13
votes
How did Caesar pronounce Latin overlined vowels?
Q1: my first question is whether overlining is the same as "stress"?
Not really. The overline indicates vowel length—how long you sustain the vowel sound—which is a component of stress in ...
- 51.2k
13
votes
Accepted
Minimal pair for hidden quantity
The example I feel most certain about is various forms of sum “be” and edo “eat”, in particular the infinitives esse and ēsse and the third-person singular forms est and ēst.
- 21.3k
13
votes
Minimal pair for hidden quantity
lustrum 'a mud pit, den' ≠ lūstrum 'a purification ceremony' (prob. from luere 'to expiate') are not to be mixed. To quote Festus from Paulus:
lŭstra significant lacūnās lutōsās, quae sunt in silvīs ...
- 5,784
11
votes
How did Caesar pronounce Latin overlined vowels?
In addition to Draconis' excellent answer, you may also be interested to know that:
The overline is called a macron.
Macrons were not used by the ancient Romans, and today they are almost only used ...
- 22.5k
10
votes
Accepted
Does CUM EŌ EO mean I go with them?
Well, no. eo is singular, so it would be "with him" or "with it." If you wanted to make it plural, it would be cum eīs eō.
Also, the final -o on present verbs is long (although ...
cmw♦
- 39.5k
9
votes
Accepted
Knowing the two quantities of 'est'
Servius (4th cent. CE) in his commentary on Virgil writes:
sānē EDO habet et rēctam, sed antīquam dēclīnātiōnem, ut 'edō edis edit', et anomalam, ut 'edō ēs ēst': quārum secunda et tertia persōnae ...
- 5,784
8
votes
Was the 'i' in cuius pronounced as 'j' or did it form a diphthong with 'u'
The i in cuius was pronounced as /j/. We can arrive at this conclusion several ways:
Firstly is the history of spelling variations: the standard spelling of cuius was not always cuius, and was ...
- 1,381
8
votes
What can we say about the pronunciation of Z?
Two reasons for thinking that Z was pronounced in Latin as a fricative:
The spelling SS was once used to represent it, as you mention in your prior question When did the Romans start using Z?
The ...
- 21.3k
8
votes
Littera Canina in Classical Latin and Old Latin
Old Latin /r/ probably had non-trill allophones: at minimum, a tap/flap [ɾ], and likely approximant and fricative allophones as well.
The existence of [ɾ] in Old Latin is supported by rare cases of /d/...
- 21.3k
7
votes
Accepted
Why are some sounds differently pronounced to how they are written?
It sounds like you are learning the reconstructed pronunciation system for Latin. This pronunciation system represents what we think ancient Latin speakers sounded like. Latin speakers used Latin ...
- 21.3k
7
votes
S at the end of Present Active Participle Pronunciation
final -ns being /nz/ occurs exclusively in anglicized Latin pronunciation
What you noticed is a feature of English pronunciation of Latin.
English speakers typically use a certain type of anglicized ...
- 21.3k
6
votes
Resources for pronouncing Greek
An obvious first is of course W. Sidney Allen’s Vox Graeca: The Pronunciation of Classical Greek, third edition, Cambridge UP 1987, latest reprint 1994, currently print-on-demand (but with very quick ...
6
votes
how would Caeser say "hodiē iānuae domuum sunt ātrae"?
Hear me pronounce [ˈhɔd̪iʲeːˈjaːnuʷae̯ˈd̪omuʷõˑs̠ʊ̃nˈt̪äːt̪ɾae̯].
I transcribe [õˑ] as half-long because nasal vowels are inherently longer than oral ones and nobody transcribes the French/...
- 5,784
6
votes
Accepted
Pronunciation in medical terminology
As far as I can tell, there are no classical precedents for the specific form of the ending -oideus. It ultimately comes from Ancient Greek -οειδής, an ending found mostly on third-declension ...
- 21.3k
6
votes
Accepted
What was the most common pronunciation of the interjection "io" in Classical Latin?
Both of them are the same thing, and are pronounced the same way. It is just a matter of how to write it down. The left one, /ˈi.oː/, is phonemic transcription, showing the phonemes of the sound ...
