23
votes
Did Latin have the same gender labels that the Romance languages have?
Yes, Latin had a distinction between masculine and feminine nouns (and also a third category, "neuter"). This didn't always correspond to biology—homo "human" is always masculine, ...
- 65.1k
15
votes
Accepted
Did Latin change less over time as compared to other languages?
Blame Cicero!
Note the last line of that quote, about "authors of inferior Latinity". In other words, this isn't about the Latin language in general, but is about Latinity—the quality of ...
- 65.1k
14
votes
Accepted
When did the silencing of 'h' start?
Before the late Republic
Already in Republican inscriptions we find people leaving off H's, as in Oratia for Horatia, or adding them where they don't belong, as in havet for avet. During this time, ...
- 65.1k
11
votes
In what ways Latin is considered to be "imprecise"?
The context of the comment, combined with my own intuition, makes me think this comment was referring mainly to vocabulary. As a random example of a Latin word that is not notably "precise" ...
- 27.3k
10
votes
Accepted
Does "laviniaque" from Vergil's Aeneid point to Romance palatalization?
This is a phenomenon called synizesis (συνίζησις), and it happens in both Greek and Latin poetry. For example, at the beginning of the Iliad:
μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
To fit in a hexameter, ...
- 65.1k
8
votes
What are some ancient Greek words from which a word-internal digamma was lost?
A famous one comes right from the beginning of the Iliad, where the digamma in μῆνιν ἄϝειδε θεὰ prevented the vowels from contracting together.
For examples that occurred after consonants, Cairnarvon ...
- 65.1k
7
votes
Accepted
What would the general pronunciation of Latin be like in the 600s CE?
This is not a complete picture, but here are some changes that I'm confident were well advanced if not complete by that time:
the change of the consonant v from [w] to a fricative, likely [β]. See ...
- 27.3k
7
votes
What are some ancient Greek words from which a word-internal digamma was lost?
There are quite a few, e.g. νέϝος, κλέϝος, ἔλαιϝον, λέϝων, Διϝός, ἑσταϝώς and other perfect participles in -ϝώς, χαρίϝεις and other such adjectives in -ϝεις, ἡϝώς, αἰϝεί.
I don't know of many examples ...
- 30.9k
7
votes
Does the old English second person verb ending -est (eg thou comest) come from Latin conjugation?
Nope! They're independent of each other. But I can see how easy it is to make that mistake, since they both come from the same source.
Both Old English and Latin are Indo-European languages, and they ...
cmw♦
- 52.2k
6
votes
Accepted
Parallel examples of the change of Apothēca to boutique?
Nyrop, Grammaire historique de la langue française (1914, p. 256) gives the following additional examples (among others) for French:
Apulia > Pouille, Aquitania > Guyenne
hemicrania > ...
- 30.9k
5
votes
Accepted
What are some ancient Greek words from which a word-internal digamma was lost?
Like all centum languages, Greek lost the contrast between sequences of a velar + *w and labiovelars, so you're not going to find instances of a velar followed by a digamma: in all Greek dialects of ...
- 8,779
4
votes
Did Latin have the same gender labels that the Romance languages have?
Most1 Afroasiatic Languages also have noun gender. This appears to indicate it was likely a common feature of Proto-Afroasiatic, and not borrowed later from contact with Indo-European. I'm not sure ...
- 149
3
votes
Parallel examples of the change of Apothēca to boutique?
Loss of an initial vowel is the kind of thing that tends to happen relatively freely. In this case, the fact that it was a greek word, rather than latin, allows it to have been acquired imperfectly, ...
- 131
3
votes
Accepted
When and why did "Σ" make a comeback?
Still, the lower case σ,ς are more lunate than not...
In this blog at the British Library you may monitor the transition from manuscript to print (Aldus Manutius) in late 15th century. The Florentine ...
- 1,147
2
votes
When and why did "Σ" make a comeback?
This comes down to the distinction between "uppercase" and "lowercase" letters, which developed out of an earlier (by which I mean Mediaeval, not Classical) manuscript tradition ...
- 65.1k
2
votes
What are the most important scholarly resources for Latin and Greek historical linguistics?
For Greek, the best etymological dictionary is Robert Beekes' Etymological Dictionary of Greek in two volumes. This is to Greek what De Vaan is to Latin.
Greek is among the most intensely and widely ...
1
vote
Are there records of Latin-based pidgin languages?
There are no true Latin-derived pidgin languages known from the ancient world.
This is for a fairly simple reason: pidgin languages are primarily spoken, not written, and it would be unlikely for any ...
- 335
1
vote
Are there any general rules for creating 'proper' Latin neologisms, beyond matching gender, number, and case?
Many Latin's lovers across the world would like use the Latin in the today's
life, but they cannot find Latin names for the things of our time.
Answering to your question is not easy. First, we need ...
- 11
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