scanning the "ui" in "pinguis", and the "ui" in general???

Latin Learning Latin
1

Here is a line from Vergil’s Georgics:

At quae pinguis humus dulcique uligine laeta

How to pronounce and scan the “ui” spelling in “pinguis”? Dictionary entries may help with this, but I’m having a hard time catching the clues. Here is how I scanned the line:

SDSSDS
At quae/ pinguis hu/mus dul/cique u/ligine /laeta

For this to work, in pinguis, I counted “u” as a consonant, to give “pinguis” only two syllables. But “ui” has three possible sounds, it seems to me:

  1. the “u” is a consonant, as I treated it above.
  2. the “u” is a short vowel, like “oo-ee”, but short.
  3. the “u” is half of a dipthong, like the French word “oui”.

I’d be most grateful for a link to a demonstration of this matter, especially with reference to picking out the clues in Lewis and Short.

2

1. Latin gu
gu was most likely the voiced equivalent of qu. It only occurs in front of n, which then of course phonetically represents [ŋ]. With “most likely” I mean the difference between [gʷ] and [gw] (of which the latter is therefore the unlikelier alternative).

This is slightly theoretical, as
piŋ-gʷis : piŋg-wis
uŋ-gʷis : uŋg-wis
saŋ-gʷis : saŋg-wis
etc. will always give the same syllabic structure (open vs. closed, light vs. heavy).

To my (weak) understanding of Italian, its words like questa o quella have rather [kw] at their beginning than the [kʷ] which Latin qu to our understanding represented.

2. Latin ui
ui was a diphthong in Latin, though it occurs only in a few words (three I think). In fact all Latin diphthongs occur rarely except the trio ae, oe and au. From the diphthong ui is obviously to be distinguished words with uī like fructuī, which have syllable boundary between the adjacent vowels.

3

Thank you for the reply Timothée. This problem appeared recently when I started trying to improve my metrical reading.

First, I conclude that the ui dipthong is so rare that I can memorize the words that use it.

This reduces the problem to deciding whether

  1. u is a consonant, as in pinguis, sanguis, and unguis;

  2. or, u is a syllable by itself, as in fructui.

Maybe the dictionary won’t help with this. Now I consult inflection tables for verbs, nouns, and adjectives.

4

I was of course speaking of the case of [gʷ] above. Naturally we have the letters gu elsewhere in Latin marking [gu] or [guː] (like gutta, gūstus and exiguus). The case of [gʷ] is when gu is followed by a vowel in the same syllable¹, and then it’ll be also preceded by n, as I said. Italian will be different as we have there guardare [gw-] and guerra [gw-] (Germanic words in Romance!), impossible in Latin phonotactics.

You should try to see gu [gʷ] as corresponding to qu [kʷ]; then you’ll almost automatically read lingua as [liŋgʷa].

¹ There’s a syllable boundary in exigu-us.

5

Thank you Timothee for the reply.

I’m reading more carefully rules for Latin pronunciation, syllable divisions, quantity, and so on. Because I have no competent teacher, only myself, I miss many precepts that are taught in classroom.