Salvi sitis omnes,
I am perplexed by a paucity of Latin words that are not, per the modern tradition, written with V where there clearly is a consonantal U. Exempli gratia:
suavis. This word has only two syllables, not three, therefore we ought to write svavis.
I believe Svetonius is another such example. Does anyone have a collection of other such words?
I think it’s like the u on qu.
Well, that’s a decent hypothesis. The problem is that qu and ngu are regularly recognised, while this su- is not.
‘qu’ is not two consonants, but a digraph for one consonant sound. Therefore “neque” has two short syllables, not a long followed by a short. Is the ‘u’ in “suavis” part of a digraph, or a consonantal U?
“suarum” is three syllables, but “suavis” is only two — you see the problem. The consonant U is unmarked.
I think it’s part of a diphthong and thus really is a vowel.
http://books.google.com/books?id=IIwAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13
See #4 in the above link.
Ua, ue, ui, uo, uu, when diphthongs, are pronounced like wa, we, etc. ; as, lin’-gua, que-ror, sua’-de-o, quo’-tus, e’-quus. They are always diphthongs after q, usually also after g, and often after s.
I appreciate the link, Ed. However, that grammarian does not fully comprehend grammatical terminology. He describes the use of Consonantal U plus another vowel as a diphthong — which is incorrect.
A diphthong is two vowels in the same syllable. In the case of “neque” “lingua” or “vetus,” all of these u/v’s are in some way acting as consonants — not vowels.
Put more Englishly, does the word “with” possess a dipthong? What about “work”? Or “quick”?
Of course not. However, “bout,” “hey,” and “boy” all have dipthongs, glides of two vowels in one syllable.
The words “with”, “work” etc. may well be described to contain diphthongs, namely so called rising diphthongs (as opposed to falling diphthongs), but indeed, the more usual analysis is to rather describe it as a semivowel followed by a vowel.
It is definitely not a good idea to describe the sounds in, e.g. “quoque” as being (rising) diphthongs, since, as noted, the “qu” digraph describes a single consonantal sound, and hence “quoque” consists of two light syllables. (If we want to describe them in terms of diphthongs, we also must treat them as being equal in length to a short vowel, and in general the analysis gets kind of messy, I think.)
But what about “sv”? There are three possibilities, I think:
Some searches in poetry seems to rule out option 1, for we frequently find cases like “Tum celerare fugam patriaque excedere suadet” (Aeneid 1.357), where the “su” in “suadet” don’t make position. But (in a quick search in Virgil and Ovid) I have not been able to find a case where “sv” is followed by a light syllable, and in the absence of any such example, it is not possible, I think, to differ between case 2 and 3. (That is, the beginning of “suadet” may be analyzed as “labial s” + “long a” just as well as as “s” + “rising diphthong ua”.)
Has anyone been able to find something written about this in the literature? I’m sure it has been discussed somewhere. I’m not at home right now though, and don’t have access to, e.g. Allen.
Alatius, about your option 1, I think it’s still viable since because word initial clusters like sp, st, sc don’t necessarily make position either. There’s some discussion on this in in a book called “Latin Prosody Made Easy” that’s available at google books (although I don’t know if its conclusions about the s being made silent are correct).
But a search on some of its examples led to me an old (1949) paper “A Note on Latin Prosody: Initial S Impure after Short Vowel” (available at jstor.org), which if I understand it right after a quick go-through says that in early verse (Plautus and Terence), word-initial combinations starting with s (and also ps, x, z) did not make position, but later poets avoided having any of these except su (with consonantal u of course) occur after short vowels, but when they did, it seemingly could go either way depending on the poet. The reason given for this is the conflict between Greek tradition which demanded they make position and the Latin pronunciation which didn’t – a situation similar to how tr and pl and so on were later able to make position under Greek influence. For su, which seems to have never made position, the explanation is that like qu, there was nothing comparable in Greek to change the Latin tradition, although is this still a good explanation if you take into account that qu, like you said, probably wasn’t a double consonant at the time?
Something that might eliminate option 1 (or confirm it) is how word-internal su affects the accent. Are there any words with word-internal su where it could affect the accent depending on how it’s divided?
Ah, thank you for the pointer to that article. I wasn’t aware of the special treatment of word-initial “s”; very interesting. But, as you point out, the article states that “sv” was treated differently from the rest of the initial clusters starting with “s”.
Well, Greek of the time didn’t have the semi-vowel “v” as far as I know, but neither did it have labialised consonants like “qu” (or, possibly, “su”), so, if I follow the reasoning correctly, I think it is sound in any case.
Something that might eliminate option 1 (or confirm it) is how word-internal su affects the accent. Are there any words with word-internal su where it could affect the accent depending on how it’s divided?
I can’t say I have found any example where the placement of the accent would differ, but I have found one example of a word-internal “sv” following a short vowel, and there it doesn’t make position either:
et Metus et malesuada Fames ac turpis Egestas (Aeneid 6.276)
(Granted, it follows a quite severe morpheme boundary.)
Let me stress that I haven’t made any thorough searches of Latin literature; I have only looked at hexameters, mainly Virgil, and some Ovid and Horace. And I may have overlooked something at that, of course.
Well, it had lost all its original “w” sounds, and abandoned the letter digamma, but it still had the (aspirated) “w” sound, in ὑιός (Whee-OS,) for example.
I wrote in another thread (http://discourse.textkit.com/t/help-requested-aperto/55/1):
Tertius Robertus, how do you write the “v”, v.gr., in ign?via,ae (cowardice)? I used to write it like ign?uia,ae but my doubt is about the pronunciation. I pronunce the “v” like in the italian quegli (this is to say, like the “u” in Spanish language). (…)
Well, but another question arises in the writing of abjicio (I cast away), conjicio (I fling), etc. I was using a XIX century method (which I have already finished… and now I use Lingua Latina Per se… Roma Aeterna without important troubles) and it seems to have been a sort of change in the orthography:
http://books.google.com/books?id=8yMBAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA46&dq=date:0-1700&as_brr=1
Here, you can percieve, for instance, how the modern trends makes the i of huius to be written like hujus.
I can see how now -in the modern editions, from the 19540/50s? to the present- the v of which Lucus Eques talks about is usually written as an u.
Gonzalo - modern editions vary on whether they use v or u. My OCT Catullus uses u for consonantal u while my OCT Caesar uses v.
Ok, I observed that trend in editions which I have.
It is used as you say in this thesis: http://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/tesis?codigo=829
(qvod, qvia, qvoniam, eo qvod)
Thanks for your reply.
What I was thinking was that he’s probably wrong about the reason for “qu” since it didn’t make position because it was just a single consonant, so maybe “su” was a just a single consonant – your option 2. Another thing, though, and I can’t remember if he mentions it is that “fr” and “fl” seem to also have been influenced by Greek tradition but there was (at the time) nothing in Greek to resemble "f’ either.
The υι diphthong is usually reconstructed (by Allen for example) to be falling so normal υ gliding into ι.
Gonzalo - it differs from editor to editor. The Caesar OCT, for instance, has u with q, but v otherwise, except after s. So quis, quae, quid, but volo, velle, volui.
I thought it was a sort of change of trend. I am not used to see written, for instance, Troja instead of Troia. It is less frecuent, in my opinion and by my own experience (the short experience, of course, of a novice).
What I saw as the “standard” for a while (especially in the past couple of decades) is using i for consonantal i but v for constantal v except in combinations with other letters, like quies or suadus.
All the dictionaries I own follow this standard.