I’ve noticed this several times before but never bothered to ask about it. According to Wheelock as well as the full-first-conjugation paradigm posted here not too long ago, any vowel preceding -nt and -nd (initial, medial or final) is short. Yet in Horace 1.1 we have:
Condidit (9)
Gaudentem (11)
Findere (11)
Condicionibus (12)
Luctantem (15)
And so on, all metrically long. If they’re determined to be long by position because they’re followed by two consonants, then why focus on the (short) vowel at all (can we even know it)? If a nasal + mute is like a mute + liquid as in “patria”, either short or long, then wouldn’t it be inaccurate to say that it’s always short? Same thing if this is confined to a certain era.
It would be odd for Wheelock to insist on something so easily and widely contradicted (though he also says the vowel in “hic” and “hoc” are short). Am I missing something?
Ed: I realized that none of the ones I picked out are verb forms ending in -nt but you have “iuuant” (23)
Vowels and syllables are different things. You can have a short vowel occupying a long (aka heavy) syllable, as in e.g. –ant or -unt. Such vowels are sometimes (or used to be) spoken of as “long by position,” but that’s quite wrong: the vowel itself remains short.
Wheelock tells you the vowel is short before -nt and -nd because otherwise you wouldn’t know: meter doesn’t reveal it. The vowel quantity is “hidden,” hidden by the fact that two consonants follow, resulting in a long syllable with a vowel that could be either long or short if you didn’t know which. It makes no difference to the metrical scansion, but since the distinction between short vowels and long ones is prosodically fundamental, it’s best to know whether any given vowel is long or short. It makes a difference to how it sounds, to its pronunciation. In a very few cases it’s not known whether a vowel was long or short, but usually it can be determined by philological reconstruction.
The first vowel in patria, like the other two, is short, always short. It’s the length (or weight) of the syllable that may be variable, according to whether the “mute+liquid” combination “counts” for metrical purposes as one consonant or as two. That’s different from –nt or –nd, which always count as two.
To avoid the confusion between vowels and syllables, it’s convenient, as well as more accurate, to speak of vowels in terms of quantity (short vs. long), but syllables in terms of weight (light vs. heavy). When you write out the scansion of a line of verse, what your longs and shorts are really marking is heavy and light syllables. Vocalic quantity, syllabic weight: both binary systems (short:long, light:heavy) but not coextensive.
It makes a difference to how it sounds, to its pronunciation.
But of course. Now that I think about it I do pronounce the vowel short in those syllables, though I tend to stretch out a syllable long by position (mostly giving extra weight to the consonants); this is probably a bad habit. As to the question of how one can work out that that syllable is long or short when the meter is identical, I guess it’s working back from the Romance languages?
Vowels vs. syllables: I’ve conflated the two in the past, having read from different places that refer to them seemingly interchangeably. Thanks for the clarification.
I think it’s best to respect the distinction between short vowels and long ones. That’s what underlies the language’s accentual system. Any given vowel will be either short or long, and any given syllable will be light aka short or heavy aka long. Forget about anything being “long by position,” and forget about “stretching out” syllables. Just pronounce them as if you were reading prose, with the metrical pattern fixed in your head. The rhythm should assert itself.
As to determining vowel quantities, it’s a matter of philological reconstruction on the basis of morphology and linguistic history, not so much working back from romance languages as working forward from earlier stages. To be honest, so long as you get the meter right (and that’s a matter of syllables, not vowels), it doesn’t matter a whole lot if you get the occasional vowel quantity wrong.
I’ll keep that in mind. I’ve suffered from horrible insomnia the last two nights and haven’t been up for reading; hopefully tomorrow I’ll try the new approach. To be honest I wasn’t overscrupulous in learning which vowels were long, falling back on (seemingly) most heavy syllables being (a) long by position, (b) part of the accidence, (c) containing diphthongs, (d) having standard prefixes or word-shape, or (e) just sounding right to be accented on the penult. The rest can often be inferred. In prose I generally ignore syllable weight and vowel length, and it looks like I ought to change that: it’s a bit daunting to go after it but I thought the same thing about going word-by-word without instinctively looking forward or back and that really wasn’t hard at all.
I actually did take a couple days of Latin in community college back after I dropped out after freshman year. The first day the instructor said not to bother with learning the macrons, going so far as to not include them in handouts (which she used in lieu of a textbook) and asserted that Latin poetry was stress-based. Maybe she was trying to teach Church Latin (though she was Russian); in any event I bailed after two classes and forgot to officially withdraw and got an F for the semester. If I was going to learn it wrong I’d be better off not learning it at all.
Noob question here, as befits a first post (salve omnes!), but are you saying that stressed and heavy syllables are different? So that Church Latin basically sounds like Italian, with a difference between vowel pronounciation (like “bit” vs “feet” when an “i” is short vs long) but not duration of the sound, and a uniform stress on the penult or antepenult but with complete freedom or indifference with regard to syllabic weight, while Classical Latin has a more finely differentiated system of accentuation, where not just long/short vowels but also heavy syllables and stressed syllables are (more or less) distinct from each other?
