How do the enclitics -ne and -que affect accentuation? For example, itane and itaque. Does the accent in both fall on the i? Thanks for any information that can be afforded to me.
To cut a (very) long story short, enclitics force the accent unto the penultimate. So
Itáne, Filióque
The problem arises with words that would supposedly already understood as one word. So “Itaque” doesn’t really mean “et ita”, it means, well, “itaque”. So should the accent be regular, as “Ítaque”? And conversely, if we find “et ita” in the form “itaque” (assuming we could identify it as such), should we pronounce it “itáque” in that specific case? As far as I know, the jury’s still out on this particular issue. A few years back there was a not very amusing thread here on Textkit about this subject.
It’s a bit a quæstio de lana caprina, but we have to entertain ourselves I guess.
Thanks very much for the help. One more question: do prefixes affect the accentuation at all? Exempli gratia, erit has accent on the e even though it is short, because it cannot go further back. Would aderit have accent on the a? Or do we ignore prefixes for accentuation?
Yes. The word is taken holistically: Áderit.
Apparently short ă is to be accentuated before enclitics. It wasn’t always so, however. We have in Vergil uótaque, ármaque, méllaque. This was archaic accentuation. Why ă has accent before -que, -ue, -ne? I may guess that it was reminiscence of the original first declension nominative -ā.
Surely I am missing something. How do you take stress from the poetry? Quantities, sure, but stress?
Arsis in poetry must have some correlation with the actual Latin word stress. But how extensive a correlation? In “Árma uirúmque canó Troiáe qui prímus ab óris”, for instance, the first and last two arseis fall on the correct word stress, the two middle ones do not. (I think it’s generally stated that at the end of a dactylic hexametre line the correlation between arsis and word stress is bigger than in the beginning.)
I found armaque six times in the Aeneid, and in all of the cases it formed a dactyl in itself (thus ármaque), either in the first or in the fifth foot. A coincidence? Surely not.
This is completely new territory for me, thanks. Do you happen to have any sources that refer to it, either Ancient texts or Modern scholarship?
Well, Manu Leumann recounts the Latin stress in his grammar’s pages 235—254. Leumann’s grammar is from 1977 (he died the same year just under 88 years old), so it cannot refer to the newest books and articles. But I do think Leumann’s account is excellent for quick starters. It’s compact and amply referenced.
Thank you!