- 871
6
votes
How has the pronunciation of the letter "c" developed?
For context, none of the pronunciation systems used today for Latin developed by continuous change from the pronunciation of Latin as it was originally spoken by the Romans. The natural sound changes ...
- 21.3k
6
votes
Why is no one pronouncing the final 'm' as a nasal vowel?
People writing about the pronunciation of Latin word-final "m" often use certain terminology somewhat vaguely or even incorrectly, so first I want to clarify how I use terms.
Many different ...
- 21.3k
6
votes
Littera Canina in Classical Latin and Old Latin
Probably not, but it's hard to be sure.
As far as I've been able to tell, we don't have any grammarians describing the sounds of Latin letters before the Classical period. The phrase littera canīna ...
- 51.2k
5
votes
Was the 'i' in cuius pronounced as 'j' or did it form a diphthong with 'u'
Cuius is typically thought to have been pronounced as /kuj.jus/ with short /u/ (which was possibly realized phonetically as [ʊ]) followed by geminate (i.e. long, or doubled) /j.j/.
The phonetic ...
- 21.3k
5
votes
Syllabification of "anhelo"
Partial answer.
As you say, -nh- is quite a rare letter sequence within a word.
The word's metrical behavior suggests the division a-nhe-lo
The only perspective I can speak from confidently is a ...
- 21.3k
5
votes
Is it possible to make sense of the classical words and pronunciation in Dune, by Frank Herbert?
"Atreides" refers to the House of Atreus (Ἀτρεύς). The genitive of Ἀτρεύς is Ἀτρέως. Atreides is a singular first-declension masculine patronymic (Ἀτρείδης or Ἀτρεΐδης) formed with the ...
- 21.3k
4
votes
Accepted
How were τὰ φυσικά, φυσικός, and φύσις pronounced in Aristotle's time?
/tà pʰysiká/, /pʰysikós/, and /pʰýsis/.
υ in Classical Attic was /y/, not /u/ (in Aristotle's time /u/ was written ου), and φ was still /pʰ/ (an aspirated p sound), not /f/.
Classical Attic still had ...
- 6,159
4
votes
When did the consonant U (i.e., V) begin to be pronounced as the fricative [v] instead of [w]?
Greek transcriptions with β (beta) support dating the start of the change in the pronunciation of Latin V as early as 200BC
While the earliest evidence in texts written in the Latin alphabet for the ...
- 21.3k
4
votes
Are there minimal pairs between the acute and circumflex accent?
I have always thought there were many such minimal pairs, e.g. ἦ "verily" v. ἤ "or".
- 18.5k
4
votes
What is the name of the thing that the tongue does on the trī part in the word patrī?
If I understand correctly what you are asking for (the "rolling" of the r on the front of the tongue in patri, librum, etc.), as mentioned previously in comments and answers, modern ...
- 451
4
votes
What is the name of the thing that the tongue does on the trī part in the word patrī?
As MPW said in their comment, this is a trill, a common feature of many languages. I'm no linguist, but I would classify the one in your recording as an alveolar trill, similar to that in modern ...
- 883
4
votes
Accepted
Pronunciation of aspiration in ἔδεισεν δ᾽ ὁ γέρων
Phonetically, there is little doubt that this sequence would have been pronounced [-endho-].
To take your possible answers in reverse order:
5 can be ruled out because if this was the pronunciation it ...
- 28.2k
4
votes
When did "ae" become [e]?
This has been a disputed question. I have not gotten a chance to review the relevant literature yet, but here's what András Cser says in "Aspects of the Phonology and Morphology of Classical ...
- 21.3k
3
votes
What is the name of the thing that the tongue does on the trī part in the word patrī?
There are many types of "r" sounds that phoneticists can distinguish. The one you have in the link is a "trill," a "tap," or a "flap." It is not clear to me ...
- 2,480
3
votes
Are there minimal pairs between the acute and circumflex accent?
I came across another example today: μῆτις, ιος vs μή-τῐς, μή-τι. It may not strictly qualify, as there also is a difference in vowel quantity for the final syllable, but in any case, As both their ...
- 3,007
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