Hopefully that’s at least minimally comprehensible. I’m trying to teach myself and although I usually pay a lot of attention to pronounciation, especially early on, this is my first real experience with quantitative verse and I feel like I really need someone to just sit me down and sound out the differences a bit.
Yes, stressed and heavy syllables are different. All three syllables of “pastores,” for instance, are heavy, but only the penult is stressed, i.e. accented. Classical Latin regulates its vowel quantities—either long or short—as well as its syllable weights (strictly either heavy or light in verse). Just as vowel quantity (i.e. relative duration) and syllable weight are interrelated but don’t always map onto each other, so likewise with syllable weight and word accent.
Here’s how it works in classical Latin. (In very early Latin it was a bit different.) In a word with a light penult syllable (e.g. constitit or placidus or differentia) the accent falls on the antepenult (if it has an antepenult, that is!). Otherwise (e.g. consistit, salvete, habent), the penult takes the accent. That may sound complicated but in fact it’s more or less the way English works too (e.g. “different” vs. “tomato”), and most of the time we instinctively put the accent in the right place, unless we get the quantity of the penult wrong. E.g. in amicus the penult is long/heavy, so that’s where the accent falls. If the -i- were short, it would be the a- that got the accent.
So when you read prose, you’ll find you get most of the accents right without even thinking about it.
It’s exactly the same in verse. But verse has meter (that’s what makes it verse), and meter has a pattern of its own, a certain pattern of long(heavy) and short(light) syllables. People used to think there was such a thing as metrical stress (aka ictus). Even if there wasn’t (and there wasn’t), if this is your first experience of quantitative verse you’d do well to start out by putting stress on the metrically long elements until you get the metrical pattern fixed in your head. Once you’ve learnt to read metrically, then you can start giving the words their natural stress accents. Then very interesting things emerge (as you’ll find if you look at some of the Aeneid threads). But that’s another story.
I don’t know if this is useful to you. If not, maybe it will be to somebody else.
Argh I just lost a longish reply. An abbreviated second attempt:
Gratias mwh ago!
Your response is certainly helpful, but it didn’t answer my main (albeit very badly expressed) question. Basically I’m wondering about whether stress works the same way in Latin as I take it to in English. In English a syllable being stressed means that more air leaves the mouth when it is pronounced, and so that it is protracted, and that it is louder, right? The other way that stress could equal accentuation, as you seem to be saying, is if there is a variation in pitch. Since I made my first post I listened to part of a lesson from one of Evan der Millner’s courses and I believe he was saying that Latin is a tonal language, with variations in pitch describable using acutes and circumflexes. Is that maybe how stress works in Latin, as opposed to English? Because if it’s just about volume and length then I really can’t see how it can be kept separate from syllable weight, which I understand to mean exactly that.
In the bastardization of classical systems of metering that took place in English (and later Romance language) prosody, stress took the place of syllable weight as what’s counted right? And that’s because there is nothing strictly comparable in those languages to syllable weight in Latin/Greek. So if I start reading Latin iambic pentameter and start putting stresses where heavy syllables should be, would I be wrong?
Apologies if I’m just being dumb! And thanks for the welcome.
In looking something up while responding I’ve come across this Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_(Latin)#Two_rhythms, which I should probably just have read in the first place, and it seems that folks are still debating all this. Interesting stuff! Looking forward to having a go at it for real over the coming months/years.
Are you sure you don’t mean Greek when you talk about pitch accent (it’s true of Greek but I’ve never heard of it associated with Latin)? And a stress-based meter isn’t necessarily a “bastardization” – the Stabat mater and Dies irae are very much stress-based and they either precede or weren’t influenced by stress-based Middle English poetry.
(Disregard)
I’ll shut up and let mwh or whoever handle the rest (or correct my errors).
Yeah he was for sure talking about Latin! This is the video https://youtu.be/g7TGnPznNpY?t=480. Sounds like he’s suggesting it is indeed accent that counts as stress in Latin but if someone could clarify that would be great.
I guess I’m kind of following Robert Bridges and Gerard Manley-Hopkins’ line of reasoning about how sticking to meters derived from languages which measure by quantity (Latin and Greek) in languages which measure by stress (English) is to neglect the resources that English has of its own to offer, through sheer traditionalism and lack of invention, that’s what I meant by bastardization. As far as I remember they set about coining new terminology for prosody and in Hopkins’ case at least the verse in “sprung rhythm” to warrant it.
I was actually thinking of spoken English and conflated sprung-rhythm and the like (there’s a Wikipedia article on “accentual verse” which is more in line with what I was thinking of) with “stress-based” poetry; disregard what I wrote.