...
- 31.5k
4
votes
How many syllables are there in 'mortuus'?
Weiss writes that “there was no general anaptyxis between a consonant and u” (p. 145). The outcome is different and seems to be unpredictable. In some cases Cu > Cu or CC or C:
equus (*h1ekuos), ...
- 11.8k
4
votes
Does D/L variation go back to a dl cluster?
For ease of reference, here's de Vaan's entry for lacruma.
- 31.5k
4
votes
Accepted
On what basis is bilabial [ɸ] rather than labiodental [f] reconstructed for any Latin varieties?
Since you are asking about Latin and not Proto-Italic, my answer is going to address Latin only (so I will ignore e.g. the following sound change proposed by Philip Baldi, based on the glotttalic ...
- 11.8k
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